Can you provide more information on the “immense tension forces”?
The only thing above 1g(what we have on earth) of force would be the outside of the ring.
The tricky parts to me would be:
Keeping the structure rigid to avoid buckling.
Does the whole structure rotate? How do you dock things to it?
If the entire thing doesn’t rotate, how do you ensure a perfect seal over a long period of time so that you’re not venting atmosphere?
On Babylon 5, the docking was done through an opening in the centre, along the axis of rotation, so ships wishing to dock only needed to match rotation and the station would appear to be, well, stationary.
That said, the defence fighters launched from the exterior walls of the station, so I assume they had to constantly adjust in order to re-dock there, assuming they didn’t also return through the mid-port.
Yeah, we have plenty of materials that can withstand 1g of consistent force, because that’s the default on Earth’s surface and the conditions that we’ve most studied for material properties.
Yeah, that was just badly worded. Didn’t really think it through either. Let me clarify.
You don’t want to spin the wheel too fast, because that’s going to make people sick. To get around that problem, you need to compensate by making the wheel bigger. More specifically, it should be hundreds of meters in diameter. That means it’s going to require a lot of construction materials, and that gets really expensive to build and even more expensive to deliver.
Normally, space things are built to be as light as possible. Building stuff out of thin aluminium, magnesium, titanium and carbon fiber just won’t be good enough unless you make those structures thicker. The materials are good enough though. If you could launch stuff up there for free, you might as well use steel cables and they would be strong enough.
Nevertheless, it’s still a pressurised donut, and that puts a lot of stress on all the parts, which means you can’t build it out of paper thin titanium. The rotation is totally fine by comparison, since that doesn’t add too much to the stresses.
Can you provide more information on the “immense tension forces”?
The only thing above 1g(what we have on earth) of force would be the outside of the ring.
The tricky parts to me would be:
On Babylon 5, the docking was done through an opening in the centre, along the axis of rotation, so ships wishing to dock only needed to match rotation and the station would appear to be, well, stationary.
That said, the defence fighters launched from the exterior walls of the station, so I assume they had to constantly adjust in order to re-dock there, assuming they didn’t also return through the mid-port.
Yeah, we have plenty of materials that can withstand 1g of consistent force, because that’s the default on Earth’s surface and the conditions that we’ve most studied for material properties.
Yeah, that was just badly worded. Didn’t really think it through either. Let me clarify.
You don’t want to spin the wheel too fast, because that’s going to make people sick. To get around that problem, you need to compensate by making the wheel bigger. More specifically, it should be hundreds of meters in diameter. That means it’s going to require a lot of construction materials, and that gets really expensive to build and even more expensive to deliver.
Normally, space things are built to be as light as possible. Building stuff out of thin aluminium, magnesium, titanium and carbon fiber just won’t be good enough unless you make those structures thicker. The materials are good enough though. If you could launch stuff up there for free, you might as well use steel cables and they would be strong enough.
Nevertheless, it’s still a pressurised donut, and that puts a lot of stress on all the parts, which means you can’t build it out of paper thin titanium. The rotation is totally fine by comparison, since that doesn’t add too much to the stresses.