High Frontier Forums

Here's a little something that's been rolling around in my head for a while...


(Right-click and select "View Image" to see the full-sized version.)

This is in fact a blueprint of the colony design that appears in that "Ball falling in a space colony" simulation I posted a while back.  I keep coming back to this design because it strikes me as a very practical, achievable near-term space colony.  Spinning at 2 RPM, we get over 350 thousand square meters of 1-G living space in the outer deck.  But I'm very fond of the martian and lunar decks too, which provide good amounts of space at the gravity level of those bodies.

And then we have the zero-G deck in the center.  It's only 40 m across, but that's still a pretty huge space.  If we counter-rotate it, or in other words make that deck not rotate, then it would be 260 thousand cubic meters of true zero-G environment.

So what would we do with all that?  Well, the Mars and Moon decks would be ideal for training for operations (I don't like "missions" because they imply short-term visits) on those planets.  I can imagine all sorts of recreation and tourism, too.  A station like this, in equatorial low-Earth orbit, would be only a few minutes from the surface of the Earth; much easier and cheaper to reach than the actual Moon, and way easier than Mars.

For the same reasons, movie studios might want to rent out large spaces for filming; even with all our modern special effects, it's really hard to properly fake low gravity.  (The Martian, for example, didn't even try, despite being a fantastic movie in all other respects.)

I also suspect that the Mars and Moon decks might be reasonable places for adults to live and work.  Children would probably want to stay on the Earth deck most of the time, so their bones and muscles develop normally.  (Though the occasional visit to the lunar deck aviary, to strap on wings and fly around like a bird, would probably be a great form of exercise.)

Note that High Frontier does not currently allow nested decks like this one, alas.  Maybe someday!  In the meantime, you can at least simulate the colony with the outer deck, plus all the other parts not shown here — docking ports, power plant, radiators, etc.  I used it initially to plan the overall shape and stability, and when it comes time to pursue this design more seriously, I'll probably use it again to calculate mass, thermal balance, and so on.

OK, that's it.  This idea has been trying to barrel its way out of my skull for weeks, so now that it's finally out, maybe I can get some peace.    Any feedback is very welcome!

Here's a High Frontier rendering...


(Again, right-click and View Image to see the full version.)

And another one, from the lit side...

I have an old NASA study on colonies somewhere that shows using many decks not for different gravities but for increasing the area available for use. A bit like making the whole thing a multi-story building. Seems like a good way to minimize the trouble of a hull breach, too.

FYI, I put a simple interactive walk-through model of this design up here.

(12-01-2016, 10:05 AM)JoeStrout Wrote: [ -> ]FYI, I put a simple interactive walk-through model of this design up here.
...

Feel free to give it a try!

"The browser could not allocate enough memory for the WebGL content. If you are the developer of this content, try allocating less memory to your WebGL build in the WebGL player settings."

(12-02-2016, 08:12 PM)hanelyp Wrote: [ -> ]"The browser could not allocate enough memory for the WebGL content. If you are the developer of this content, try allocating less memory to your WebGL build in the WebGL player settings."

Doh.  WebGL is a bit dicey that way, and this is a fairly common problem.

I'll try tweaking the memory settings a bit.  It could be that it's asking for more memory than it needs.

Out of curiosity, what browser and OS are you trying it on?

It's working fine here with Chrome and Win 10.

But more importantly, when are we going to be able to walk around in our own colonies like that??

Well, that's a possibility... but a rather difficult one. The model scale (and other optimizations) for an overhead vs. street-level view are quite different. But it's certainly not impossible!

What browser and OS are you using? Is there another browser you could try, just to get another data point?

That's a pretty interesting model, Joe. What fictional movie space colony do you like the most?