Coriolis Force (Was: New member)

From: Steve Long [mailto:longsteven@...]

"In a torus large enough to require 1-1/2 to 2 minutes to complete one
rotation, golf and baseball could be affected... but table tennis won't."

And a habitat large enough to even try to put a golf course in would be
turning about that slowly. The `Island One' size habitat would have around a
2 rpm rotation: about 4 times as fast. Someone with better math skills than
I have (which would probably include most of you folks! ) ought to be
able to work out a few formulas utilizing habitat rpm, projectile velocity,
and distance covered. Do we have any volunteers? :)

"It would only be trajectories with large up or down components that
would require correcting to spinward or antispinward to correct for
coriolis. Something thrown vertically would appear to curve in the
spinward direction going up and in the antispinward direction coming
down."

Correct. And any trajectories that are going at an angle both `lengthwise'
and `across' the habitat are going to include a bewildering combination of
both horizontal and vertical deviations from what our Earth-trained sense of
direction tells us is correct. For the sports/recreation aspects, it could
be amusing. For moving liquids around the habitat (fresh or waste water),
there could be some interesting problems, as mentioned. There might be some
other problems, besides the firearms concerns I listed.

"I hope they find someway to subdue the violent that doesn't require
high-velocity metal projectiles."

There's a lot of work being done on `non-lethal' and `less-lethal' systems.
So far, nobody has anything even close to being able to replace a sidearm;
the alternatives are too bulky, too slow, unable to deal with multiple
opponents, too fragile, too easily blocked, or some combination of the
above. Still, since habitats are some years off in the future, it might be
possible we'll have an solution by then.

"There's too many opportunities in a space habitat to break a window and
let the weather out. See the Sean Connery movie "Outland." "

The habitat design with the greatest percentage of widow area I know of is
the classic O'Neill. In `The High Frontier', the scenarios of an `Island
One' and an `Island Three' losing a single window suggest that a one-hour
repair time wouldn't allow enough air to escape to be noticeable by the
occupants, and that it could take "several years" before the `I-3' lost all
it's atmosphere. And all that is based on O'Neill thinking the windows would
be made of glass, manufactured from Lunar silicates. If, instead, we use the
hydrocarbons available from the NEOs, we can make the windows out of Lexan,
and have no concerns about bullets, and less concern about micrometeorites.
As to `Outland', it's an entertaining movie, but it's also a
typical example of how little Hollywood pays attention to the "science" part
of science fiction.

Dave