[DataPacRat]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Try SM+22 (you have about 1/3,000,000 the area you need).

Can do. :)

Originally Posted by Agemegos

With 33,000 tones per square metre of load you'd need an 8-km-thick band of nanotube-reinforced polymer, or 1.5-1.7 km of flawless diamond or continuous nanotubes above and below to support the stone.

If it's that important for verisimilitude, then I can always make the 13th system of armor Nanocomposite instead of another Stone. (Looks like it'll add 700k dDR, and $150 quintillion; though I'm slashing the budget by a lot more than that by dropping the SM+35 factory.)

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

15 km thick armor seems...excessive for a habitat, as is any production of power points for industrial purposes (just use vast amounts of minifacs). In addition, such a habitat is a massive waste of resources, as you could use the same resources to make 1,000 habitats one-tenth the dimensions each that would have a total surface area ten times as large, allowing them to support ten times as many people. Such a complex of habitats could be connected through static structures that could support solar panels and radiators, and could support any industry that truly needed power points.

And that brings us into the station's actual design goals.

The original builders' purpose was to create what's effectively an offline backup system for their civilization, by placing a selection of stations in various out-of-the-way points in the galaxy; each of which could maintain itself, independently, for x million years, and maintain a population of baseline humans (or near-human equivalent) for the duration. I'm assuming that simply keeping an offline set of records of DNA and some vatfacs prepped doesn't meet their criteria. I'm trying to take some of the lessons of Biosphere 2 into account, and that keeping an active biosphere working for a long time requires more redundancies than is immediately obvious to account for various complex interactions. I'm also assuming that there are issues in most forms of active management of any such collection of ecosystems, so it all has to mostly run itself. (Plus or minus the occasional automated nudge, such as vatfaccing up some individuals of a species that's undergoing too much genetic drift; and with at least one release valve for any human-equivalents who are too curious to avoid poking their fingers into dangerous pies; and with a set of systems to rapidly increase the inhabitants' tech-level if galactic society vanishes for too long.)

Put another way, the purpose of the station isn't maximizing industry, or energy, or even population; it's maximizing absurdly-long-term ecological stability. There are plenty of arguments that could be had about the trade-offs between structural strength and biosphere acreage, but a Varleyian Gaea seems to both be possible without superscience and to provide a plausibly large area, so seems a good starting point.


For example, if I wanted to get a similar amount of acreage with a SM+34 station, I'd need at least 10 of the systems to be Open Spaces (and with fewer armour systems, the radiation protection would be roughly halved); and couldn't do it at all with a SM+33 station, even with all twenty systems being Open Space.

Originally Posted by ericbsmith

Not really. A ship can be built with as little armor as you want - including no armor at all - and still be assumed to have structural supports. What Spaceships assumes is that each component has enough structural support for itself, and the ship as a whole has enough structural support for all of it's components.

:thumbs-up: