Skylights

Lucio,

I think the passive airflow concept might work out pretty well, with
the radiators on the inside of a torus, or two seperate cylinders.
Nuclear reactors also make use of some limited passive cooling, and
given the amount of information available for heating/air
conditioning, duct work, heat flow, etc., the design of the
radiators and airflow should be pretty easy.

I found some flat plate bending formulas on the web, and a 6' by 6'
tempered glass window should be about 1.5 inches thick, if the
formula that I found is correct. This is for 44.1 psi, or 1
atmosphere with a 3:1 safety factor. Dropping this to 14.7 psi gives
a window only about 57% as thick.

For the thick windows, this works out to almost 300 pounds per
window. Pyrex seems to be about 50 cents a cubic inch, and at 8000
cubic inches, this comes to $4000/window.

At this rate, given an Island-3 type design, with a diameter of 3
miles and a length of 5 miles, with 1/3 of the surface covered by
windows, we require over 12 million of the 6'x6' windows, weighing in
at 1.77 million tons, and costing about $50 billion dollars, not
including delivery, mounting, sealing, and any other installation
tasks. However, surely glass prices would drop in such large volume
manufacturing.

Best Regards,

George Turner