Cylinder

Saatvik Agarwal wrote:

"I plugged in a population of 30,000 in the Belmont calculator and
surprisingly the cylinder required the least radiataion shielding.
The tours[sic] required something like 70 megaton, the sphere around 46
megaton and the cylinder only 4 (yes that's four) megaton.
Is this true or is there a bug in the calculator? If this is true why
was the cylinder eliminated for such small population sizes?"

Bearing in mind that someone else has said that the calculator has a bug
(and adjust the decimal point accordingly) -- for a habitat of 30,000 people
I shrunk the size of the cylinder until it had a diameter of 1km and a
length of 1km (as wide as it is long; any wider/shorter and it'd be a torus
w/o the hole) and came up with a set of stats. I then shrank the sphere
until I had the equivalent area per person (104.5 persons per m^2 +/- in
this case, and the sphere had a radius of 705 meters) to arrive at a second
set of stats.

The totals were 24,778 kt for the cylinder, and 31,861 kt for the sphere:
total savings of 6883 kt if the cylinder design is chosen.

The cylinder had 7600 kt less in shielding than the sphere. In fact, the
only benefit to the sphere is 1112 kt less in structural mass.

I could design a cylindrical habitat for 10,000 people, but it'd be a
spinning disk. Might as well save money by making it a donut -- now you've
got a torus. But the torus is expensive to provide sheilding for, so its
back to either the sphere or the squashed cylinder.

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