Steve Jackson Games Forums - View Single Post

AlexanderHowl · 04-01-2019, 01:58 PM

Unless you have some sort of active management system, a habitat would probably destabilize within a thousand years or so regardless of the size as artificial structures need repairs since they cannot depend on gravity to keep everything together. For example, even a relatively small asteroid impact (~10 m radius) would imbalance the spin gravity system by subtracting mass from somewhere, which would result in the entire system decaying within a few days without load shifting (0.2 rotations per minute is still a rotational velocity of more than 20 km/s). Since a 10 m radius S-type asteroid masses ~10,000 metric tons, it would hit with an average energy of ~400 kilotons of TNT, probably fragmenting off a few billion metric tons of stone armor.

04-01-2019, 01:58 PM	#23
AlexanderHowl Join Date: Feb 2016	Re: [Spaceships] SM+35 Toroid Station? Unless you have some sort of active management system, a habitat would probably destabilize within a thousand years or so regardless of the size as artificial structures need repairs since they cannot depend on gravity to keep everything together. For example, even a relatively small asteroid impact (~10 m radius) would imbalance the spin gravity system by subtracting mass from somewhere, which would result in the entire system decaying within a few days without load shifting (0.2 rotations per minute is still a rotational velocity of more than 20 km/s). Since a 10 m radius S-type asteroid masses ~10,000 metric tons, it would hit with an average energy of ~400 kilotons of TNT, probably fragmenting off a few billion metric tons of stone armor.