How Earthlike?

From: andy-nimmo
To:
Sent: Saturday, March 31, 2001 8:41 AM
Subject: Re: [spacesettlers] How Earthlike?

> Hi Lucio,
>

Hi Andy,

> How do you build tall buildings on the 6 - 10 metre thick inner surface
> of a habitat? I would think O'Neill's preference for small buildings was
> a simple matter of constructional capability.
>

Tall buildings inside a space colony does not seems an unsolvable
engineering problem. One possible solution: you can use cabling and make a
building in a given point of the surface counteract the weight of another
building in the opposite side - you have simply to connect them by cables.
(If you can make a small dumbbell colony, then certainly you can make a
"dumbbell building" inside a big round colony.) In structural terms, the
buildings would in fact hang over the internal surface, instead of putting
their weight over the surface.

But I suspect that not even the use of such cabling system would be
necessary. I'm no civil engineer and I don't know how to make the
calculations, but if you can make a hull that is 10 meters thick, that is, a
hull that supports something like 20 metric tons per square meter, wouldn't
be possible to make that hull strong enough to support a buildings some tens
of stores tall? After all, what is the pressure that a building of, say, 20
stories exerts on the ground?

> Best wishes, Andy.
[snikt]

Best wishes, Lucio.