4 ms·

>issues with microgravity I don't get it. You can make a ship big enough to house an entire civilization, for tens of thousands of years, but you can't spin it

• giantg2 3mo ago
  Yeah, and appearently we don't know how to shield from radiation either.
• josefritzishere 3mo ago
  Even NASA considers rotational gravity to have huge obstacles rendering it impractical. https://technology.nasa.gov/patent/TOP2-311 https://technology.nasa.gov/patent/TOP2-311
  • andai 3mo ago
    >the need to mass balance the entire rotating spacecraft in order to eliminate or minimize rotational imbalance causing gyroscopic precession/nutation motions and other oscillations of the rotating spacecraft; I suppose this also involves mass-balancing the inhabitants! What does the Coriolis effect mean in this context?
    • recursivecaveat 3mo ago
      Objects will experience weird-looking 'forces' from the perspective of people in a rotating reference frame. For example a thrown object will curve strangely through the air. On earth the effect is so subtle that only artillery and weather are really effected I think. On a spacecraft which is much smaller you would experience an extremely magnified version. As far as I can tell, there's no reason to believe that Coriolis will be harmful to humans beyond nausea and disorientation. If you ran quickly through the station it might cause you to fall. Possibly it might make machinery that deals with fluids more difficult to deal with. I would chalk it up as a relatively minor concern compared to other issues.