Orbital Habitat Schematics

[dynaman]

Originally Posted by dscheidt

A torus will have living space on the outer skin, with the farms on the sun side of the top. Engineering space will be in the central hub, mostly.

Sorry to hijack the thread, but wouldn't the plants be upside down doing this? With the roots getting the sunlight instead of the Leaves? It would be interesting to see how plants would grow in this situation.

[Rhino]

I really think that an e23 product with deck plans of various orbital habitats and spaceships would be a good seller with the THS fans.

[dscheidt]

Originally Posted by dynaman

Sorry to hijack the thread, but wouldn't the plants be upside down doing this? With the roots getting the sunlight instead of the Leaves? It would be interesting to see how plants would grow in this situation.

A fair number of plants grow pretty well upside down. With some bio-engineering, even more will. You can also use mirrors and other optics to direct sunlight around inside. For a cylinder, roughly half the surface is going to be in the shade at any given time, so you're likely to want to have some sort of mirror array on the outside to increase the light the farms get. the alternative is to point the axis of rotation at the sun, and run a light pipe up the center.

Outside the orbit distance of Earth or maybe Mars, the level of solar radiation isn't really worth the effort of using to grow plants directly, so you can ignore that, and just use grow lights, powered by your fission/fussion reactor.

[dynaman]

Originally Posted by dscheidt

Outside the orbit distance of Earth or maybe Mars, the level of solar radiation isn't really worth the effort of using to grow plants directly, so you can ignore that, and just use grow lights, powered by your fission/fussion reactor.

Sounds better, I would think that method would be used just about everywhere too then, not just further out in the solar system - since it allows ships to not worry at all about getting/not getting sunlight. Although closer to the sun entire space stations are probably powered strictly by solar power.

[thtraveller]

Originally Posted by Rhino

I really think that an e23 product with deck plans of various orbital habitats and spaceships would be a good seller with the THS fans.

There is a Meizi or Vulcan spin pod deck plan here www.transhuman.talktalk.net/ts/tsSpinPod.htm

[Rhino]

Thanks, thtraveller. Anybody else have anything similiar?

[Moebius]

sounds like you guys are describing the O'Neill Cylinders (like the ones in Mobile Suit Gundam).

[hari]

Wait a miniute, I dont have the book around to look at and cant remember too well but doesnt Sakharov station have no gravity? Its like a big collection of junk as I remember it. Not at all the same as these big spinning habitats and everything like that.

I mean, those are useful as orbital habitat schematics for other things but I think the people who talk about dungeon style tunnels have it right when it comes to Sakharov Station.

[JimMarn]

Originally Posted by Moebius

sounds like you guys are describing the O'Neill Cylinders (like the ones in Mobile Suit Gundam).

Yeah, I remember those. L-5 habitats. I saw a book about them years ago. Many years ago.

[jeff_wilson]

Originally Posted by dscheidt

For a sphere: Remember that there's only apparent gravity near the equator.

This is not correct. The apparent gravity is proportional to the cosine of the latitude, the same as the distance from the axis of rotation.