Saturday, August 17, 2024

Gilliland's rafters

Yesterday I went up to Nederland where I bought (used) Alexis Gilliland, The Revolution from Rosinante - with S. It's the first in a trilogy. It's in George O Smith's genre of an asteroid colony dealing with Earth bureaucracy and lawyers - also, unions. Since I haven't finished even the first book, I shall defer the review to Nicoll, in times past a smarmy Leftist but perhaps by 2024 a little wiser. For our post here I am getting my head around the station architecture - because, I have to, in order even to understand what is going on over here.

This architecture is so alien to me, and the content uses such alien terms like "purlin", that we need diagrams. These are supplied in the first few pages. But they aren't helpful either, so - 3D illustrations are needed too. Luckily, we have the cover art. Humans reside in a cylindrical bulb inside a lampshade. Actually a pair of "lamps" together.

Rosinante is a Quixote reference, being the Don's horse. We'll see it reused in The Expanse with C. Nyrath Chung was big on Gilliland's book, probably why Abraham and Franck reused the word. Nyrath's recommendation was why I kept my eye out for it. I can't just download it on account Gilliland, already almost fifty years old in 1981, is still alive(!).

"Purlin" meanwhile is a sort of ceiling-rafter. In fact "rafter" refers to the load-bearing struts running from the wall to the top; a "purlin" is more like a buttress, connecting the rafters at the perpendicular. Assuming you're not just doming it all.

The rock is, best I can tell, fictional. It is a C-type which has got itself into a Mars-crossing eccentric orbit semimajor 2.58 AU - middle belt, past 3:1 resonance. It pretty much shares a band with also-C (subset, "G") 13 Egeria, with a 4.14 year period; although at 1.32 AU perihelion the fictional 'stroid is a sight more eccentric. To the extent a hard-SF feels the urge to invent some fictional rock: not!Egeria with low-inclination and near-perihelion seems an excellent choice, with plenty of water and other "ices".

As for Gilliland's habitat design, I do wonder how stable it be. They might get away with affixing it all to the rock. The rock's own rotation may pose a problem; 13 Egeria is oblate on account of spinning a 7 hour day and being 10% water.

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