O'Neill Cylinders

[jeff_wilson]

Originally Posted by Brett

Yeah, I noticed. It's worse than that, actually, since I am going for a diameter, not radius, of 20 km. And the fact that my end caps are hemispheres rather than disks is not going to be anything like enough to save me. In fact, the inequality is rather discouraging. It looks to me as though cylinders have to be so short in relation to their length that roofing over the cylinder floor would be cheaper than capping the ends. That produces a Stanford rather than an O'Neill.

Which means I'm stuck with active stabilization, I think.

I see two ways of giving your self more wiggle room:

1) Ditch the precession and use mirrors to keep the sunlight aimed in.

2) Increase the moment arm with some sizeable masses on spokes. These needn't be entirely deadweight, they can be high-gravity applications like wastewater separation or detention. Or if the yoke technology was realistic, you could mount the spokes on coaxial bands like barrel hoops and have them spinning at slower rates for the same apparent gravity, less gravity for invalids and sybarites, or adjustable if you like.