Tilting floors in the centrifuge wheel : would it work?

[SomeGuy12]

Let's suppose, for the same of argument, you had a manned spacecraft (unrealistic) and a rocket engine that could produce appreciable amounts of thrust (more than 1% of 1 G) for a prolonged period of time (several days). Both are unrealistic, and realistically, the kind of exotic engine technology that might give you that kind of thrust would probably use antimatter or some really powerful fusion. By the time humanity develops such an engine, we probably won't need human bodies.

Anyways, suppose you had a centrifuge wheel near the front of the spacecraft, per the Discovery 2, NASA's paper study of a fusion powered spacecraft. http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20050160960.pdf On page 3.

Anyways, could you mount the decking inside the habitat floors on tracks, so you could angle the floor a little bit? The idea is, the vector sum of the centrifugal force and the thrust from the engine would sum to a vector that would be normal to the floor, so the crew could walk around on a "flat" surface. The hatchways between sections would have to be circular since the whole floor rotates.

Of course, there'd be a variety of wiring and plumbing problems this would cause - all the links between the decking and the underfloor wiring and plumbing network would have to be on flexible hoses. Very much doable, especially compared to the engineering challenge of a working extreme thrust fusion or nuclear salt water engine.

The floor would be limited to canting just a few degrees from it's normal horizontal position - if your engine had variable thrust modes that tradeoff thrust for ISP, you'd cant the floor differently depending on the burn.

Would this work?

[Shpaget]

If you can deal with wiring, plumbing and other stuff you mention, then yes. There is nothing inherently impossible with the idea.

[AngelLestat]

This will be similar to what I imagine to get 1g on the moon:

[Beowolf]

Dude, that is one insane habitat design! Totally absurd, impractical, and every other derogatory term I can come up with because I'm mad I never thought of it myself!

Gonna turn it into a mod?

[KerikBalm]

Just do it like centrifuges in a bio lab, and have the things on a swivel?

Or perhaps a folding prop on a model airplane is a better visual (although there the prop blades are brought forward by aero forces as well)

Imagine this, but much much bigger... with hab compartments at the end of the blade... in space:

[Nuke]

i like the idea of using a tunnel boring machine to cut out circular tunnels underground about 1km in radius. in the tunnels you instal tracks and then construct a series of habitat cars. many of these are joined together to create sort of a train at first then a ring city when the ends meet. being under ground shields the habitat from radiation and residents can enjoy a 1g environment. the whole tube is pressurized so the ring doesnt need pressurization. it would be easy to spin down for maintenance. inside the main habitat ring you have a smaller transport track, with a train that can match speed with the main habitat, or stop to allow personnel to transfer to the lunar gravity environment or to other points in the habitat. the tbm would also make a number of adjacent tunnels for industrial facilities.

Edited June 28, 2015 by Nuke

[AngelLestat]

Dude, that is one insane habitat design! Totally absurd, impractical, and every other derogatory term I can come up with because I'm mad I never thought of it myself!

Gonna turn it into a mod?

heh thanks, I had the same surprice when I think about it for first time, I look in internet, but nothing even relative similar, so the only way to show what I mean was to draw it.

About mods, I am bad on that. But it would be fun to see the physics work.

Just do it like centrifuges in a bio lab, and have the things on a swivel?

Or perhaps a folding prop on a model airplane is a better visual (although there the prop blades are brought forward by aero forces as well)

Imagine this, but much much bigger... with hab compartments at the end of the blade... in space:

http://file.espritmodel.com/accessories/spinner/aeronaut-whiteturbo-spinner.jpg

Yeah, in his example with variable trust, your idea fits better.

But the picture example confuse more than help

Edited June 29, 2015 by AngelLestat

[magnemoe]

If you can deal with wiring, plumbing and other stuff you mention, then yes. There is nothing inherently impossible with the idea.

Plumbing would not be to hard, you will only need to tilt the arms from straight out to 45 degree downward with 0.5 g trust. any sort of flexible tube will do this.

Now rotating the crew compartment independently is far harder, can still be done by having multi layered piping in center but this is harder, it would be smarter to keep all water for crew in the crew compartment, keep spare at the center.

[PB666]

This will be similar to what I imagine to get 1g on the moon:

http://s20.postimg.org/jdf1f7a7x/Moon_Artificial_Gravity.jpg

If you are on the moon just place 500 kilos of weight your lunatians to carry around in a rec room 2 hours a day. Problem solved. You can take plastic or rubber weights and fill them with lunar sand.

Stable lunar colony is

Build underground

Lighting is from LED

Plant growth is same LED from solar power/battery power.

Reliant on earth for raw materials like water, carbon, At least until it reaches a critical mining and processing mass.

[AngelLestat]

You can not simul gravity or its effects on the body just lifting extra mass. A force applied to few external points of your body has nothing to do with a constant acceleration applied to each atom of your body.

[magnemoe]

This will be similar to what I imagine to get 1g on the moon:

http://s20.postimg.org/jdf1f7a7x/Moon_Artificial_Gravity.jpg

Better to use an larger flywheel with tilted floor, slower rotation rim could run on wheels on a rail, for smaller scale just have two wagons with an connection to the core.

[AngelLestat]

In his case of variable thrust, yes how I already point.

The graphic that I did is for the moon, which I think is cheap considering the area and easy to enter or exist.

[Arkalius]

This will be similar to what I imagine to get 1g on the moon:

I like that design, it's pretty neat. Though, I wonder at it's utility at that size. I'm not sure how disorienting a sustained 4.2 rpm is on the average human's equilibrium. Plus, by my calculations, a person at the 1g section would experience about 1.12g's walking with the rotation, and about 0.88g's walking against it with average walking speed, more than a 25% variation. Not sure how difficult that would be to deal with. Still, it's a neat concept, and could potentially be scaled up to compensate for those issues.

[FleshJeb]

Hey, I remembered my high school senior project correctly! This source (and the other ones I recall reading) states that 1 RPM is the practical upper limit: http://www.nss.org/settlement/nasa/75SummerStudy/Chapt3.html

This source says 6 RPM: http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19930020462.pdf

[AngelLestat]

Ah I never thought on the effect of walking with the rotation or against, so if we run is 1.5g, that is a hard training, if that is much, they can run against the rotation.

But yeah, that is a flaw, not sure if is a way to fix that keeping all in manageable scales.

I was more worried at the begining for the difference of acceleration between our head and feets, which is 0.05g, not sure if is enoght to be anoying.

To be 1 rpm as fleshjeb said, the habitat needs to be 900 meters of diameter.

[SomeGuy12]

In the case of a long duration spacecraft, you probably don't need a full G. You need enough gravity to send the fluid in your sinuses back to your heart, to make healing from wounds and surgery more like on earth, to make it possible to walk at a decent speed, to be able to take a shower normally, etc. 1/3 G might be enough for all this.

This is important because it keeps the minimum diameter of the centrifuge wheel down, so you can build a smaller ship with a lighter crew compartment. Of course, we don't know if 1/3 G is enough - a full G may be the only adequate level of gravity, even with exercise.

Edited July 1, 2015 by SomeGuy12

[prophet_01]

Yeah. It's not rly known what low gravity (not none!) does to the human body. There is a lot of educated guessing involved until someone actually builds a hab there or creates a rotating hab in LEO.

But I'm pretty sure that such a thing might be handy for a lot of things. Food production might also be affected by the lower gravity and could benefit from that kind of thing.

The new boss of ESA mentioned his intentions to build a permanent station on the moon (international of course) on multiple occasions. I'm not holding my breath, but here is a nice long interview with him on national radio today