Mirrors versus diffuse reflection

In a message dated 5/31/01 6:23:45 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
dromni@... writes:

<< Hi,

For some reason, in the last few days I have been thinking about designs for
spherical and cylindrical rotating habitats following what I call "Frazer's
Guidelines" (*) for lighting: instead of having huge transparent areas for
letting sunlight in, they make use of relatively small transparent "holes"
where concentrated sunlight gets into the habitat and is used for lighting.
At first, as usual, I thought about mirrors inside the colony to disperse
the incoming sunlight in a useful way. But after a while I thought: wouldn't
simply making the sunlight hit an opaque and purely white surface be a
simpler and cheaper alternative to a mirror system?
>>

It might be. I have an idea on that. How about a cylinder about the size of
an Island Three cylinder, but instead of wasting half the real estate on
giant floor windows have the sunlight come through one of the end caps in
concentrated form, the light beams through an aperature in one endcap and
through a large transparent tube stretching from endcap to endcap containing
a gas, the gas is heated to a plasma by the concentrated sunlight and is
contained by magnetic field coils so that it does not contact the walls of
the transparent tube. The plasma is heated to the same temperature as the
surface of the sun so that it glows in a diffuse yellow light that's simular
to sunlight illuminating the entire inner surface of the cylinder.

Tom Kalbfus