Transportation within a habitiat

--- victoriatangoman wrote:
> Everyone's raising good points. I'd be very skeptical though of
> having automobiles of any sort manufactured in orbit. The
> manufacturing and supply chain for a car is immense and requires
> high capital costs and a large market in order for it to make
> economic sense.

Not neccessaryily. Sure they do on earth but they could be designed to be much
cheaper and given what our capabilities would be we could probably manafacture
enough for the large colonies if it's decided to go down that road.

> I wouldn't compare the immensity of the structure of a habitat and
> the daunting task that it presents for the project with the process
> of creating an auto industry up there. They're both huge
> undertakings, but the habitiat construction is basically a large
> construction task while the creation of a car is a complex process
> involving the creation of many industries. It's not as simple as as
> just processing the metal which we'll be doing almost from the get
> go. Just think about all of the parts that go into your car.

Many industries which BTW we're going to need to have in orbit anyway.

> As to the comments about designing the community to address these
> issues from the start - I completely agree. We've got a blank slate
> and need not bring legacy issues up there with us.
>
> As for firefighting, I also think that there should be some built in
> fire-suppression technology in all of the buldings. Perhaps,
> alongside the water, electrical, sewar networks, we can incorporate
> a halon "main pipe" and when the sensors detect a fire in the
> building, a valve opens and the halon gas flows the few feet from
> the main pipe (perhaps buried under the sidewalk?) to the building.

Halon would be good. On earth it's illegal due to environmental reasons but in
space with no ozone layer it wouldn't be too much of a problem. Except that
when you spray a lot of it people can die from it and also it can leave a
coating on things that are put out. I can also see CFCs being used in cooling
systems in space since there is no ozone layer to wreak there.

> But, let's not confine our thinking to just house fires. How about
> grass fires, shrub fires, forest fires. Started by nature ( I know,
> hard to think of nature in our created environment, but why
> not . . . If we've got weather systems up there, will we be able to
> control the complexity of the weather to such an extent that we'll
> be able to eliminate lightning? I don't know.) Or how about
> malicious mischief, sabotage, or stupid kids pulling pranks which
> get out of control by lighting fires. Will we be able to have all
> of the flora up there so drenched that it would be impossible for
> anything to catch on fire? If we do, would we want to put up with
> all of the mold and mildew? I think it's more likely that we'll want
> to have a comfortable living environment and that'll mean that our
> forests and lawns might be susceptable to fire.

I wouldn't expect to eliminate lightning without getting rid of natural
whether. We will need to have some way to fight forest fires if our habitat
has any forests. As well as that we should also make sure to design them with
a good buffer zone between the forest and the populus to reduce any death toll
from a forest fire.

Probably an even bigger worry about a forest fire would be the CO2 since the
habitat wouldn't have much air to dilute it into.

> I keep thinking that the last mile issue is going to be significant.
> A "reasonable" walking distance is probably OK, but having to walk
> anywhere near a km to get a a transportation node is just not going
> to work. The optimization issue is going to be in finding the
> optimum distribution of subway terminals. What I envision is what
> the airlines are doing here on earth. The hub and spoke system. We'd
> have small feeder lines connecting to main terminals. They'd
> continuously run their small hop routes. Then the passengers would
> disembark to the multiple main habitat-transversing routes.

What is a reasonable walking distance?

I could see something much like rail networks on earth but completely
underground. Getting people to it is the thing that needs to be worked on. If
roads are allowed we'd just have people drive to the station in their electric
cars. If we don't have cars or roads then we may have to use slower
mini-subway systems to feed the main ones.

> But the last mile issue still remains. We could design the community
> in clusters so that each neighborhood has a small subway terminal,
> at most a ten minute? walk from any point.

Yes. Although that would waste some space.

> Or, something that I'm just now starting to ponder, is having
> utility corridors underneath each street/sidewalk (better to access
> all of the utilities from a corridor rather than jackhammering and
> digging into street or ground) and each house - apartment - office -
> factory has a basement that can access the utility corridor. In that
> corridor are tracks on which a fairly slow vehicle travels. This
> corridor leads to a main subway node. That solves the last mile
> issue but the trade-off is a lot of infrastructure has to be built
> and maintained.

