Starship Generations Update

Discussion in 'Earth Science' started by Success_Machine, Oct 14, 2002.

  1. Success_Machine Impossible? I can do that Registered Senior Member

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    Well, not really. But I've improved by renewable energy transportation ideas.

    There is no quick fix for renewable energy. This is the conclusion of months of research. It is my opinion that maintaining our way of life using renewable energy can only be achieved with great patience, and a combination of technologies that do not yet exist.

    Read my essay "Benthic Energy", found near the bottom of my starship generations website:

    http://geocities.com/womplex_oo1/StarshipGenerations.html


    (this is harder than breeding fruit flies)
     
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  3. Success_Machine Impossible? I can do that Registered Senior Member

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    Clarification

    Maintaining our way of life using renewable energy can only be achieved with great patience, genetic engineering and a combination of East Asian technologies that do not yet exist in North America.

    (that's better)
     
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  5. Clockwood You Forgot Poland Registered Senior Member

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    Nice site. Personally i perfer a cyllindrical habitat with a radiative rod down the middle though.
     
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  7. Clockwood You Forgot Poland Registered Senior Member

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    One plant I wnt you to look up that should come in handy. The amaranth.
     
  8. Karel Paborsky Registered Member

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    A doughnut?
     
  9. Jaxom Tau Zero Registered Senior Member

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    I always liked the Bernal sphere myself, but the cylinder design O'Neill proposed would work for me also. A classic doughnut shape is okay for a smaller settlement, but wasteful as the size increases.

    Pics of all three types are at this site.

    - Jaxom
     
  10. Clockwood You Forgot Poland Registered Senior Member

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    Cyllinders are the ideal shape. It would be weird living in one though. You walk down a road and instead of dropping below the horizon it goes up, dissapearing behind the radiative core.
     
  11. Clockwood You Forgot Poland Registered Senior Member

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    1. How do weather patterns form in a cylindrical space station?
    2. How would housing be constructed? Free standing houses? Dorms build into the station “floor”?
    3. Where would heavy industry be performed? Remember that metalworking would consume oxygen.
    4. How would you stop soil bacteria from consuming oxygen? This was a problem on Biosphere 2.
    5. What is done in case of a puncture due to collision with space debris?
    6. What preparations could be made on a station for war? It seems very vulnerable.
     
  12. Jaxom Tau Zero Registered Senior Member

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    559
    1. How do weather patterns form in a cylindrical space station?

    Definitely not the same as on a sphere, but they'd be powered the same way as on Earth, by the sun. Not only would you have the rotational forces shaping the weather, but also the fact that moving up towards the center reduces the force "down" dramatically. It also depends on the size...it might be possible that too large of a cylinder would lead to strong wind shears between the lower and upper layers of air. I've never seen any actual studies of a weather system inside one.

    Edit: I did run across this text at http://students.db.erau.edu/~walkerf/colonylife.txt
    but I don't know how accurate the science is.

    2. How would housing be constructed? Free standing houses? Dorms build into the station �floor�?

    I don't see any restrictions at all...the builders could do whichever they wanted. In one of the 70's documents about how life might be like on a colony, they had underground houses, but each room had windows that could show any scene, from an actual shot from outside the colony to a nature type scene.

    3. Where would heavy industry be performed? Remember that metalworking would consume oxygen.

    I'd guess most industry would be either outside in space or at the zero G points. And if more oxygen is needed, grab another comet or two...at that point that wouldn't be a difficult thing to do.

    4. How would you stop soil bacteria from consuming oxygen? This was a problem on Biosphere 2.

    I don't know enough to even guess here, other than to repeat that colony makers can get more oxygen...or probably find a way to recapture the missing oxygen.

    5. What is done in case of a puncture due to collision with space debris?

    We don't need to have a full atmosphere of pressure...as long as we have a full 20% partial pressure of oxygen we can breathe fine. So minor punctures won't be explosive, and would be easy to find on the outside, with the air leaking out and freezing.

    6. What preparations could be made on a station for war? It seems very vulnerable.

    Good question. Probably one good reason to set it up away from earth. Hopefully the station would see an attacker coming way before they get there...as for someone sneaking aboard and sabotaging it. I suppose that'd be high on the list of the security detail.

    Hope that answered a little. I wish there was more info out there about this kind of thing, but most of what I've ever found is dated. I guess it'll stay that way until leaving earth is a lot easier.
     
    Last edited: Oct 29, 2002
  13. Clockwood You Forgot Poland Registered Senior Member

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    I am thinking about those convection currents.

    If you have an illumination rod down the center it would get hot there. The heat would build up and would stay there because that would be as far "up" as you could go. To get a good convection current going it has to be hotter "below" than "above". I dont know how you would fix this.
     
  14. Success_Machine Impossible? I can do that Registered Senior Member

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    What I designed was neither a Bernal Sphere, nor an O'neil Cylinder. My design is entirely unique as far as I know. It consists of 50 nested cylinders surrounded by a spherical shell. The reasons for this design are given in great detail on my website.

