Oolite Bulletins

Sagasa wrote:

Hence, I'm forced to conclude that space stations do in fact have their own artificial gravity generators and merely spin to separate the boy-pilots from the men-pilots. A kind of stellar darwinism if you will.

Your thoughts?

cim wrote:

Why spin rather than artificial? It could be a question of power consumption. Artificial gravity in a spaceship only really needs maintaining for the crew areas - the hold, engines, etc. could be kept in zero-G. So relatively little energy needs to be spent to do artificial gravity, and spaceships have a very high density of power sources.

Meanwhile a space station is very large, and they're mostly habitats which need gravity. So the ratio of power sources to gravitational space is relatively low, and rotation is a cheap way to get it.

Disembodied wrote:

Then you've got factors like overheating: rotating allows the station to keep its hull temperature constant, rather than having one side sit in the full glare of the sun for hours and other other in blackness. Any permanent, stationary (i.e. not zooming hither and yon like a ship) structure in space is going to have to rotate. Which raises questions about why some OXP stations don't rotate ... I'm guessing some sort of special supercooling methods and/or industrial requirements that exploit major temperature imbalances.

cim wrote:

Why spin rather than artificial? It could be a question of power consumption. Artificial gravity in a spaceship only really needs maintaining for the crew areas - the hold, engines, etc. could be kept in zero-G. So relatively little energy needs to be spent to do artificial gravity, and spaceships have a very high density of power sources.

Meanwhile a space station is very large, and they're mostly habitats which need gravity. So the ratio of power sources to gravitational space is relatively low, and rotation is a cheap way to get it.

Another possibility is that artificial gravity technology is a relatively new technology, and one that's difficult to retrofit. If you look at the in-service dates for the stations, most of them are centuries old. So, again, a spaceship might have had artificial gravity retrofitted to the crew areas - even an old Python, if one of its owners got lucky on a trading run and decided to splash out - but no-one really feels like the expense of refitting an entire cubic kilometre of space station just so they can stop it spinning. (The newer TransHab stations are mostly stationary, with just a couple of large centrifuges for scientific research)

Micha wrote:

Actually, there's nothing canon to say that ships have artificial grav; and some fanfic actually says quite the opposite! As usual, pick your favourite handwavium

snork wrote:

There is an experiment you can do to see that not only does your ship not feature artificial gravity, but rather has one of them [darn, me no good in techno-SF-babble (English version) ] thingies that won't let any acceleration affect the inside of Oolite ships.
(In German it usually are Dämpfungsgeneratoren or Stasisfeld or sth.)

Sagasa wrote:

I'm now led to wonder as to where the stations get their power. Solar panels perhaps? Solar energy would probably be the most readily available form of energy for a stationary object out in space and it would free them from the fuel limit that plagues smaller spacecraft. How much power could one generate with a Coriolis-sized solar panel I wonder. Would that be enough to power the station?

Commander McLane wrote:

Selezen wrote:

I've been researching the correct rotational speeds for space stations to generate 1G gravity.

Given a radius of approx 500m (since a Coriolis is about 1km in diameter) the rotational speed would be 1.33 rpm. Not as fast as I would have thought, oddly...

I assume that would be 1G at the outer hull, becoming less in the interior levels until we finally reach the Zero-G-cricket ground in the very centre.

So perhaps the rotation speed would be a little faster, maintaining 1G in some intermediate level, less than that on the inside, and more than that towards the hull.

For instance, the same calculator says that for 1.5 rpm you get 1.25G at 500 meters (which seems just bearable), but only 0.62G halfway down to the centre at 250 meters. In this case you would have 1G at 397 meters.

{
	"coriolis-station" =
	{
		station_roll = 0.15;
	};
	"dodecahedron-station" =
	{
		station_roll = 0.15;
	};
	"icosahedron-station" =
	{
		station_roll = 0.15;
	};
}

El Viejo wrote:

I reckon stations look much better with a slow roll... I use station_roll = 0.15; for mine.

DaddyHoggy wrote:

it's not about ease of docking - it's about a sense of ponderous grandness as you move into dock

DaddyHoggy wrote:

El Viejo wrote:

I reckon stations look much better with a slow roll... I use station_roll = 0.15; for mine.

I concur - it's not about ease of docking - it's about a sense of ponderous grandness as you move into dock - odd, how the stations seem to be bigger because they're spinning more slowly...