Hello and a question

--- In spacesettlers, "mgellis2" wrote:

> Dear Friends,
>
> Hello. I am new to this group but I am very glad to have found
> it.
> I've been interested in this topic for a quite a while.

Welcome to our little corner of the Solar System.

> A quick question. One of the basic designs for space habitats
> seems to be a torus or "ring town." The initial Stanford design,
> as I recall, was a ring about 2 km. in diameter and 150 meters
> across.

1.8Km and 130 metres, but whose counting. ^_~

> Is there any reason the ring needs to be so narrow (relative to the
> diameter)? Or was that just chosen because they only needed to
> house a certain number of people?

They wanted to house 10,000 people, and their medical people insisted
that it had to be at least 1,800 metres across. So they built the
smallest 1,800 metres across torus that they thought would be big
enough to do the job.

> I would think it would be more efficient to make "fat" rings (with
> more interior land area) if you're going to build a ring-shaped

Sounds reasonable. If the diameter could be cut to, say, 1,000
metres, then the ring would need to be fatter to have the same area.
You keep doing this long enough and you'd get a stubby cylinder.

> habitat. Or would "fat" rings create special engineering
> problems? Is there any limit on how "fat" the rings can be? Could

The answer here is that I don't know. I'll bet some of the more
mathematically and engineeringly astute here would be able to tell
us, though.

> you, for example, have a 5-to-1 ratio (e.g., a ring 5 km. in
> diamter with a floor width of 1 km.)?

Well, folks, could you?

> Thanks. I look forward to reading your thoughts on this.

As long as we're asking "Stanford questions," is there any reason
that the cross-section has to be circular? Could it be eliptical, or
perhaps rectangular? Perhaps 200 metres "wide" by 150 "tall"? Does
Mark's 1Km wide floor have to be in a 1Km high environment, or could
a 1Km wide by 250 metre rectangular tube do the job?

> Mark

Xenophile