Communists on the moon !

[geoschmo]

The mass distribution could be compensated for by pumping fluid around from point to point in the structure. There will be plenty of fluid available, water, fuel, waste products. It would be a fairly simple matter of having resevoirs at various points around the station connected by tubes and pump it back and forth to keep things in balance. We do it now on airplanes and ships. It can even be done automatically by the computers.

[Suicide Junkie]

(Now I don't know what happened to space lab, maybe it was just built badly and that was the reason for its orbit deteriorating, the people inside jumping about surely weren't !) Just look at Mir... those russians had some wild parties up there

I think it was just in a low orbit, so the very slight atmospheric drag caused it to drop deeper and deeper over the months/years without thruster boosts.

[Narrew]

Originally posted by geoschmo:
The mass distribution could be compensated for by pumping fluid around from point to point in the structure. There will be plenty of fluid available, water, fuel, waste products. It would be a fairly simple matter of having resevoirs at various points around the station connected by tubes and pump it back and forth to keep things in balance. We do it now on airplanes and ships. It can even be done automatically by the computers.

NO, no, no, your almost correct, I read this real late Last night and was too tired to let you all know my master plan to solve the vibration issue...JELLO yep, thats right jello, that will take care of any vibration issue and a little treat for maintenance workers, heck there could be some radiation absorbing material added to the jello for shielding.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

no, no, no, giant shock absorber's attached to cosmic strings!

[JurijD]

Originally posted by Loser:
One more thing about the spinning wheel. Small changes in the distribution of mass around the wheel will change the point around which the wheel spins. This will change the strength of the illusionary 'gravity' throughout the wheel and could cause problems for any machinery sensitive to changes in it own 'weight'. Amusingly, the more mass you put on one side of the wheel the less 'weighty' things on that side will become.

Yes that is a funny thing isn´t it the more mass u put on one side the less "gravity" it gets heheh.

I think that one solution is obviously for the station to be way more massive than any object that will move inside of it... And the idea of pumping fluid around it to compensate for the different mass distributin is pure genious

Well if we get back to that Mars mission we were talking about a few months back... I think that now everyone agrees that we could build a rotating section on a spaceship that would enable people to have a semi-gravity environment. So...I have a couple thousand euros on my bank account... lets start putting money together and get this baby up in orbit before Xmas

because in my view the biggets problem was providing "gravity" to the astronauts. I wonder how much a say 1km wheel would cost...