How Earthlike?

Hi Lucio,

Must admit on construction I really know nothing at all, but I have
noticed that even small buildings in this country anyway, always seem to
have enormous holes dug first and go down almost as much as they go up.
Certainly though, I can see how your cable method would work, like
guying a tent.

Please note that as from Thursday I'll be away for about 10 or 11 days,
so Don't expect to hear from me during that time, but I'll be back on my
return. I'm off to a space conference in the south of England at which
our SDC is having its first AGM, and I have a couple of writing
commissions in other towns, one going, the other coming back.

Best wishes, Andy.

"Dr. Omni" wrote:

> 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.
>
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