    There would be no central plasma core because that type of lighting is too inefficient, generates too much heat, and with 50 cylinders of various lengths nested one inside another, a single central light wouldn't work anyway. Preferably solid-state light-emitting diodes would be used to illuminate the interior, the majority of which would be used for agriculture. To achieve optimum growing conditions the ceilings & walls would be coated with billions of LEDs. Also hanging 'vines' composed of LEDs would illuminate between rows of plants, right down to the surface. In this way, the farmland would be bathed in light.

    The LED lighting would still generate alot of heat, so heat pipes would be used to convect heat upwards to the central cylinder where an active cooling system is located. This system would be a "combined cycle" cooling system, using both a compressor style refrigeration plant, and an expansion-style electric powerplant. The excess heat in the starship Habitat Sphere would be converted to electricity and channelled outside the ship to a grid of tungsten filaments, which radiate the heat away. The filaments are hot enough to emit in the visible spectrum, and therefore they can be focussed by a parabolic mirror. This mirror focuses the waste heat and reflects it aft, providing the ship with additional high efficiency propulsive force. This form of propulsion is called a photon rocket, and it would the ship an extra push, above and beyond that provided by the antimatter-initiated microfusion (AIM) engines.

    Ideally there would be no significant convection currents in the cylinders. Any air movements would be restricted to the ceiling height on each 'deck', approximately 5 meters. Except in case of malfunction there would be no cloud formation, wind, rain, etc. Ideal agricultural growing conditions would be maintained at all times.

    I haven't made any allowance for industrial metalworking, manufacturing, or anything like that. The front of the ship is protected by a double-barrier hypervelocity impact shield that would theoretically protect against space dust, but I don't think it would take a very large pebble to destroy the ship at the intended cruise speed of 1500 km/sec (0.5 percent cee).

    Remember, this is not a space station, it is a Starship, and it is designed for minimum mass, minimum propulsive energy, minimum radiation shielding and atmospheric barrier, and minimum micrometeorite shielding. Active cooling has been used because the energy requirements are far less than the propulsive energy, and the solid-state radiator required is far less massive than that of a conventional radiator with fins and coolant fluid, and as a result contributes far less to the propulsive energy requirements.
     
    Last edited: Nov 8, 2002
  15. NenarTronian Teenaged Transhumanist Registered Senior Member

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    1,083
    Cool stuff. Reminds me vaguely of the later Rendezvous with Rama books (even though they sucked compared t the first, still some pretty neat ideas presented there)

    In the idea of self suffiency in the starship, concerning food and everything, and fuel, you never mentioned medicine. Wouldnt you need some funguses to grow antibiotics (or wherever AB's come from), and opium and marijuana for pain and all the other medicinal herbs that are helpful?
     
  16. Gifted World Wanderer Registered Senior Member

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    2,113
    On Niven's Ringwolrd, you had a coriolus(however you spell that) affect. The axis a hurricane spins around would be parallel to the ground, not perpindicular.

    YOu could probably use such currents to power wind turbines to augment other electricity sources.
     
  17. Success_Machine Impossible? I can do that Registered Senior Member

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    My estimates of how much farmland would be needed to feed the crew was based on 4 specific crops: wheat, soybeans, broccoli and seabuckthorn. These would fill the four nutritional food groups. I also posted a downloadable zip file called "crop varieties", which contains text descriptions of dozens of alternative crop varieties. Among these are Aloe, Balsam, Belladonna, Digitalis, Foxglove, Ipicac, Mandrake, Neem, Opium, Plantain, Valerian, Witch Hazel and Wormwood, which are a source of special medicinal and chemical resins. There are probably many others. These plants do not necessarily have to be cultivated regularly - they can be planted occasionally and in limited quantities, between rows of conventional crops, and their products stockpiled for later use.

    After reading through the list of potential crop varieties, you will gain an appreciation for how enormous a mountain, and how vastly more difficult, interstellar Starship design will be in the future. How much variety will we plant? Shall we deprive generations of future colonists the complete range of delicacies readily available on Earth, in favor of simplicity and efficiency? Can we do all those things simultanously, or do we need to create different climate zones inside the ship to grow certain types of special plants?

    Ultimately, starship design becomes a logistical nightmare that I am not qualified to tackle. You may feel free to do so if you choose. However, I believe that it is literally easier to solve all the problems on Earth, such as the renewable transportation fuels problem, which I have tackled briefly at the bottom of my Starship Generations website.

    Lastly, I think that by solving the problems here on earth, such as the genetic engineering of ocean-borne energy crops, that we will as a worldwide community, achieve a new threshold of enlightenment that may allow us to see clearly enough to take the biology of the Starship Generations "machine" one step closer to reality.
     
    Last edited: Nov 9, 2002

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