Colony Wall loading, I made a big mistake.

I compeletly misunderstood the description of Island One construction
on Dyffed Neal Dwyars [i]High Frontier[/i] page. That is what I was
going by.

The Island One colony walls werent 3m thick they were 15 m thick! And
the windows total 12 m of glass. Now that sounds a whole lot better.

Here is a quote from the e-mail he sent me on this.

[quote]Regarding the windows, it's important to remember that they're
not as
thin and "open" as they appear. Each prism is three meters (ten feet)
thick and there are four layers of prisms, so the "sky" panels are
twelve meters (forty feet) thick. For any part of the "sky" to blow
out, all four layers would have to fail.

The prisms are mounted in a five-by-five titanium grid to form a
square
"frame" fifteen meters (fifty feet) on a side and three meters deep,
with twenty-five prisms per frame. Even if the titanium cross-beams
are
only a centimeter (half inch) wide, that's still a very solid
infrastructure. The system can be made even stronger by making the
prisms trapezoidal and dovetailing them, so that any outward pressure
locks them even more tightly together.

Consider also that the actual force vector isn't perpendicular to the
axis of rotation, but tangential to the circumference. This creates
an
outward force that makes the inner hull seem like "down" to the
occupants, but the upspin force is demonstrably greater than the
outward
force, hence the upspin veer. The mass of water isn't pushing
directly
outward, but at an angle, hence the higher water level on the upspin
side.

Finally, while all of the illustrations show square window panels in a
classic Cartesian grid, that's probably because such a grid is easier
to
draw and more familiar to the layman. If I were designing these
things,
I'd use a geodesic array or triangular prisms for the windows and,
indeed, the titanium reinforcement for the concrete hull.[/quote]