transportation in space settlements?

On 9/6/14 11:30 AM, Al Globus alglobus@... [spacesettlers] wrote:

>> at a university, if you look at any university map, there are plenty of
>> roads. Just about every building has a road (at least an alley or
>> service road) next to it, so it can be accessed by service and delivery
>> vehicles.
>>
> Thats because suppliers are km (or more) away. In Kalpana One, for
> example, NOTHING is more than about 1 km (15 min walk by a healthy
> person) away. One does need vehicles for heavy loads, large loads, and
> the infirm but you can run electric golf carts on a wide sidewalk with
> little trouble.

True, but I don't think the heavy/large loads issue can be neglected.
Commercial sites (e.g. grocery stores) need a fair amount of stuff
delivered every day; industrial sites need raw materials brought in and
finished products shipped out; even office buildings occasionally need a
palette of toilet paper or other sundries. All this is too much to
transport on foot. Electric cards could probably do it, but I worry
that it adds up to a fair amount of traffic -- your foot/bike paths
would be clogged with delivery vehicles, cautiously snaking their way
among the pedestrians.

> BTW: these vehicles can almost certainly be
> self-driving in the time frame of space settlements (decades from today).

True. I think Google's vision is for most cars to be essentially
automated taxis. So for personal transport, instead of owning a car,
you would just hail the nearest auto-taxi on your smart phone, and have
it take you where you need to go. (Oops: I see you made the same point
later on.)

This obviously doesn't eliminate the need for roads, but it could
greatly reduce the number of cars needed to support the population, and
therefore reduce the parking lots, service stations, car dealerships,
and other sprawl-producing effects.

> A more difficult transportation problem for settlements is vertical
> transportation. In Kaplana One its 250 m from the hull to the axis of
> rotation ladders arent going to cut it. Almost certainly need
> elevators, and some really big ones as the food production in Kalpana
> One is in interior cylinders. Probably make at least some of the
> elevators big enough to drive the golf carts into (eliminates two
> payload transfers).

Yes. And of course if most of your shipments are in the "down"
(outward) direction, more low-tech solutions are available... package
chutes, for example.

(The hard part might be stopping the local kids from sliding down the
chute themselves!)

> Also, most food might be delivered directly to the point of use, without
> warehousing or ever being in a store. The golf carts taking food from
> the farms could drive themselves directly to kitchens where a small
> robot could unload and store the food. This would be hard for todays
> robot, but probably not 2, 3, 4 decades from now.

Hmm, that's an interesting point. But now I'm picturing even *more*
robotic carts, going not just between distribution centers and major
commercial zones, but to individual homes and offices. They'd be
smaller, but there'd have to be a lot of them.

Still better than cars, of course, but hardly ideal... I think I'd
prefer the delivery quadcopters.

However, the notion of direct home delivery (and home manufacturing, for
that matter!) eating away at the need for commercial shops is very
interesting. I do suppose that's likely. Though I think sometimes
shops serve other functions besides just getting goods to consumers.

> Theres no reason not to share vehicles. If we get driverless cars on
> Earth (a much harder problem) in, say, two decades, by the time space
> settlements are available people may well be used to ordering up
> vehicles when they need them rather than owning a car.

Yes. This certainly helps.

>> It might also be possible to have broad walk/bikeways (of the sort
>> common on university campuses), and allow small commercial vehicles to
>> also use these, at a slow speed and yielding to pedestrians.
>>
> I think this sort of thing should work pretty well. Industry should
> probably be separated from residence and commercial.

That's true, and the transportation needs of each zone type could be
quite different.

>> Note that if the space colony has less than 1 G gravity,
>> then flying becomes easier and more efficient.
>>
> It should be easier even at 1g pseudo-gravity. The only force on the
> drones is air currents, there is no gravitational attraction to the
> hull. Thus, once you get above the boundary layer there isnt a lot of
> force pushing you towards the hull.

Erm. You've made a really interesting point here, though I think it's
more complex than this makes it sound. I'm going to break it out into
its own thread to examine more closely.

Best,
- Joe