OT: Ceres more interesting than previously thought

[NullAshton]

From over your head?

[Suicide Junkie]

Strategia_In_Ultima said:
.....Is it me or am I the only one who cannot picture Dogscoff's "coin"?

Take a ringworld. Shrink it down so that it surrounds the asteroid Ceres instead of a star.
Now build walls over the flat, open spaces.

What you now have, resembes a giant, hollowed-out coin, with the remains of ceres inside.

[Parasite]

Spin "Gravity" and the gravity from mass are two very very different things. The maximum spin "gravity" you can generate depends mostly on the strength of the steel, Plexiglass, or clear aluminum you use. It also depends some on the radius of your wheel and how much it weights (mass), but only this because it takes a stronger rope to swing a 2 ton bucket around than a 2 kg bucket. The spin would also need to be in the plane of the orbit if you wanted to keep the light coming in through the floor.

There are issues with the conservation of rotational momentum if you want to add more mass to the ring or shift stuff around from the center to the edge. I believe these could be easily solved given that we could build it in the first place. Venus Equilateral lives again! (V.Equ. is a book by the way)

(Edit: what I get for starting and then getting pulled off to work on my real job )

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

/me pictures a fish jumping out of the water and continuing straight up intil it hits water again

/me pictures SJ sitting on a boat with a look on his face saying "OK..... WTF?!?"

[dogscoff]

I was also thinking: Assuming you take Ceres out of the coin so that you can have sunlight coming from overhead, and assuming that overhead sunlight is sufficient to live by, you could actually have two landmasses: Each one would be a ring around the coin's circumference, with a ring shaped ocean seperating them. At midday you could look stright up and see the far side of the coin as three stripes: Land, sea, land. The sun would be shining down on you through the distant sea. for people on the far side (midnight for them) it would be dark, unless they were on the water where they'd have bright sunlight shining up at them from underneath.

Strolling along the beach at midnight would be spectacular.

[inigma]

Strolling along the beach at midnight would be spectacular.

And instead of jet lag, people would get "strolling lag" as you could probably walk faster than the rotation, and could essentially walk into multiple timzones on just one stroll

And riding a speed bike in the opposite direction of the spin would be out of the question - as the faster you travel counter to the direction of spin, the more of the centripetal effect you will negate.

Some interesting side effects: When you jump, you won't always land in the same place you started.

And throwing a football would require additional knowledge of flight trajectory in relation to the spin of the coin, and throw it hard enough, then what goes up most certainly won't come back down.

[Wolfman77]

Inigma, I believe you are confusing force with acceleration. Not hard to do in this context. The "force" being refered to in this thread is similar to gravity, which is technicaly an acceleration, m/s^2. Force, as you are refering to, would be like Newtons, which is Kg*m/s^2. If you work the math out with their label on you will find that it makes more sense.

On that note however, if the ring were 1,000Km it would need the outside of the ring spinning at 2213m/s to achieve 9.7947m/s^2, approximately 1g. Also 1Km in from the surface would still have approximately 9.756m/s^2, less than 1/2 percent difference.

Don't ask me how you could get it to stay together at those speeds though.

I've also found out that about 4 inches (9cm) of water will block gamma rays, 3ft (1m) will block about 20% UV.

[dogscoff]

Wolfman77 said:
On that note however, if the ring were 1,000Km it would need the outside of the ring spinning at 2213m/s to achieve 9.7947m/s^2, approximately 1g. Also 1Km in from the surface would still have approximately 9.756m/s^2, less than 1/2 percent difference.

Cool! Numbers! Thanks. I wonder how low you could take the (apparent) gravity for people to feel uncomfortable/ suffer ill health effects. I reckon most ppl (particularly the arthritic and the overweight=-) would enjoy bouncing around in .75G. What about half a G? Fine for an afternoon on the bouncy castle, but what about long term?

Don't ask me how you could get it to stay together at those speeds though.

Smaller ring and/or settle for lower gravity, I guess. Or use better unobtanium.

I've also found out that about 4 inches (9cm) of water will block gamma rays, 3ft (1m) will block about 20% UV.

[/quote]

Wow, is that it? I thought it would be a lot more than that. I wonder if NASA's Mars design will have the water tanks wrapped around the ship to shield the crew from radiation. Are those the only dangerous rads to worry about out there, or would there be others?