Skylights

Mike

Yes, by stacking multiple floors, the heat problem is going up linear
with floor space, but the cooling is not. This illumination would
certainly require forced fluid cooling. I'm thinking of a minimalist
station design of two cylinders suspended by cables, rotating around
a common axis. If the cylinders are lying flat on their sides (to
give a long horizontal view), with a slight upslope from one end to
the other, then air can be supplied at one end, and flow to the
other. The cool return air starts at the low end, and moves along
each floor toward the higher end, getting hotter as it travels, and
then hits the "chimney", which flows up toward the axis. Maybe half
way to the axis, the air dumps into a series of zig-zag downward
sloping finned pipe radiators, so the air cools as it descends. Once
back down near the habitable cylinder, it flows back into the lower,
cool end of the station. This should work even for tiny cylinders,
the size of an airliner fuselage. It also provides a breeze that
varies with heat loading.

If windows are expensive, then it would be easy to fashion them into
lenses, and having mirrors concentrate light on them, then have the
lens re-disperse it into the station's interior. If the light comes
from beneath the floor of a torus, then the illumination could be
bounced off the ceiling, which could be mylar, or maybe some crazy,
white-light, hologram of a real sky. This would eliminate a great
deal of required glass area, plus the seals.

P.S. I was browsing some of the links to islandone.org, etc. and
noticed that in the vast compendiums of launch methods, no one
mentioned the possibility of building an orbiting ring. A couple of
years ago I doddled on it, but thought someone else must've thought
of it first, and rejected the idea. It's a similar concept to a sky
hook, but is essentially just a big continuous cable in LEO, or lunar
orbit. By making it spin just a few meters per second higher than
its natural orbital velocity, it can be put under tension. By making
its top surface a series of simple wire loops, a mag-lev car (using a
Halbach array of permanent magnets) can glide along it at ground
speeds, dropping a tether to the surface. Once the tether is hoisted
up, the car can accelerate back up to orbital velocity.

There is the nasty problem of having the hoisted weight set up a
traveling wave in the cable (and at that diameter it would take a
very wide ring to not act like a noodle), so active damping may be
required, but I'm not certain. It would take quite a bit of modeling
to investigate these effect, plus any tidal forces that might be
encountered. However, a single shuttle mission could easily pull up
enough carbon fiber for a continous loop, if a truly noodly cable can
be in any way useful. Is so, then the cable can be used to hoist up
yet more cable in a fairly continuous fashion. If a way of binding
subsequent strands can be made automatic, then no further flights
would be required.

I still haven't run across any references to the method, though. Any
big reasons it can't work? It seems at least buildable with common
materials, as opposed to some of the other skyhook concepts.
However, I'm probably missing something.

Best Regards,

George Turner