Cities in space - Singles or clusters?

Xenophile,
Greetings

>I should think that that 12 hour trip to the far side of the ring
>could be brought down quite a bit. If one were to travel opposite the
>direction of the orbit itself, one could in fact ZERO orbital
>velocity, and let the ring move around you (from your own POV, of
>course, it would seem that you were movie very fast indeed). This
>would give you the 12 hour trip.

This was exactly what I was meaning, the ring is going one way with a 24hr
orbit, you take off in a retrograde orbit and in 12hrs you would be on the
far side. Now this makes a few assumptions. The first one is about the speed
of the transport system, how fast can the capsule travel in its rails. How
fast can you go if you limit yourself to 1G, I may have to do the maths to
see, problem is the maths is not my strong point (Ironic really, for the
past 14yrs I have been a professional forensic examiner, technically making
me a scientific expert for court purposes maths should be my second
language I still need a translating dictionary).

>You would also find that you had at least some part of your Earthly
>weight back, due to natural gravity provided by the mass of Mother
>Earth (after all, if you're no longer in free fall...).

But you should be feeling spin-gravity with your feet pointing away from
Earth

>But by speeding up, again in the direction opposite the orbit, you
>could get back to weightlessness again. This would happen at orbital
>speed, and would make your farside trip 6 hours.
>
>But why stop there? I suppose the real limit might be that when
>you're going so fast that following the curve of the orbit flings you
>AWAY FROM the Earth at 1 G, that's as fast as anybody should be
>allowed to go (on the public transport, that is, and in a
>non-emergency; private not-on-the-public-system spacecraft might get
>up to higher speeds).
>
>I don't know how fast this would be, but I'm guessing it takes a lot
>out of that 6 hour transit time.
>
>Please note that rotating the *entire ring of habitats* to 1 G
>probably requires unobtainium building materials, but supporting a 1
>ton (or 100 ton) transport zipping around does not.

I dont think that the idea was to have a ring that was spinning, I
understood it to be a framework that was in a simple orbit, each bit was in
a standard geo-sync orbit with the habitats embedded in it and the were
spinning (one half clockwise & one half counter-clockwise) to give each its
own spin-grav.

Darren