[Spaceships] Million Merchant Marathon

[Anthony]

The minimum weight for a sunshield is the same as a solar sail (and in fact will be one and can use that for station keeping, though you may have to play games with albedo to avoid having it just blow away), and there's extant proposals that are on the order of 0.1g/m^2 or about 11 million tons for the entire thing, with no reactionless drives or anything similar involved.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by scc

EU and British Commonwealth, who are the primary backers behind this, seem to de a bit better. And one of the reasons this project got started was America imploding, so the American tendency to overspend is gone.

A world that has experienced the collapse of its #1 economy (making up over 20% of the world economy) probably isn't in any position to fund terraforming operations. Also, "a bit better at avoiding government overspending than the United States," even if true, still leaves a lot of room for government overspending (and I believe the EU tends to have economic issues of its own; combined with human nature being what it is, I highly doubt the terraforming spending is anything close to efficient).

Originally Posted by scc

Well world production of aluminum foil is only 6 million tons, so that would take even longer to spin up then plastic.

The advantage of using things other than plastic is that you can fairly-readily get the materials from asteroids out in the Belt; set up mining and refining operations out there, and it probably won't take terribly long for production out in the Belt to massively outstrip production planetside.

Originally Posted by Agemegos

Standard thickness for what? The density of aluminium is 2 700 kg per cubic metre, so foil that massed 4.5 kg per square metre would be 1.67 mm thick. That's chonk foil.

I weighed a roll of aluminium foil in my kitchen. Net of the box and the cardboard core it's rolled up on, a 30 m by 30 cm roll (9 square metres) massed 343 g. That is 0.038 kg per square metre. 38 tonnes per square kilometre.

I don't recall where I got the value from; I believe I googled the thickness of typical aluminum foil, then found a page that let you input the thickness of an aluminum sheet (meant to be used for aluminum sheet metal, but it didn't limit how thin you could input), and put that thickness there. I'd imagine I must have made an error at some point. Going off 0.038 kg per square meter rather than 4.5 kg per square meter, I'm getting around 4.3 Pg - still massive, at around 85 Great Walls, but not quite as ridiculous.
Fake EDIT: Retracing my steps, I found my error - Google told me that standard aluminum foil is around 0.63 mils thick, and then when I converted that to mm I accidentally input 63 mils (probably 063 - I failed to include the period), and so ended up with something 100x as thick.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Varyon

The advantage of using things other than plastic is that you can fairly-readily get the materials from asteroids out in the Belt;

.

Lunar maria is 14% aluminum by mass. 7% magnesium too. I wouldn't go to the Belt for light metals.

[Witchking]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Lunar maria is 14% aluminum by mass. 7% magnesium too. I wouldn't go to the Belt for light metals.

If you dig mining trenches in straight(ish) lines you can take the C-H-A and finish out for C-H-A-I-R-F-A-C-E.

SPOON!

[doctorevilbrain]

Chairface?

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by doctorevilbrain

Chairface?

Chairface Chippendale, a villain from The Tick (hence the SPOON! reference). He tried to carve his name into the moon, but was stopped before he could finish, resulting in the moon only having C-H-A carved into it.

[Witchking]

Originally Posted by Varyon

Chairface Chippendale, a villain from The Tick (hence the SPOON! reference). He tried to carve his name into the moon, but was stopped before he could finish, resulting in the moon only having C-H-A carved into it.

Highest Honors! A scholar and a gentleman!

Bows

P.S. Have been reading the thread mostly for amusement. Have nothing to add for Sci Fi Dyson Sphere level megaprojects. However when I saw the comment on carving large hunks of the moon out...I could not resist.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Witchking

Highest Honors! A scholar and a gentleman!

Bows

Full disclosure - while I did recall Chairface being a villain in The Tick, without the SPOON! reference I probably wouldn't have. I also didn't recall his misadventure with the moon - I looked him up to make certain I was correct that he was from The Tick, and found the reference to said misadventure. So my knowledge isn't quite as encyclopedic as it may first appear.

[Witchking]

Originally Posted by Varyon

Full disclosure - while I did recall Chairface being a villain in The Tick, without the SPOON! reference I probably wouldn't have. I also didn't recall his misadventure with the moon - I looked him up to make certain I was correct that he was from The Tick, and found the reference to said misadventure. So my knowledge isn't quite as encyclopedic as it may first appear.

Ah but the SPOON! clue was there for a reason.

[scc]

Originally Posted by Varyon

A world that has experienced the collapse of its #1 economy (making up over 20% of the world economy) probably isn't in any position to fund terraforming operations. Also, "a bit better at avoiding government overspending than the United States," even if true, still leaves a lot of room for government overspending (and I believe the EU tends to have economic issues of its own; combined with human nature being what it is, I highly doubt the terraforming spending is anything close to efficient).

Oh, it's more then that, China goes away at the same time.

That said, both nations populations are somewhat intact and parts of the US that don't feature high levels of radicalism probably come through the change partially intact.

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Lunar maria is 14% aluminum by mass. 7% magnesium too. I wouldn't go to the Belt for light metals.

Yep, the idea that there will be any great push to mine the asteroids doesn't scan. But where possible I reckon things will still be ground based, building factories in 0G that don't need to be generally doesn't make (economic) sense. And in this case it's a jobs program, so things are Earth-side.

Keep in mind that standards for satellite construction go down as you build more, my sunshades likely aren't built in clean rooms, because why do that?