09-12-2016, 10:53 AM
Agriculture can be moved elsewhere (I'm imagining a higher deck, with lower gravity, where you can do that sort of thing — if anything it will probably increase yield, as the plants wouldn't need to build as much structural support).
Since I doubt we will have a lot of cars, at least in a small space colony, maybe we should look at college campuses (where car use is usually severely restricted). I'm not sure what's typical there. But let's see, my alma mater, Miami University, is (according to Wikipedia) about 8 km^2 with somewhere around 25,000 students. Many of those don't live on campus, but with hand-waving, that's... about 8000 people/mi^2, or 320 m^2 per person. It felt crowded there (plenty of people swarming about) but not obnoxiously so.
At that density, a colony with a radius of 224 m (so it spins at 2RPM) and a length of 250 m would support about 1100 people.
Since I doubt we will have a lot of cars, at least in a small space colony, maybe we should look at college campuses (where car use is usually severely restricted). I'm not sure what's typical there. But let's see, my alma mater, Miami University, is (according to Wikipedia) about 8 km^2 with somewhere around 25,000 students. Many of those don't live on campus, but with hand-waving, that's... about 8000 people/mi^2, or 320 m^2 per person. It felt crowded there (plenty of people swarming about) but not obnoxiously so.
At that density, a colony with a radius of 224 m (so it spins at 2RPM) and a length of 250 m would support about 1100 people.
Joe Strout
Lead Developer, High Frontier