mounstable rants concerning Instability of long cylinders

> Here's what you do: you take your two twenty mile long, four mile wide
> cylinders...
> Place the two cylinders end to end, about a mile apart. Then you take
> a one mile long cylinder (still four miles wide) and attach it with
> your magnetic bearings to the two cylinders.

That's interesting. At 1 G, a cylinder with a 2 mile (3219 m) radius
needs to speen 0.528 RPM... which sounds slow, but in linear terms it's
about 178 m/sec (400 mph). That's pretty fast. You'll definitely need
some moving sidewalks to transition from one section to the other. But
rather than one slidewalk that speeds up and slows down, I'd suggest 80
of them, each moving 5 mph faster or slower than the one next to it.
Then you can have continuous traffic in both directions.

I'm not sure whether such a system would be stable, however. Sure, it
has a net angular momentum of zero, but only as a whole -- the parts
have decidedly nonzero momentum, and I suspect the physics of the
forces between those parts could get a bit hairy.

Best,
- Joe

Joe Strout -- joe@...
Strout Custom Solutions