Quote:
Originally Posted by DataPacRat
I'm planning on doing some plots within a rotating space station based on John Varley's "Gaea": radius 650 km, width 250 km, centrifugal gravity 0.2G, air pressure 2 bars
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I calculate that you'll need a structural material about twelve times as strong as, and one-quarter the density of, high-tensile steel for that structure to resist the tension generated by its own rotation. You could build it out of a polymer reinforced with carbon nanotubes. But not stone.
And that's not counting the 15km of stone as a passive load, that's leaving it out altogether. 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.