Stack of Donuts

[Permeable Ceiling]

(04-19-2017, 04:15 PM)JoeStrout Wrote:

(04-16-2017, 12:29 AM)Permeable Ceiling Wrote: The presented configuration of same size donuts would have different lighting conditions, in the vein of 60%/80%/100%, at least theoretically.

No, they would all have 100%.  (Remember the light rays are parallel; there is no occlusion here.)

EDIT: Just realized one thing that's probably causing some confusion... the light angle in design mode is not the "final" light angle, as deployed in orbit.  Your colony is always built with the spin axis perfectly perpendicular to the light; a torus is always edge-on to the sun.  But we found that when things were lit this way in design mode, it caused visual illusions that made it harder for people to perceive what they were doing.

The one exception, of course, is when you actually care about the lighting, in which case the current solution is deceptive.  It's a trade-off.

I think I understood the lighting correctly, since my percentages weren’t taking into account the angle of lighting that’s displayed in design mode.


[Illustration of three toruses stacked on top of each other; view along the top axis (i.e. from the mirror); Green: stack of three toruses, superimposed; Grey: three rings of mirrors at 45° angle, reflecting light into the ceiling of their respective torus, radius increases with distance from point of view; Canteloupe/Salmon/Tangerine: hubs of increasing radius & spokes]

No, it’s more to do with the area of mirrors compared to area of torus. If the torus area is 1, then the top donut has a mirror area of something like 0.5, middle has 0.7, and the bottom donut of 0.9. So the bottom donut catches the most (of the parallel) light, and mirrors with smaller radius catch less. In this case, lighting percentage should be directly proportional with cross-sectional area the mirrors take up along the axis.