Martian Ring World

[bm92]

If you built a 'ring world' with a radius of 100Km around Mars, spincalc suggest angular velocity of 0.002357 rpm (about 7 hrs for 1 rev) - how much would this reduce the Coriolis effect?  What would be an acceptable reduction for human comfort and even lower for human perception?  How big would the ring need to be to achieve these values?  Would you still feel anything walking or jumping tangentially to the rotation or along the direction of rotation?

[tater]

Assuming actual materials, the circumference is limited by the breaking length. I want to say for carbon nanotubes or graphine that number is around 6500 km. That means a radius of around 1000km is the largest ringworld possible. At 1g, that's 33 minutes per rotation.

For a giant ringworld, as your example, I think no one would notice anything odd.

[Bill Phil]

You mean a ring around Mars that’s 100 km above the surface?

I’m not sure it’s worth doing.

Don’t forget that to get 1g in this ring you’d need to cancel out the Martian gravitational acceleration, meaning you’d need 1 Earth gravity plus roughly 1 Mars gravity, though it’d be a tad less.

Some people are inherently more sensitive to rotation than others, but the common accepted value for comfort is 2 rpm. However there is evidence to suggest 4 rpm can be comfortable with suitable acclimation.

As for lower rpm valuee, there’s a diminising return effect. That is, you can double the radius but the rpm value doesn’t go down as much. What this means is that there may be an optimal radius that optimizes everything from materials, energy cost, and human comfort.

Edited July 2, 2019 by Bill Phil