**CORRECTION: Blue rotation rotate should say: "2.8 deg/sec" (not deg/min)--This is an O'Neill cylinder space habitat.It is drawn to actual scale.The diamete...
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.
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.
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.