transportation in space settlements?

On 9/6/14 9:56 PM, sailorbarsoom@... [spacesettlers] wrote:

> I imagine everybody living on a "residential deck," with utilities,
> warehouses, the local jail, and why not delivery vehicles in the
> "basement." Thus delivery behicles never have to mix with residential
> traffic. The grocery store or furniture store or whatever receives
> deliveries in the basement.

Yes, that's a very good point. It does though that your space habitat
has to be several meters bigger in radius than it would otherwise be.
Whether that's a sensible trade-off or not is unclear (but for my
purposes, I guess we can let the players try it and see!).

> I've given a lot of thought to moving sidewalks, and it seems that, to
> be practical, you end up using a lot of width. However, probably not
> any more than light rail here in Dallas. One problem with replacing
> light rail with moving sidewalks here in Dallas is weather: it gets
> terribly hot, sometimes cold, and it sometimes rains (we could use some
> of that right now), snows, and even hails. A roof over the entire
> slidewalk system would help, but would also be costly.

Yes, I've been reading up on this, and I think weather is a major reason
why moving walkways haven't caught on in cities here. In a space
colony, weather will be much more mild (or nonexistent), so maybe they
would make sense there.

FYI, they have walkways now that accelerate after you get on them, and
decelerate at the end; check this out:

http://sreejithknols.wordpress.com/article/accelerating-moving-walkway-an-indepth-27d4pai9ji3et-25/

Apparently there's one of these in an airport in Toronto. Sounds pretty
neat.

Best,
- Joe