Re: coriolis force and air currents in an O'Neil colony
- From: Brian Davis <brdavis@xxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 6 Oct 2008 04:49:58 -0700 (PDT)
On Oct 5, 9:35 pm, Alfred Montestruc <montest...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Trying to improve crew moral at the cost of using 20+ times as much
mass of structural material for the whole ship and making it cube root
(20+) times as big in dimensions (2.714+), is not even going to be
considered. It is on it's face absurd.
If the goal is to provide a familiar shirt-sleeve environment for the
general person, it might not be. Large open areas might be something
that people strongly desire (look at the fact that a lot of us
maintain yards, or parks - utterly pointless utilizations of lands
that could much more practically be used either in multi-storied
apartment complexes (without window... after all, that drives up the
cost and heating/cooling requirements),in order to free up more space
for growing crops (which could then be grown closer to the living
areas, thus decreasing transport times and costs).
And the mass does not scale as the cube if you are comparing a "solid"
ship or habitat to a cylinder. After all, the cylinder is mostly air
by volume (and that at a density of less than 1.2 kg/m^3).
FYI mass is at many times the premium in space as it is offshore.
Depends on where you are getting the mass from. Manufacturing ability
in high-orbit may be in demand... but by the time you scale up to
building habitats for thousands to tens of thousands of people, mass
is unlikely to be a constraint. You just stop the silly wasteful
practice of hauling it out of the gravity well.
My take it that terraforming takes too long, and costs too much for
the habitat created.
If you break up a planet and use the materials of it to make far more
useful habitat in space at lower cost, so in the long run that is the
way that that will win out.
In the very very VERY long run, perhaps. In the mean time, it might be
worthwhile to consider the weak stop-gap measures like terraforming a
whole planet, or building a modest habitat. Once you get up to
disassembling planets, well... now you are really entering the realm
of science fiction :)
A Dyson sphere need not be a solid structure...
Of course not. In fact, it's darn hard to make it a solid structure,
for very little purpose, and presents some really horrible stability
issues.
My vision of a Dyson sphere is like that, billions of habitats in
orbit around the Sun, where Mercury, Venus Mars and perhaps the Earth
as well have been dismantled to make vast swarms of habitats, and a
lot of gas from the gas giants, and all the more solid moons are
tapped for volatiles and solids as well to provide for them.
And you're worried about the materials requirements for a trivial
little O'Neill cylinder? Huh.
--
Brian Davis
.
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