Orbital Space Colonies and Geometry Primitives

[JoeStrout]

I found this blog post today, about the most common geometries for orbital colonies (torus, sphere, and cylinder).

Nothing here will be news to High Frontier players (in fact, the author seems unaware that the Bernal sphere is unstable, and will result in residents quickly having a very bad day).  But there's some truly inspiring artwork, neatly gathered in one post.  I think my favorite is this one:



Which is your favorite?

[hanelyp]

Note that the cylinders are operated in counter-rotating pairs to counter the instability of rotating on their long axis.

[JoeStrout]

(09-17-2015, 02:06 PM)hanelyp Wrote: Note that the cylinders are operated in counter-rotating pairs to counter the instability of rotating on their long axis.

Yes, that's the standard O'Neill design.  But you do sometimes see single-cylinder designs, like Kalpana One.  (The first version of Kalpana One was in fact unstable, but then we revised it and made it short enough to be stable with flat endcaps.  If I were to do it again today, I would use inverted endcaps, which would allow us to make it considerably longer.)