I was thinking about space habitats. It was probably triggered indirectly by the fact that I'm reading* a SF story at present (The Algebraist, Iain M Banks), though there's no direct connection to my resulting train of thought.
*when I'm travelling, I read. There's lots of waiting about and sitting in planes and stuff (13-14 hours across the Pacific, for starters) and I rarely feel well enough in flight to concentrate on actual work. Even if I only spend a fraction of that time reading, I will get through several books on a trip.
It occurred to me that there will be a particular radius of "ring"-type space station where one rotation in 24 hours would produce artificial gravity of about 1g (this will obviously be large, even without doing calculations).
If you put such a habitat at an L4- or L5- point on the earth-sun system, you'll get earth-level radiation from the sun (without the nice van Allen belts to protect you, unfortunately), with earth "days" and earth "gravity".
So how big is it? Well, I did the calculations, and I get a radius of 1.85 million km. This thing is huge - the earth-moon system would fit comfortably inside it.
It's not Ringworld-huge, by a long, long shot - on that scale, it's miniscule. But still, very very large indeed. If it were a thin ring about 100 km wide (it's about 11.5 million km around, so 100 km wide is indeed "thin"), it would have a "land" area roughly eight times that of earth (assuming people live only on the inner surface of the ring). For the present I'm assuming you'd have a series of interconnected domes or similar on the inner surface, which allows you to bring air, water and other resources in stages.
Assuming, that is, that I have done all the calculations correctly.
Many of the problems associated with a ringworld habitat go away - you don't need to worry about the orbit being unstable for example, though I guess if the mass gets large enough there may be some issues with the stability of the Lagrange points. The amount of material required is far, far smaller than for a ringworld - and the relatively more obtainable amounts of material mean much less hyper-engineering is required.
I haven't done any engineering calculations to work out stresses and such, so I don't know whether you could build a lot of the base structure from simple rock, or if you really need to go to strong metals or even unobtainium.
A nice little thought experiment, anyway. I don't recall seeing anything like this in a story. I'm not sure if that's because I don't read around enough or just that nobody has used an idea like this - but I cannot have been the first person to work this out, so I am curious to know if it has been used in a story somewhere.
[Edit: there's some nifty ringworld artwork to be found.]
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6 comments:
You should know better than to dangle such ideas in front of people like me. . . .
Why would you want a period of 24 hours? Unless this thing is floating around a large non-rotating light source that only emits light from one side I don't understand what the significance of the 24 period is. Besides 24 as a counting number is so medieval (so it what if it is divisible by 2,3,4,6,8 and 12 we have calculators now!!).
Because humans beings work on a 24 hour cycle of light and dark(among others, of course). If you make the thing rotate once every 24 hours, that is the first step toward emulating the day/night cycle.
By the way, I think you misundertood Efrique. The stattion wouldn't reolve around the sun; it would sit in an Earth-moon Lagrange point (so it always seem to be in the same place, as seen form the Earth), and it would rotate around its own center of mass.
valhar2000: no, it's at the earth-sun lagrange point, not the earth moon one. It would follow the earth around its orbit (or lead the earth around its orbit). It is bigger than the earth-moon distance (by a long way) - you really can't put it there.
So indeed it does orbit the sun.
anonymous: The rotation about its own axis will give a day-night cycle. So it would be very comfortable for people from earth - a day-night cycle a day long with gravity of 1g.
Oh, okay.
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