01-04-2021, 03:03 AM | #41 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
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Re: GURPS O'Neill Cylinder Design
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Rupert Boleyn "A pessimist is an optimist with a sense of history." |
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01-04-2021, 04:24 AM | #42 |
Join Date: Dec 2012
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Re: GURPS O'Neill Cylinder Design
Have the farm machinery driven by computers, perhaps?
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Warning, I have the Distractible and Imaginative quirks in real life. "The more corrupt a government, the more it legislates." -- Tacitus Five Earths, All in a Row. Updated 12/17/2022: Apocrypha: Bridges out of Time, Part I has been posted. |
01-04-2021, 04:35 AM | #43 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
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Re: GURPS O'Neill Cylinder Design
If you can make that cheaper than minimum-wage workers, perhaps. It might just not be worth the expense, and it's just easier to use Anthony's solar array option, or run something relatively unlikely to hurt the recenna and cheap/low labour, like sheep.
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Rupert Boleyn "A pessimist is an optimist with a sense of history." |
01-04-2021, 04:41 AM | #44 |
Join Date: Dec 2012
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Re: GURPS O'Neill Cylinder Design
I'm not sure that the minimum wage workers on farms are the ones driving farm equipment anymore.
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Warning, I have the Distractible and Imaginative quirks in real life. "The more corrupt a government, the more it legislates." -- Tacitus Five Earths, All in a Row. Updated 12/17/2022: Apocrypha: Bridges out of Time, Part I has been posted. |
01-04-2021, 09:21 AM | #45 | |
Join Date: Jan 2006
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Re: GURPS O'Neill Cylinder Design
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For OP's purposes, having folks in orbit for powersat maintenance is probably sufficient to justify the habitat, but adding powersat security to that is good adventure fodder. Nuke the burrito from orbit, it's the only way to be sure. |
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01-04-2021, 11:25 AM | #46 |
Join Date: Feb 2016
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Re: GURPS O'Neill Cylinder Design
If you have SPS arrays, you will likely need lunar mines for the construction materials. Since they would use mass drivers to deliver materials into orbit, you would want substantial security, meaning a decent population on the Moon, which will likely need to go back to experience normal gravity after 6 months on the surface of the Moon. It is cheaper, easier, and safer to send them to an orbital habitat than to the surface of the Earth, so your space habitat would also support your lunar mines.
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01-04-2021, 11:29 AM | #47 | |
Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: Houston, TX
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Re: GURPS O'Neill Cylinder Design
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I'm willing to believe that environmental / artistic / traditionalist concerns could scotch most attempts at mining the near side of the Moon, and that scientific concerns (radio-antenna placement and stability, etc.) might be enough to hinder far-side exploitation. Then you have to have security way out in the Belt, and you've still got rotating stations out there, but it is a different dynamic.
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01-05-2021, 10:14 AM | #48 | |
Join Date: Jan 2006
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Re: GURPS O'Neill Cylinder Design
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01-05-2021, 11:00 AM | #49 |
Join Date: Feb 2016
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Re: GURPS O'Neill Cylinder Design
Lunar mines end up being a lot cheaper than asteroid mines due to the ability to use mass drivers for transporting materials into orbit. The close proximity also helps to catch mistakes before too much damage can be done. Of course, asteroids have more easily accessible precious metals, so they would likely exist and would produce industrial metals as a byproduct.
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01-05-2021, 02:56 PM | #50 | |
Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: Houston, TX
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Re: GURPS O'Neill Cylinder Design
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Attempts at lunar mining are going to run into a buzzsaw of opposition from traditionalists who can't imagine tampering with the "Man in the Moon," from romantics who can't imagine blemishing the light associated with countless love songs and poems, and from plain old curmudgeons who don't want an age-old component of human nights altered. In a future with generous space development, asteroidal resources could be relatively cheap, if you don't mind a long delay between when they're ordered and when they arrive. A multi-kiloton "package" equipped with a small, automatic mass driver could gently nudge itself into the inner system over a period of several months.
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Tags |
o'neill, o'neill cylinder, oberth cylinder, orbital habitat, space station, spaceships |
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