In Eclipse Phase, where the remnants of America and their Latin American cronies fled to Jovian orbit during The Big One, they're called Reagan Cylinders.
The space stations in Elite Dangerous that are set up like this are really cool, but they're a fraction of the size. But flying in to one is still really really cool.
Does anything like a material strong enough to handle the stresses of an O'Neil cylinder exist, or are they even theoretically possible?
Does anything like a material strong enough to handle the stresses of an O'Neil cylinder exist, or are they even theoretically possible?
How much hubris you want? Steel & kevlar will get you pretty damn far, few kilometers in radius. Going up to a few hundred kms with hypothetical defect-free nanotubes. Anything bigger than that gets you into ringworld territory, and while technically buildable with current materials, those require a fanciful, never-engineered, active support system to stop from collapsing in on themselves and probably fusion to power it. Or just magic, one of those.
makes me think of that story of all the people chanting "The Ringworld is Unstable!" at Niven, and how he came up with an active support system to fix the gap.
Lmao, I remember that story, and its great because every ringworld book has to spend at least a chapter addressing some other, newly noticed, fatal flaw with the concept.
Niven is such a fuckin boomer hack.
I am blessed to pretty much forget all the shitty parts of old sci-fi I read when I was a kid. I only remember some of Niven's brainworms, while clearly remembering that "WE MADE IT!" is the best name for a settled planet in all of sci-fi history.
For the original 32km long, 8km diameter design; maraging steel, graphene, and "asteroid putty" is more than feasible
The real engineering challenge is the radiator design and the lighting system
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
