Just for the record, I worked on an AIA-award winning project where the architects slowed us down a month because the client had the nerve (the nerve!) to insist that their fourth-floor rooftop garden pavilion include guardrails. And for the record, architects (not all, but enough to give the profession a bad name amongst engineers) are big on "my job is to come up with the ideas, your job is to make it happen." SEE: Frank Gehry and his CATIA-designed I-beams that had to be shipped in pieces in order to make the Experience Music Project possible. But for the record, this was design student you've never heard of, light on work, that gets to demonstrate just how "outside the box" they can think. And I mean, c'mon. They drew a daily circuit that goes from NYC to La Paz and back in 24 hours. That means that mammerjammer is averaging over 300 mph. Kinda makes that whole "transfer station" thing pretty dramatic. I mean, the stall speed of a C-130 is 115mph. Here's a Fulton in full funmode: So... set aside the whole "asteroid capture" bit, as well as the 35,000km of unobtanium monofilament necessary to drag the thing around, and the fact that they wanna build a "building" over 20,000m tall. It doesn't take much of an architect to understand that 300mph winds are a thing and that really, they wanted to put some cool pictures together. I for one applaud their audacity.
Devil's advocate: not a terribly large amount of air up there, or maybe they raise it up when they're really screamin' through the upper atmosphere? And I do think the asteroid capture thing is going to happen within two or three decades, for sure. Won't be a very big rock, but hey, baby steps. (roughly in order of contribution) For anything with one unfastened end of finite mass, hanging from a finite mass in a very inclined orbit,with a relatively large moon nearby, all in an elliptic/eccentric orbit around the sun, and considering Jupiter,in a gravitational field gradient,... lelz. nooooo..! Too nonlinear. Driven oscillations in the tether would eventually destroy the system. I'm unaware of any practical material and/or structure that would make it possible. You'd have to make it incredibly wide (or that infinitely rigid unobtainium) to damp out the oscillations. Even for the equatorial-geo-asteroid-space-elevator, with one end of the tether attached to the Earth, there will have to be considerable flexibility built into the system, and things will (of course) be broken into smaller pieces for assembly on/in the asteroid. Combating damping will be a monumental challenge, let's just assign it to Devac for homework. I'm throwing my Rotten Tomatoes (is.. is that where that comes from?). P.S. maybe one end of the tether could generate calculated optimal destructive interference movements while the other is loaded/unloaded at a stationary point. But that would have to be a huge facility, considering scale sizes. P.P.S. if you devised a way to steadily beef up the structure around a space elevator, outwards, gradually boosting the asteroid orbit while keeping the system's center of mass at geostationary height... hmmm......really, they wanted to put some cool pictures together. I for one applaud their audacity.
"Up there" is a misnomer as they intend the bottom to interface with existing ground structures. Seriously. Click through to the actual proposal. http://payload478.cargocollective.com/1/12/384722/11863260/analemma_XFER-left-GIF.gif Imagine that except it's going somewhere around 350mph and it's the size of an office tower. Let's ignore the hard stuff - pure wind shear on an object pushing through 20km of atmosphere is gonna be something, assuming all the orbital shit works out (it won't work out). Just dealing with the "I want to get on and/or off this thing" means you get to hop onto a gimbaled funride in which - 'k. Area of the Empire State Building is around 90k square feet. That means 300 feet on a side. Say happy fun ball is half of that at 150 feet on a side. For starters you're going to be going from zero mph to 350 mph in the space of about 300 feet. vf equals vi plus at 350mph equals zero plus (a) (300ft at 350mph) 350mph equals (a) 300ft/(513 ft/second) 350mph equals (a) (.584s) 513 ft/second equals (a)(.584s) a = 877 ft/second^2 1g = 32 ft/second^2 a = 27.2g And I mean, that's just linear acceleration. You're also being spun through 180 degrees which some random internet calculator puts at 165g. Wolfram alpha tells me that's roughly ten times the force Jack Nicklaus puts on a golf ball when he tees off. So fuck all your high-falootin' Keplerian hijinks, Mr. Rocket Scientist, Saint Newton tells me that if you could build this thing, you'd reduce everyone on it to a fine paste the minute they tried to get on or off. And that's without invoking materials science, which has long since run shrieking away. Clarke and Sheffield introduced space elevators to the world in '79. In '82 Heinlein had terrorists blow one up. And maybe that's why I'm cheering this asshole on - it takes some stones to out-hubris a Skyhook. Dude imagined a building cruising through the air at roughly the speed of a black powder musket ball and worked his way crazier.
Omg, this is too fucking rich. Thank you. Yeah, it's just like... a bigger cruise ship! It's the same thing! No problem. That .gif answered all my questions. That's how I'd dock too! Just catch it as it goes by. Make sure the station is reversible to accommodate the second asteroid stalactite city passing by the opposite direction. We don't even have weather anymore, almost. Not if we didn't want to though, right? Incredible. Future's finally now! We're flying into teleporting wormholes tomorrow, Harry Potter's parallel universe, it's a quantum cloudserver of akashic knowledge and politically correct genetic expressions. Several thousand virgins, reincarnating into white holes, feeding back into strings tangled up by hyperinflation. Soon, I'm publishing. Soon. There's another degree of freedom; axial rotation around the center line of symmetry. Devac, aren't you done with this homework yet? Edit: I'd rather diminish a joke than miscommunicate, so.. Devac, I am not being serious :). Although, I should warn you that my Noble Pries is in the mail, only 3 easy payments of $19.95, my mom signed me up. I'm sorry, I condensed all my shit into one easy to shit shitpost.
Favorite sentence of the day. And that's even after seeing Don Trump declare war on conservatives.We're flying into teleporting wormholes tomorrow, Harry Potter's parallel universe, it's a quantum cloudserver of akashic knowledge and politically correct genetic expressions.