L5 director: "So we thought, 'OK. We need an O'Neill colony.'"

This is a partial transcript of the new L5 featurette: The Argo and The Colony [3:38; three minutes and 38 seconds]:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNPhnJFpG3Y

[1:55]
Tom Ptasinski - writer / L5 co-creator

I was still uninformed as Stan was explaining a lot of these elements, and when he talked about the colony, this massive structure just floating in orbit around Earth, and it holds 3 million people. [...] just this massive, floating city.

[2:10]
Stanley von Medvey - director / L5 co-creator

In the 1970's, physicist Gerard O'Neill came up with a set of sort of conceptual designs for a future habitation of space. The concepts he came up with, he called them Type 1, Type 2, and Type 3. Ours, I believe, is a Type 2.

It's a cylinder. The idea being it's several kilometers long. Ours is 30 kilometers by 15 kilometers. It's a big cylinder with huge deflecting mirrors, and the idea is just that you rotate the cylinder to generate one g of Earth gravity, and then inside this cylinder, on the inner surface, you put towns and cities and trees and plants and hills and parks and all that sort of stuff. You fill it with air. And then sunlight is bounced inside the cylinder in a controlled manner by these folding petal mirrors that can open and close.

[3:11]
It's a very classic sci-fi design. It's used really only when you're thinking in hard sci-fi terms, and that's what we are. We're hard sci-fi. So we thought, "OK, we need an O'Neill colony."

And that's what that is.