any interest in a space habitat design app?

On Jul 07, 2006, at 18:27 UTC, Robert wrote:

> dont know how to help with your questions save that id likely try it.

Well, that's helpful in itself.

> one thing you would need to take into account is where the matterials
> came from. you said the program would count the cost, but if the
> matterial were from space what cost would you count? how many
> manhours would you credit the asteroid capture company? If it came
> from the moon, would you take into account the cost of the base?

Not exactly; the cost of each material would be upon delivery to your construction site, as if you're buying them from another company. So this would be an input to the program; coming up with those costs would involve a separate cost model. In free-design mode, you could set those costs however you like; in game mode, they would be preset (though may vary from challenge to challenge) and you'd just have to work with them.

But the presets would generally assume a reasonable amount of infrastructure in place, as there must almost certainly be by the time we're building space habitats. For example, it seems reasonable to assume that aluminum can come from the Moon and is fairly cheap, whereas things like iron and nitrogen may be substantially more expensive.

For the easier challenges, we might claim that there is a space elevator or some other cheap means of getting materials from Earth, so that all materials are only a little more than what they cost on the ground. For harder challenges, we'd remove those and assume that anything you can't find on the Moon has to be launched at something like the Falcon's launch costs.

But in any case, actually modeling the mining and refining of materials is beyond the scope of this app.

Best,
- Joe

Joe Strout -- joe@...