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comment by kleinbl00

"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.





am_Unition  ·  2582 days ago  ·  link  ·  

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.

blackbootz  ·  2582 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    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.

Favorite sentence of the day. And that's even after seeing Don Trump declare war on conservatives.

kleinbl00  ·  2582 days ago  ·  link  ·  

TIMECUBE