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Seriously? Start with your standard orbital space station. Add a bit more structural support and stiffening, then lower it into the atmosphere and use balloon

by evgen 6y ago

Seriously? Start with your standard orbital space station. Add a bit more structural support and stiffening, then lower it into the atmosphere and use balloons to keep it at a set altitude. Voila, cloud village. Repeat as needed until your village is a city.

ppo11 6y ago
Seriously? That isn’t how orbit works at all. With that plan you just reentered the whole thing, broke it into a million pieces, and rained it across the surface in a triumphant meteor shower of flame. Voila, everyone’s dead. Unless you had a plan for managing the atmospheric friction from orbital velocity that I didn’t read. In orbit things move sideways with respect to the surface. Fast. So the only way that works is if your “standard orbital space station” has enough propulsion to deorbit itself and hover in place — now that orbit is no longer cancelling gravity — until cubic kilometers of balloons that need to inflate (with what?) could hold it up. That amount of dV is barely theoretical at this point and would require several technological breakthroughs. You’re basically proposing deorbiting ISS without the atmospheric reentry and fiery death part, and given the similarities between our planets and their atmospheres it’s not a poor comparison.
- dang 6y ago
  Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0&query=community%20identity%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

by evgen 6y ago

ppo11 6y ago

Seriously? That isn’t how orbit works at all. With that plan you just reentered the whole thing, broke it into a million pieces, and rained it across the surface in a triumphant meteor shower of flame. Voila, everyone’s dead. Unless you had a plan for managing the atmospheric friction from orbital velocity that I didn’t read. In orbit things move sideways with respect to the surface. Fast. So the only way that works is if your “standard orbital space station” has enough propulsion to deorbit itself and hover in place — now that orbit is no longer cancelling gravity — until cubic kilometers of balloons that need to inflate (with what?) could hold it up. That amount of dV is barely theoretical at this point and would require several technological breakthroughs. You’re basically proposing deorbiting ISS without the atmospheric reentry and fiery death part, and given the similarities between our planets and their atmospheres it’s not a poor comparison.

dang 6y ago
Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0&query=community%20identity%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...