Mirrors versus diffuse reflection

In a message dated 6/1/01 6:12:51 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
mejames@... writes:

<< Your asking an awful lot of that poor end cap. That would have to be a
very intense light stream to create a plasma. that glowed. It might be
a lot easier to do every thing with artificial light (no windows). I
think that the reason Island Three was designed with the big windows was
that having complete power failure or other non air loss catastrophe
that life could still be maintained.

Mitchell James
>>

The light does not go through a glass window in the end cap, there is simply
a hole open to space that allows for the concentrated sunlight to pass
through. The magnetic coils keep the plasma bottled up along the axis of the
cylinder, and a glass tube keeps the atmosphere to the outside of the
cylinder by connecting with the sides of the openings of the end caps. The
sunlight keeps the plasma at the center of the cylinder a plasma and
additional solar power is collected to maintain the magnetic field. This is
simular to the bottle of a magnetic confinement fusion reactor except the
plasma is only heated up to the surface temperature of the sun. Perhaps later
on you could modify this arrangement and have a fusion reactor directly heat
up an outer sheaf of plasma that provides illumination to the colony, in this
case the colony could be located anywhere, even interstellar space.

Tom Kalbfus