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Re:The Evolution of Tunnel Boring Machines by ReptileMan on Sunday January 05, 2025 @09:22AM (#42601893)
How is The Boring Company doing lately? There will be huge induced demand for tunnels if they manage to deliver even close to their goals.
Re:The Evolution of Tunnel Boring Machines by jeltz on Sunday January 05, 2025 @12:10PM (#42603175)
Is there any reason to think they will be able to? They are just going the same thing as everyone else but started later. Another player might lower costs slightly but not much.
Re:The Evolution of Tunnel Boring Machines by ReptileMan on Sunday January 05, 2025 @01:27PM (#42603805)
No reason, but Elon style is - if he delivers to deliver qualitive and not quantitative improvements to technology.
Re:The Evolution of Tunnel Boring Machines by youngtaff on Sunday January 05, 2025 @01:59PM (#42604048)
They’re also boring much smaller tunnels which have much smaller costs
Re:The Evolution of Tunnel Boring Machines by grecy on Sunday January 05, 2025 @09:33AM (#42601972)
Slow and steady progress. They’re just about to go big in Vegas, with tunnels the length of the strip.
Re:The Evolution of Tunnel Boring Machines by youngtaff on Sunday January 05, 2025 @02:02PM (#42604079)
The strip is 4 miles long… when Musk company can bore longer, wider tunnels avoiding other infrastructure e.g. London tube lines, sewers etc then they might have something to shout about
Re:The Evolution of Tunnel Boring Machines by ggm on Sunday January 05, 2025 @06:04PM (#42605830)
I believe he is deliberately targeting low process burden, low soil resistance targets. He isn't aggressively chasing contracts for complex, deep, large tunnels working around existing infra, or rail, he's chasing places which want disruptive change in transport.

Nobody has explained to me what the boring company has actually done innovating TBM, the machines themselveds distinct from a cash injection and some energy from Musk as lead investor. TBM are flow process. It's a pipeline of inputs and outputs. It's scheduling.

The LV tunnel isn't a complete success either. It's not operating completely as promised yet is it?

[dead]
Re:The Evolution of Tunnel Boring Machines by h3rsko on Sunday January 05, 2025 @11:59AM (#42603100)
Its a special "kind of fraud and failure" that launched 90% of mass to LEO in 2024.
Re:The Evolution of Tunnel Boring Machines by pfdietz on Sunday January 05, 2025 @02:48PM (#42604439)
"Success is the child of audacity." -- Benjamin Disraeli

"Audacity, more audacity, always audacity." -- Georges Jacques Danton

"The first quality that is needed is audacity." -- Winston Churchill

Re:The Evolution of Tunnel Boring Machines by aredox on Tuesday January 07, 2025 @04:00PM (#42627386)
Shotwell has launched 90% of mass to LEO in 2024.

Elon, meanwhile, is shitposting all day and most of the night on X.

Re:The Evolution of Tunnel Boring Machines by stephen_g on Monday January 06, 2025 @07:23AM (#42609977)
I don’t believe they have advanced the field in any way. They didn’t really have any solid ideas, just the idea that it would be really cool if tunnelling could be made cheaper. Surprise surprise, it’s actually a highly advanced, mature field and there wasn’t actually any low-hanging fruit for inexperienced startup guys to disrupt…

The only thing they’ve done with their Vegas tunnel is to make it cheaper by making it too small to have proper emergency egress, but they can get away with it since with just their chauffeured Teslas going through it only fitting a few people each (making the system extremely low-capacity), they can’t really fit many people in at once, and it’s short enough so combined that makes it not that much of an issue.

In the newest section of the Vegas tunnel they have now only built a one-way tunnel instead of a tunnel for each way, making it cheaper again but low-capacity to a basically comedic level.