OT: Ceres more interesting than previously thought

[NullAshton]

What if you design a material to only let the visible light spectrum, and lower through?

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Beware the mutant fish of DOOM!

I'd use some of that material to build some floating islands.

[dogscoff]

What if you design a material to only let the visible light spectrum, and lower through?

That would be handy- not only for the coin but for spaceships and stuff as well.
I remember a short story involving a ship manufacturer who builds all ships completely transparent, and then the buyer just paints in the bits they want covered. Might have been asimov...

Suicide Junkie said:
Oh, and as for the radiation thing... It shouldn't take too much water to block the rads.

Cool. I know I read somewhere that water is a cool rad blocker.

What if you just build a double-coin, and fill the space between them with water?

Well you could, but then you start getting into "why not just build a giant space station" territory.

As a bonus, that water barrier will help shield the inside habitat from small asteroid impacts. AND keep the

Well, only until the outside barrier gets busted by the first strike and leaks out all the water, surely..?

sun-facing surface cool!
You can then let the coin face the sun if you like.

Alternatively, what if you set your coin so that it is not quite edge-on to the sun? Align it so the shadow of the sun-ward dirt bottom does not fall on the far edge of the coin.

At "noon" you'd see the sun just to the left of the skyring.
At midnight, you'd get a few rays glancing up from below only if you are on the far right side of the ring.

This is how Banksian Orbitals work. They either have enough atmosphere to soak up the rads, or (more likely) he left the Minds to take care of it with their omnipotent powers. (S_J, have you read any Banks?)

[Suicide Junkie]

Its just a simple double-hull idea.

If the water dosen't vaccuum-freeze fast enough to block the hole, you could always pour goop in to make it self-sealing.

Puncture-sealing fluids are advertised all the time these days, for car tires and radiators and whatnot... Just buy some in bulk from Canadian Tire.

If all else fails, pour jello into the outer hull. You could even make the jello armor piece by piece, so you don't have to build the entire outer hull, just a mold for while the jello sets.

[dogscoff]

Suicide Junkie said:
Its just a simple double-hull idea.

If the water dosen't vaccuum-freeze fast enough to block the hole,

When you put it like that, it makes a lot of sense.

you didn't answer my question: Have you read any Iain M Banks stuff? If not, I'd like to repay the man who introduced me to Schlockmercenary by recommending anything by Iain M Banks. It's about the only scifi I enjoy more than Schlock. You'd love "Against a Dark Background" (For the Lazy Guns) but I think a better introduction to his work might be "Excession" or "Use of Weapons". If you lived near me I'd lend you a copy, but I think it would be easier for you to just click http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/sea...015029-1860360 and splurge a few dollars. Trust me, you will not regret it.

Of course if you've already read it all, forget I spoke.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

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

[Makinus]

Can someone draw a diagram? i too cannot picture it...

[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.

[dogscoff]

What S_J said is dead right, but here's a diagram anyway because I'd already drawn it.



So, the spin of the coin generates centripetal force, which works much the same as gravity, in this case, sticking the ocean, the atmosphere, the people, fish and everything else to the inside edge of the coin. To blatantly steal an analogy from Iain M Banks' "Consider Phlebas": Imagine that you have a bucket of water with a model boat floating on the surface. Now pick up the bucket by the handle and, holding it at arm's length, start to spin it over your head and back down again. As long as you keep spinning it really fast, the water will never fall out of the bucket, and the boat will not sink, even when the bucket is upside down.

Note that the orbit I've drawn in there could be around Earth or around the sun or even around the moon. Doesn't matter, as long as the sunlight only ever comes in through the bottom of the ocean as shown in the picture. This is because the ocean is what filters out all the harmful radiation.

Note also that my diagram does not show the two circular walls that turn the "wedding ring" I've drawn into a "coin". (If you can't get your head around that, think about what you'd need to add to a wedding ring to turn it into a hollow "coin" shape.) These are the two faces I've been referring to as "heads" and "tails", and they are not transparent. They have two main functions:
1- They keep the atmosphere in.
2- The keep harmful cosmic radiation out. Cosmic radiation comes from all directions, not just from the direction of the sun, so the ocean won't block all of it (unless you are in a submarine.)
Your airlocks and space-ship docking would be on the haids and tails faces.

The dimensions of the coin are beyond my mathematical ken, but you're probably looking at a minimum diameter of about a thousand Ks, and a maximum defined purely by the strength of the materials you are building from. Width-wise, it depends largely on the size of Ceres after you've strip-mined and melted it. Probably in the 200-500Ks range.

You might find that you can have a breathable atmosphere sticking to the ocean in much the same way that the ocean sticks to the coin, but that the centre of the coin, around Ceres, is vacuum (or something close to it.)

Oh, and you don't actually need Ceres in the middle there, by the way. You could take it out if you wanted.

Finally, imagine yourself on Narf's boat. Think about where the sunlight is coming from, and how your surroundings would look. Assuming the coin spins once every 24 hours, where will the light be coming from in 12 hours' time?

[NullAshton]

From over your head?