Flight in faux gravity haitats.

[Pye-rate]

Everybody forgets that spin is not gravity. Once an object leaves the surface of a habitat it is no longer under acceleration. Not a problem in large habitats the speed of rotation is so small and the mass large,m that this problem is barely noticeable. However not nonexistent. If one had wings one could fly because there is no gravity.

[JoeStrout]

Spin is not gravity, but it's darned close to it. When an object leaves the surface it will continue to travel in a straight line with its last velocity. That line intersects the ground. Objects that roll off a table will drop to the floor; things tossed up into the air will come back down. Strapping on wings (on a 1G habitat) wouldn't enable you to fly unless you could flap yourself up to something approaching the linear speed of the ground, which is over 100 mph for even a 250-m habitat. (Or, of course, if you start and stay near the spin axis, where the apparent force is much lower.)

So, even if you were living there, it would be easy to forget that it's not gravity.

I think the people affected most by the difference will be players of sports involving flying balls: baseball, American football, etc. Such balls will appear to follow a curved path that depends on which way they're going relative to the spin. I suspect that serious players will quickly adapt to this and be less troubled by it than the wind, which also affects a ball's path but is far less predictable.

[hanelyp]

Air in a spinning canister will tend to spin with the canister. So even if you manage to kill your velocity relative to the hub, if you're off center air drag will tend to give you some velocity that eventually sends you to the rim.

That said, flight in pressurized volume near the hub should be possible, just not starting from the rim with near Earth normal acceleration.

[Pye-rate]

The other thought I had about this, masstransit moved up into the air. The air will absorb most of the torsional effects reducing the corrections needed. There being little actual gravity relatively little power is needed to stay airborne. The simple problem of not hitting the curved ground is the biggest risk. Even slow flight antispinward would be rapid transit. Spinward flight would be the equivalent of tour boats.

[tankthing]

I'm wondering if you could do something with rotating tethers around a central hub. The concept has been discussed for use on a very large scale on the moon, mars and other <1g bodies using today's high strength materials. The forces involved in dealing with atmospheric friction in even a large oneil cylinder should be far less in comparison than a spinning counterweighted tether in lunar orbit.

[JoeStrout]

Are you talking about a colony design, like the barbell component in the game? Or something for use inside a colony?