Super-habitats

Lucio,

An addendum to my last post, I was going to mention space travel but in my
haste to get out to get my son (he does have priority) I forgot to put it
in. This kind of super hab does have all the advantages of habitats with the
advantages of living on a planetary surface but without some of the
drawbacks. Consider, what is the biggest gripe the members of this list have
with planets, why dont we want to build colonies on Mars? Gravity, why go
from one gravity pit to another? The hyper-habs wouldnt have that problem,
if you were living in such a habitat (lucky bugger!!!) and lets say you
were a wealthy man and owned your own spaceship (or else they are cheap or
cheaper than now, a good chance there) and have decided to take the family
on a weekend trip around the moon. So you pack your bags and load them into
the car (electric of course), drive along the low speed surface roads to the
nearest down ramp, taking you down to the road system (why have them on the
surface, underground seems a better option), here the computer takes over
and you really start to move, drawing power from the road you quickly get up
to 300 Km/hr and twenty minutes later find yourself at your local spaceport.
Park your car, load the bags into your ship ( a very simple sphere), a
factory made ship as you dont have the time to build your own, run through
the 30 minute check list, have the computer lodge your flight plan, then
spend another twenty minutes doing another one when the computer rejects
your first one (less than the minimum separation time between you and a
Fed-Ex parcel flight to one of the L5 clusters. Flight plan #2 is given the
okay so you enter the flight line, 15 minutes later you are sitting in the
launch cradle, all the checks are okay, all lights green and you see the
door below you open, the counter runs down and then at zero, the restraints
open and your ship is flung out of the launch bay in the bottom of the
habitat at just short of 5,000 metres per second or almost 18,000 km per
hour (if my quick maths is correct, as an aside it should take almost 53 min
for a single rotation) this is no slug, if is moving fast.

In my last post I also asked how long would the longest trip take, that
would be about 23,000 Km at 18,000 Km per hour (the speed you could do in
counter rotation to the hull of the ring at 1G), so it should take about 1.2
hours to go the maximum distance in the habitat, if you consider that you
may not be able to go in a direct line and add in a few kinks in the track
you should still be able to get from anywhere to anywhere in under 2 hours.

Interesting.

Darren