08-03-2015, 06:57 PM
OK, there's another one for my reading list then! I love hard SF. A good book should make you think — and not about dreamy vampires, but about real possible futures for humanity.
I don't see why you couldn't build something very much like that Aurora design in High Frontier. I'll paste the image in here in case anybody's bashful about following the link:
So, two torus sections, joined with what in HF would have to be some box sections. (Adding non-rotating cylinder sections, for just this sort of design, is on our to-do list but hasn't made it to the top yet.)
I wonder whether this design would be rotationally stable, though. Even with the two torii counter-rotating, I worry that it would end up tumbling end-over-end. It'd be more stable if you shortened (or removed entirely) the distance between the torii, so the spinning mass is as close to the middle as possible.
Anyway, as for the QD lighting, you're right, it may never turn out to scale up as well as LEDs. But this just shows what a happy position we're in — we have so many promising technologies, our difficulty is figuring out which one is going to come out on top!
I don't see why you couldn't build something very much like that Aurora design in High Frontier. I'll paste the image in here in case anybody's bashful about following the link:
So, two torus sections, joined with what in HF would have to be some box sections. (Adding non-rotating cylinder sections, for just this sort of design, is on our to-do list but hasn't made it to the top yet.)
I wonder whether this design would be rotationally stable, though. Even with the two torii counter-rotating, I worry that it would end up tumbling end-over-end. It'd be more stable if you shortened (or removed entirely) the distance between the torii, so the spinning mass is as close to the middle as possible.
Anyway, as for the QD lighting, you're right, it may never turn out to scale up as well as LEDs. But this just shows what a happy position we're in — we have so many promising technologies, our difficulty is figuring out which one is going to come out on top!
Joe Strout
Lead Developer, High Frontier