Latest blog post: Redraw of chapter 1 is happening (2024-05-11)

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Visitor

I like the design of the Dawn a lot. However, I wonder how a tall building would work inside a spinning habitat. What forces would the occupants experience, moving to a higher floor?

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Senior

Higher floors would experience lower gravity. Walking with the spin would slightly increase the apparent force of gravity, while walking against the spin would reduce it. Dropped or thrown objects would follow curving paths due to Coriolis forces. Since the floors of the buildings are flat instead of cylinder sections, gravity would also tend to pull things toward their east and west edges, especially on upper floors.

Also, because the cylinder is rotating around its long axis and contains flexible objects, it wants to shift its axis and rotate end-over-end instead, which exerts a crosswise torque on the whole ship that has to be counteracted somehow.

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Senior

The cylinder is both tapered at the ends, and have a separate system, using water reserves of the ship, that spins in the opposite direction (well, pumps water, to be more technical) to counteract the spin force the cylinder excretes on the ship's non-rotating frame (In addition, the mass of the "flexible objects", the atmosphere, is insignificant in comparison to the rest of the drum). It's a quite complex and self-correcting system, which, combined with the size, explains why there isn't many ships of that class around.

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Senior

The flexible objects I was thinking about was all those trees, but a counter-rotating mass would do the trick. One of the other proposals I've seen for stabilizing a spin-gee cylinder was to just have a linked pair of cylinders with opposite rotations.

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Senior

Thanks!

Upper parts of the building are a mix of technical floors and rooms that make use of the reduced but non-zero gravity. As to what you would experience, well, depends on the speed. I once rode on an elevator that descended very fast. It was... an interesting experience. Sort of almost falling.

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Visitor

Thank you everyone for the interesting discussion.

Maybe, a large volume of water (eventually in three phase equilibrium, liquid water, ice, and vapor) could also act as a "thermal flywheel" for environmental control.

There are few science-fiction web comics that I know of, which stick with "hard" (realistic) science. Recently on Freefall by Mark Stanley, the protagonists are visiting a spinning space station. (Hint: check which way the station is rotating before pouring yourself a cup of coffee!)

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New

Just kick the door down.

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Senior

Ooh ooh, is this the scene where Zane gets The Bombshell dropped on him? I can't wait!

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Visitor

Zane, I like you, but leaving Ahshu in the dark like that isn't going to help keep the big secret under wraps. Especially since all she did was act a little impulsive.

Also, is the one week timeskip a 7 day skip or a 12 day skip?

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Senior

I think he done that to prevent further outbursts on potentially divisive topics, rather than keep any secrets.

Unless noted otherwise, time (and everything else) is in earth units.

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Senior

Is the Dawn captained by Zane himself, or by a flag captain who reports to him?

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Senior

Dawn itself has the operational crew with a separate captain, yes.

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New

Curse my speed reading skills






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The author is against any kind of application of AI to his artwork.

TRIVIA
Many homeworlds of the respective species are still divided into countries, but freshly established colonies on other planets are almost always monolithic and basically independent, since they sprawled from a single initial outpost, and time lag involved due to interstellar distances making remote management of the colony from a homeworld to be ineffective and frustrating at best.