The Thrust Ring (approximately)?
Posted on 12/23/2006 11:31:23 AM PST by BibleBabe1
An interesting place to work is the Thrust Ring. When we were on-planet, the floor was the washer-shaped flat wall of the cylindrical tube.
After we got into space and began rotating, the curved outer wall became the floor. The stairs and doorways tend to look odd, and I guess they always will.
Are you kidding? You freaking monkeys are hilarious!
No wonder Jane Goodall has that permanent Mona Lisa smile.
I've been trying to get the hang of it since the original Doom game and still can't even get a single box room right...
You've been to Rama I see.
Sounds a bit like the ship in Out of the Silent Planet...
I think it would be necessary to design everything in flat space, and ignore the rotating and other aspects for the game.
With the preferred mode of travel being enclosed elevator cars, the other spaces visible out the canopies would simply be views.
An obvious aspect of a game for the Flying Castle would be "Hide and Seek." What a nightmare it would be to have to find someone in this vast space. Even worse if they didn't want to be found.
Another good game would be Prospector. Fit out your ship, and head for the asteroids. Find your treasure -- then figure out how to spend the money, and on what!
Sim Flying Castle? Have to figure out how to keep the ecosystem running and the castle's denizens happy and peaceful...
Good rendition.
It may be a bit thinner, but that's the shape.
What keeps me puzzled is how the economics works. I've just been assuming we're all volunteers. Immensely wealthy volunteers, of course.
You see, while we were filtering Uranium out of the ocean water, and we needed a lot of it -- our filters kept gettting clogged up with all that useless gold ...
Refresh my memory, how many shuttles did we have? On liftoff?
Didn't we used to have a rough graphic of the thrust ring and all three habs at one point?
That looks pretty.
One of our problems is that our scale is so ridiculous, the sizes so unbelievable, that our eyes won't accept an accurate rendition.
I've been working with even smaller numbers that this, but just try it to see what I mean. You don't have to post the results.
Diameter of outer circumference, 11110 feet.
Diameter of inner circumference, 10410 feet.
Width of inner and outer bands, 500 feet.
It will look impossibly thin and delicate.
Looks are often very deceiving. With carbon nanotubes, the dimensions you provided would be plenty strong.
The best we had wasn't too satisfactory. We needed to spend a lot more time describing it between renditions than we did.
The rendition of the Flying Castle Habitat by itself came close. It looked rather like a sleek flying saucer, with a gridded, transparent dome.
The Thrust Ring hosted over six hundred Shuttle/Thrusters, each with two Gas-Cooled Nuclear Reactor/Rocket Engines. Thrust from each shuttle was well over a million pounds.
Except that it's not a solid structure. It's hollow, with pipes and elevator tubes and laboratories and fuel tanks and observatories, and all kinds of other things.
And initially, it was built in a hurry in Norwegian shipyards out of our specified steel.
We've been strengthening it since, with our carbon nanotube factories, but at first, it was just brute force engineering.
600 million pounds of thrust....isn't that a little under powered for towing asteroids?
The mass figure, and the volume described, would indicate we would not have floated in the ocean -- we would have floated on the ocean, like a ping-pong ball.
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