New Member

"victoriatangoman" wrote:

[How do you increase the capacity of the infrastructure as the density
grows?
What does this increased building density do to the balance of the
Habitat and the stresses involved in unequal mass distribution?
For instance, when the air hatch is first opened, will the first
settlers pick a spot and start building their town/village there and
will the city grow outwards from that center? Or will a city center be
designated, and the first small building will be built far from that
center. When it comes time to build more permanent building, I tend to
think that the infrastructure will be built for it's far in the future
maximum capacity and the buildings in the center will be built for
higher density, even though most of the Habitat will be empty.
The alternative is to build to immediate needs, then painstakingly
tear down the buildings as your density increases. Then you need to
upgrade all of the infrastucture as well.]

You missed my point. I agree with you that, when a habitat is built, all
its physicalinfrastructure will be in place before people move in. My point
is that the habitat will be relatively small, housing ten thousand people or
so. Simply because no one is going to built a habitat to house 10 million
people unless you HAVE ten million people ready to move in.

Back to my comparison of Manhattan to an O'Neil cylinder: I gather that
you're thinking that I'm proposing that a cylinder the size of Manhattan be
built, and a settlement established in one small corner. My apologies for
not being clear on this. What I meant was that NYC (or New Amsterdam as it
was called at the time) was a small trading post with some potential for
growth. No one expected (or cared) that the village would grow into a city
too big for Manhattan, or that it would even fill up the island. In actual
fact, the Dutch colony grew into a bunch of small 'habitats' -- New
Amsterdam, Brooklyn, the Yonkers estate, another farm in what became the
Bronx, an outpost called Fort Orange, and so on.

If the 17th century Dutch had founded New Amsterdam as a space colony, a
Stanford Torus or a Bernal Sphere would have been much too large a design to
warrant the cost of construction. They certainly would not have built a
Manhattan-sized habitat. They would have built a series of very small
habitats, adding more as the need arose and perhaps adding on to existing
habitats.

And /that/ is my point. You build what you need. If there is a potential
for future growth, then you may incorporate into your design a way to add on
new modules. (Mir is a good example of this.)
Or you have a standardized blueprint so that you can build more small
habitats as efficiently as possible when the need arises.

Part2:
RE:
http://www.golfarizona.com/departments/resortreviews/phoenician-golf-resort04.htm

Yep, good ol' Chuck Keating. It looks like the government finally unloaded
the property. That there is a golf course and a resort there is probably
what did the trick. So, if someone does decide to build an O'Neil cylinder
capable of housing 10 million people, there better be some pretty good golf
courses and spas located there. ;)