China’s biggest missile manufacturer is working on a hyperloop. CASIC claims it’s clocked the fastest speed ever for a superconducting maglev vehicle – over 623 km/h (387 mph) – during tests in a low-vacuum tube just 2 km (1.2 miles) long.

Hyperloop trains have become more or less a punchline in certain parts of the tech world, shorthand for ultra-high-tech projects that make grandiose claims of immense speed and efficiency, while ignoring several large elephants in the room that leave them with little practical chance of success.

The idea is simple enough: take the vacuum-tube messaging systems of the 1800s, upsize them until they can fit whole maglev trains inside, then suck all the air out and blast those trains around at thousands of miles per hour, enjoying ludicrous levels of efficiency.

There’s no air drag or wheel contact to sap power and slow you down, so you can go Mach 5 through a long vacuum tunnel without so much as a sonic peep. New York to LA in a coffee and a dump.

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Never mind that regular high-speed maglev trains and infrastructure are already hideously expensive to build and deploy, without needing hundreds or thousands of miles of perfectly air-tight tube, constantly being sucked at by vacuum pumps all day. Or the potential disaster if pretty much anything goes wrong at those speeds.

Continue here: New Atlas