Centripetal Vivarium

Different time zones inside a single structure like this might not be such a
problem if the structure is enormous. He's designed this to be about the
diameter of a Stanford Torus, but I don't see any reason why it couldn't be
scaled up to the diameter of an O'Neill Cylinder (4 miles). At that scale,
maybe you could travel a few hundred feet without getting jetlag.

With this mirror design, the sun would rise in one direction and set in the
opposite, as on Earth.

Only one problem, though: How do you get in or out?! Although he doesn't
show it, there's no reason one couldn't have spokes leading up to an axial
docking bay on the anti-sunward side. I've always felt is was a good safety
feature to have exits at the sunward end of a habitat too, even if only for
emergency use. Spokes there would intercept sunlight, but I'm not sure how
significant a problem that would be if the diameter of the spokes were kept
modest.

Overall, though, it's a pretty good design. The mirror never experiences as
much as 1 G of centrifugal force: not as good as the Stanford Torus, but
many times better than the O'Neill Cylinder. My only remaining nit to pick
is the right-angle corners: they wouldn't distribute the stresses from the
air pressure loads (an important issue) very evenly. But one could easily
substitute the kind of banded tori found in the Hatbox design, or in the
agricultural sections of the Bernal Sphere.

Regards,

Mike Combs

From: Ian Woollard [mailto:ian.woollard@...]
Sent: Thursday, June 12, 2003 5:16 AM
To: spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [spacesettlers] Centripetal Vivarium

Found this interesting design for a space habitat on the web a while
back. Good for crops; and although the mirror design is kinda cute, I'm
not sure I necessarily want my habitat on different time zones.

http://www.physci.org/1/tech/cnvv/default.html