Subject:
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Where's all that gravity coming from?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.space
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Date:
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Mon, 5 Mar 2001 23:46:13 GMT
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I don't believe that gravity generators will ever be a viable
technology. Even if it were possible to create such a thing, they
would likely cause a lot of undesirable effects.
So I try to design my MOC's (at least my more recent ones) to be
viable in a zero-G environment. However, since humans seem to
function better with at least some exposure to gravity, that needs to
be provided in some way. There are two basic ways to generate gravity
in space:
1. Rotation - centripetal force can be used to generate a gravity of
sorts.
2. Continuous Acceleration - pedal to the metal the whole way: turn
the ship around halfway and then continuously decelerate as you
approach your destination.
Oddly enough, the biggest obstacle to designing realistic MOC's that
use either of these approaches is the same: a lack of curved bricks.
To build a centrifuge you need to make a large (at least 30 studs in
diameter at minifig scale, I would say) ring. And it has to be
airtight of course. I don't know of any way to do this using the
tools we have at our disposal, though I'd love to hear ideas.
Continuous acceleration means using a LOT of fuel. And that means
huge fuel tanks. The most realistic ships would have spherical tanks,
and that's a little hard to do without having very jaggy spheres.
Also, in order to get any kind of acceptable thrust you would need to
use a form of propulsion that generates a lot of harmful radiation, so
the ship would need a lot of shielding. (And the more shielding there
is, the more massive the ship is, so the more thrust is needed, so
more fuel and/or sheielding is needed, etc.)
Comments?
--
William R Ward hermit@bayview.com http://www.bayview.com/~hermit/
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"Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others."-Groucho Marx
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Message has 7 Replies:
 | | Re: Where's all that gravity coming from?
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| William R. Ward at hermit@bayview.com wrote: <snip realistic stuff> (...) Wow, that's very realistic-sounding. Good luck with that. I think I'll stay in my comfy gravity-generator fantasy environment. :^) ~Grand Admiral Muffin Head (24 years ago, 6-Mar-01, to lugnet.space)
| | | Re: Where's all that gravity coming from?
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| (...) You don't need a ring- you can have an arm of arbitrary length with a compartment at the end. And you can have as many compartments as you want, as long as the center of gravity is at the axis. I believe that there was a ship with this sort of (...) (24 years ago, 6-Mar-01, to lugnet.space)
| | | Re: Where's all that gravity coming from?
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| "William R. Ward" <hermit@bayview.com> wrote in message news:m2r90bye2i.fsf@...iew.com... (...) Sounds almost exactly like what my grandfather said about space travel... ;-) -- Cheers, Paul LUGNET member 164 (URL) (24 years ago, 6-Mar-01, to lugnet.space)
| | | Re: Where's all that gravity coming from?
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| (...) It's been a while scince I've read it, but a book called "The Compleat McAndrew", by Charles Sheffield (I found it at BN.com just now) offers two other ideas. It's a collection of short stories that are pretty Hard Science Sci-fi. Using future (...) (24 years ago, 6-Mar-01, to lugnet.space)
| | | Re: Where's all that gravity coming from?
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| (...) Yeah, that may be so. I can imagine artificial gravity being created by an electromagnetic field but it that takes lot's of energy and creates radiation. (...) Yes, or else space fellars will get muscle atrophy. <snipped lots of good tech (...) (24 years ago, 6-Mar-01, to lugnet.space)
| | | Re: Where's all that gravity coming from?
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| As some people have already pointed out, you can rotate just about any structure for artificial gravity--a drum, a torus, a rectangular box, or a box at the end of a boom (with suitable counterweight). The problem with this methodology is the amount (...) (24 years ago, 7-Mar-01, to lugnet.space)
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