3 ms·

This is all covered in the last third of the essay, including nested structures, depressurization and the proposed structure has much, much higher volume than a

• hinkley 7y ago
  Does he though? Felt like a throwaway sentence to me. Also, his idea about hanging buildings from the wires is bunk. If you hang your buildings from the tensile structure that is buoyed by air and you have a rupture, now your buildings are going to collapse. Likely onto other buildings. Since his design has no compressive strength at all there is no way to address that issue. [edit] what makes it more bunk is that in order to have tall structures, the entire habitat has to be the same height as the structure, instead of placing them near apex of a hemispherical structure. So he's just doubled the volume versus a sphere. Also if you make a bubble structure that tall you have to handle the pressure on the walls. I don't see where he mentions walls at all except when talking about how dome walls suck. Not as much as trying to pressurize a rectangular pressure vessel! The only place his solution shines is in 'doming' a valley or a canyon, where a dome has a host of other problems he hasn't even covered. I can't remember if the bubbles on the Eden domes contribute strength to the structure, but I expect you could design them to do so. Then the structure begins to more resemble a bouncy castle (like the ISS inflatable hab unit).