Space Colonies

Please forgive my ignorance, as it has taken me a while to get to this
point, and it will take me another while to digest all the material on
that site.
If you haven't already, I'd also recommend reading Heppenheimer's two books, which talk quite a bit more about the Stanford Torus than does O'Neill's "The High Frontier":
Colonies in Space by T. A. Heppenheimer, 1977, Warner Books, ISBN: 0-446-81-581-0
Toward Distant Suns by T. A. Heppenheimer, 1979, Stackpole Books, ISBN: 0-449-90035-5 The Stanford Torus seems to answer my concerns about depressurization
in that the population can shelter down below the main concourse in
the event it becomes depressurized. This answers my need for
compartmentation.
It might interest you to know that there's also the potential for compartmentalization around the torus. It's supposed to be divided into 6 equal segments (3 residential sections alternating with 3agricultural sections) with bulkheads in-between.
I also see that the Stanford Torus has potential for many variants,
such as noncircular cross-sections, bundled tori (side-by-side)
nested (concentric) tori, etc. There is much fertile ground here
for conjecture and discussion.

Hop David has a design using side-by-side (or banded) tori, but I wasn't able to find an illustration of it on the site I was expecting to: http://clowder.net/hop/railroad/railroad.html I was about to say that one potential problem with concentric tori was that the proposed method for getting sunlight inside would only work for the innermost torus. But then I thought of the variation on the Stanford Torus we saw in "L5: First City in Space". Ithad two concentric tori with the inner one dedicated to agriculture.

Regards,
Mike Combs