Tuesday, December 22, 2020

Stone Rama: for Venus and SEL4-5

Last January I found out about O'Neill cylinders. At 32 km by 8 km, comparable to Deimos and Phobos (more to the point: Ganymed and Eros), such has so much internal space that the design has long been mooted for permanent stations, which are equivalent to cyclers. They will, therefore, not be stinky cyclers - after initial construction anyway. If they're hollowed out from asteroids à la George O Smith (or Arthur C Clarke) they're also great for shielding against solar radiation within Mars' perihelion 1.38 AU.

What occasions this post is the prospect of Hop David's permanent Venus cyclers... and "The Day Of The Rock" being observed among The Expanse fandom. Sadly I don't think we'll be having the stone shielded Rama for the Earth / Venus routes, nor for any Earth-passing route (UPDATE 2021 - okay, 2L4 might work inasmuch as it skates L1). And Hop wants Deimos and Phobos for tethers, implicitly dumb rocks with human colonies as barnacles. UPDATE 6/26/22 Although maybe spinning Deimos can be magnetised such that the tether may detach from the actual stone.

We can't leave cycler trajectories alone; they must always be corrected, ultimately by human hand. Now we have other equivalences to consider. For those who used to use Flash, which you never should've, Perdue had a calculator for this. Spoiler alert: we're looking at Chicxulub if the calculations ever get wrong... that is, for the Bond Villain, right. I foresee Earth will fear even a "light" Rama for these trajectories. I'm seeing tight regs on how the mass here gets bundled.

Mars won't want the heavy Rama for a cycler either on account that planet's orbit is so lopsided (it follows, they keep Deimos). And from Jupiter's Hilda orbit on out, they may as well use the unshielded or badly-shielded Rama. The Belters would mainly use full hollow rock for transport elsewhere, for instance to Alpha Centauri, maybe from a Neptune trojan.

Where Belters would export asteroidal Rama, and should, would be to the Sun/Earth L4 and L5. Also anywhere in Venus' stable neighbourhood: George Smith's L4 / L5 of course. Venerean direct satellites. Hilda. Phobos elevation.

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