3 ms·
The solution here seems fairly straightforward: don't make the design completely pressure-supported, but include enough weighty structural elements like ribs an
by WJW 7y ago
The solution here seems fairly straightforward: don't make the design completely pressure-supported, but include enough weighty structural elements like ribs and beams to make it heavy enough to be a compressive structure again. If you have a rib-like structure on the top side of your dome material, you could even just pile Mars dust and rocks on top of it to keep it in place.
- VLM 7y agosand/dust blows around into dunes and its dense enough that "close enough" won't hack it. Figure as an engineering 1 sig fig estimate (dry) sand runs around a twentieth of a pound per cubic inch, so 14.7 PSI air would be in compression with around three hundred or so inches of sand evenly spread around the top. Its a major labor sink to build and maintain and dunes could cause a catastrophic failure. Could make an interesting sci fi novel about "emergency EVA to run bulldozer drones to spread sand to prevent dome collapse". In the end, rather than the nightmare of making a 3000 meter diameter dome deep enough under ground that dune forces will have no effect (using h-bombs to excavate?), just make thirty 10 meter diameter tunnel boring machines and run them 10 kilometers in different directions. The linked article's tube tent is not a bad idea for surface greenhouses.