Spaceship like "Discovery One" from 2001 Space Odyssey

[Wahgineer]

About linear acceleration: you do know (hopefully from experience) that the ship isn't accelerating the entire time?

[peadar1987]

About linear acceleration: you do know (hopefully from experience) that the ship isn't accelerating the entire time?

No, no, if you throttle down at any point, you're playing KSP wrong!!

[Nuke]

if used for interplanetary stuff, you are going to fly in one of two modes, frequent continuous low thrust (ion/plasma), or periodic high thrust (chemical/nuclear) or somewhere in the middle. if your acceleration is a tiny fraction, like a tenth or less of your simulated gravity, then you can probibly just ignore it. if its around 1:1 you might as well just spin down and stand on the aft wall, but this will be infrequent application of thrust. the middle ground gets trickey. you could have pivoting floor panels or compartments rotating on a tangential axis, or just have the crew strap in for the maneuver if the duration is short enough.

mechanical issues are solvable, though spinning the ship is an option, i actually design ships like that in ksp. and its probibly possible to orient the ship however you like despite the spinning with computerized control systems (ksp plugin makers take heed ). advances in magnetic technology might make magnetic bearings possible on a large space craft in the near future. you can also design your way out of the problems of maintaining rotating seals, by simply eliminating them.

take a ridged toroid hull suspended on fixed rails of a hub using magnetic bearing wheels. this hull would have its own airlocks, next to the ring would be a smaller car on rails. if you needed to move from the spining toroid to a fixed zero g hull, you spin the car up to the speed of the toroid, align and connect with one of the airlocks robotically. you could then move into the car. it would undock, spin down, and dock with a fixed airlock on the zero g hull, which you could then enter. there would actually be 2 cars at opposite ends for balence, and their smaller mass makes them easy to balence out with a torque wheel. to balance out the toroid you would need either another toroid (this gives you some redundancy) or a high mass high speed torque wheel. if for some reason you wanted only the toroid to be pressurized, an unpressurized spin down platform would be all you need to go eva.

the other idea, which is used on discovery, is put a light centrifuge inside a pressure hull. this makes everything easier to maintain.

[Idobox]

Large tethered structures rotating in low-earth orbit would find it hard to keep a stable orbit due to fluctuations in gravity between the two ends, making station keeping difficult, although by no means impossible.

You don't need something huge, 100 or 200m would allow reasonable gravity at a few RPM. For a station, I would probably build it in two parts or roughly equivalent mass, on on each side. Solar panel tracking might be an issue though.

You would have to stop the rotation once in a while, when adding/removing a module, changing the orbit, etc, but it won't be a big deal. And you could probably store that momentum in a flywheel for a few days without too much trouble.