High Frontier Forums

Hello everyone,

I've recently purchased the game and am enjoying getting to grips with designing new space habitats and learning more. It seems rather sophisticated and I'm looking forward to getting more into it.

I have a keen interest in space settlement and write a blog about it which can be found here: http://projection3.blogspot.co.uk/.

I'm also a member of the British Interplanetary Society and am part of their study project on reviewing the reports on space colonies by Dr Gerard O'Neill and his colleagues.

Cheers!
Adam Manning

Welcome, Adam! You've got the right background to really enjoy this game (and, perhaps, to use it as a serious design tool too!).

Have fun, and please let us know how you get on with it!

Best,
- Joe

Hello there,

Could you tell me a little bit more about how you calculate the stability factor, particularly for cylindrical shaped habitats? In our study with the British Interplanetary Society we're looking at a redesign of Dr O'Neill's Island One using a cylinder rather than a sphere for the habitat section and stability issues are becoming increasingly important. We're aware that concave end caps can help make a cylinder more stable and we're interested in exploring this.

Any thoughts on this greatly appreciated!

Best wishes,
Adam

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you.  It's a great question!

To calculate the stability, you have to add up the moments of inertia for all the parts (adjusted for their position within the overall structure, using the parallel axis theorem).  You want the largest moment of inertia to be at least 1.2 times the other two.

Our notes on the subject are available on the wiki here, and we have blog posts about it here and here.  The blog posts include some fun videos from our early simulations, so please check them out!

Doing all the moment of inertia calculations by hand can be a real chore, but you can use High Frontier to do them for you... if you click the little "i" button next to the stability number in the Analysis palette, it will show you the actual numbers.