Redesigning O Neill cylinders

On Sat, 22 Jan 2005 10:07:36 -0000, ANTIcarrot
wrote:
> > From: Ian Woollard [mailto:ian.woollard@...]
> > That's commonly supposed, but may not necessarily be the cheapest way
> > to go.
>
> Yes, but the whole point of the Island designs was to create a *nice* place
> to live. If the inside is covered in factories instead of trees I'm not sure
> many people would want to live there. ;)

The two aren't the same problem anyway. Most people live in houses or
cities that don't have sufficient farming to support the population,
but that doesn't mean they aren't necessarily good places to live.

You can either tuck the machinery out the way, and use gardening type
of landscaping for aesthetic reasons or you can trade with other
habitats for food.

> > There's no shortage of power.
>
> There would be practical upper limits though. An earth microwave-power
> reciever measures something like 6*7 miles IIRC.

We were talking about habitats... solar power, concentrated with
aluminum foil is cheap; a turbine generator can be highly efficient.
Getting rid of the waste heat is not particularly difficult, but needs
fairly big fins kept in darkness from the sun in the thermos flask
that is space.

Whether you would actually go for high efficiency for power
generation, I have no idea; but large acreages of glass would not
particularly fill me with enthusiam if I were a habitat designer;
although they may certainly be aesthetic.

> ANTIcarrot.
> NB: Alternative in this case = not direct solar illumination. ;)

--
-Ian Woollard

Professor Frink: "We studied traffic patterns and found that drivers
move the fastest
through yellow lights. So now, we just have red and yellow lights."