That might be a good idea. The infrastructure could be maintained and would be
built with the colony.

I could easily imagine the main door to a house not being the one above ground
but the one to the basement.

> As for moving furniture and other items, the comment about doors
> limiting the size of items is a good point. I guess the same point
> would need to be considered in optimizing the size of the utility
> corridor so that most everything needed in a building could be
> transported in that corridor.

What about getting it up the stairs from the basment?

> Now if the corridor is the way to go, does it have dedicated vehicle
> for each leg of the trip or is it just an "underground" road
> network? If their are dedicated vehicles running back and forth,
> then we'll need transshipment points to transfer items from the main
> transportation routes to the "lastmile" corridors.

Whatever the colonists want.

> I'm not quite sure in my own mind which alternative makes the most
> sense. I envision the utility corridor vehicles to be as low tech as
> possible and still be automated, while the main routes would be
> fast, efficient mag-lev systems.

Sounds like a good idea. With the big colonies like Island 3 we'd have to have
something fast to go from one end to the other.

Something also has to be thought about with high speed motion around the colony
since it will add or subtract from the gravity.

> As for the big item transportation equipment - pipes, construction
> materials, dirt, . . you name it, I wouldn't want to have to carry
> buckets of cement back and forth on a construction site. And, even
> if it's modular, we won't be constructing those buildings from
> paper. Each of the components is going to weigh quite a bit. Now,
> without roads how do we move the big stuff throughout the habitat?

That is a problem.

> The idea about an overhead crane is intriguing, but consider all of
> the safety restictions on a construction site. Now how comfortable
> would we all be having tons of stuff moving above us wherever we
> were, because the constuction sites would be all over the habititat
> and that central crane system would have to move material between a
> number of points. I wouldn't feel too comfortable with the overhead
> cranes, and with the bigger habitats, those cranes would be even
> higher in the sky, posing a greater kinetic energy potential, which
> might even be enough to threaten the structure of the habitat
> itself. Any rebuttals on this issue?

Given the masses and speed of impact I wouldn't think they'd penetrate the wall
but they could do a bit of damage. That would have to be balance against
fatailies from truck crashes.

> How does one get a refrigerator, a bed, modular wall sections, a
> concrete truck, fire truck etc along that last mile? As you can
> probably tell, I'd really like to minimize the precious land that we
> use for roads. Ideally, I'd like to see no roads at all, just
> sidewalks, but I'm having trouble replacing the functionality of
> road networks, . . . but if we could I think the payoff of land
> that is freed up would be significant.

Roads will probably be neccesssary and we're probably going to need them.
Although we should try to minimise the amount we have. Of course if we have
roads people are going to put cars on them eventually unless the colony bans
them (some will, most probably won't).

> As for the issue of constant medical monitoring, consider the issue
> of accidents. No monitor is going to foretell cutting yourself with
> a kitchen knife, falling down the steps, a kid poking a stick in
> another kid's eye, etc. You sure don't want to have to walk a long
> distance to get to a transportation vehicle.

True.

> Maybe the vehicles for the serious emergencies are all air vehicles.
> The cost would be much more but their speed be fantastic . . oh, but
> then where do they land in all of the neighborhoods?

Electric helicopters would be good provided we can give them good enough range.
Landing is something we'll have to deal with. Note that they'd only work in
large habitats because of the altitude they'd have to be able to get.

> The Segway/electric scooter suggestion seems to me to be workable.
> We'd need new anbulances and fire trucks designed that were pretty
> narrow to fit on our narrower sidewalk/streets. But how about moving
> the big stuff around the habitat?

I don't think you could really make an ambulance any smaller then they are now.
There has to be a way to fit all the equipment in and also allow room for the
paramedics at each side of the paitent. In reality current ambulances are
probably a bit too small.