Colony Illumination

Here are my concerns with these two suggestions for colony
illumination.

The ilumination tunnel through the center of the cyclinder will have
concentrated sunlight, which should equal earth surface intensity
when it strikes the colony living surface. Now O'Neill's solution
was to devote equal surface area to land and window, and allow the
exterior mirrors to reflect into the cylinder the sunshine directly
without any concentration. With the illumination tunnel, by what
ratio will the sunlight be concentrated and what will the
temperature of the illimunation tunnel be? I've seen reports that it
would be so hot that all materials would melt. Also, what happens to
the image of a solar disk and the transit of the sun through the
sky?

Perhaps a solution to these issues is to have a hot plasma in the
center illumination tunnel and we concentrate enough sunlight into
the plama for it to burn brightly and still be contained by either a
material that won't melt or by magnetic containment. WE'll have
light, but we won't have a solar disk. There'll just be a sun bright
cylinder running throught the center of the habitat.

I find the fiber optic solution intriguing. I used to think that
they may provide the solution, but consider the sheer volume of
cables that would have to be produced. O'Neill's solution was to
just have plain old glass windows covering half the surface area of
the habitat. To convert that surface area into fiber optics will be
an immense task.

No one has offered a critique of my suggestion in message #2236. I
think it solves a number of problems, but no one has offered their
wisdom in pointing out the flaws in the proposal.

Oh well, . . .

--- In spacesettlers@y..., "Ed Schonert" wrote:
> I believe consensus opinion is for the "radiation-shield 'cave'
> that doesn't rotate" (ref Ian Woollard's 7-22 Radiation Fatigue?
> comments). He's saying a conical glass cylinder down axis of
> colony cylinder lets in light reflected from a large concave
mirror.
>
> Since incoming beam is converging I assume that is why the
> conical shape is preferable over true cylindrical for this incoming
> light container. Wouldn't there be a series of inclined mirrors on
> inside of glass cone required to re-reflect light out to entire
inside