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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

The subtitle of the article is a better title for the HN post.

> A refinement of O'Neill's colonies.

Basically just increasing the robustness of an O'Neill colony by removing the windows and giant mirrors. Also bolted on the power generation and cooling requirements that the original design mostly overlooked. I'm not sure the cooling requirements have been fully considered however, since it involves pumping hot coolant through 32+km of pipes. As described the colony is going to have a hot side and a cold side.

And honestly, the O'Neill cylinder is going to be covered in gold foil. I fully agree that the windows and gigantic mirrors are not a good idea. Electric lights run off of a massive solar array avoid many of the problems of the original design.

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If you remove the windows, the O'Neill colony won't be as cool. We must invent some sort of transparent steel that is also effective at blocking radiation.

To be clear, you're requesting a material that is optically thin in the narrow range of EM radiation that is human visible but relatively opaque otherwise. Obviously particle radiation in general is just blocked by matter. However transmutation the material undergoes has to /also/ maintain these properties.

I can't think off the top of my head why it would be /impossible/ but it'll definitely be an engineering nightmare compared to good camera feeds and a few scattered "Star Park" type facilities.

Ahem, I think you mean transparent aluminum.

So, sapphire.

That's the ticket laddie.

The back side of solar arrays make for good radiator placements. I dont see any reason why all the solar arrays and radiators need to be on opposite ends, why not have both on both sides?

If the habitat is segmented and connected with non rotating couplers then you could mount solar on each coupler. The design would then be multiple identical potentially self sufficient modules that can be assembled into a large colony and expand as needed. Wouldn’t have much of a horizon though so it would feel a bit claustrophobic.

Why bother connecting the solar arrays to the habitat? Just hook them up to microwave transmitters and beam the power to the cylinders. That way you can have the solar arrays anywhere it's convenient, maybe even in position to shade the entire colony so that the heat disposal problem is less of an issue.

Fair point but you needn’t bother with microwaves when a cable and some good ol’ fashion brushes will do. It’s just a rotor after all.

Maybe it would make sense to set up the solar array like a huge umbrella on the sun-facing side of the colony. Then you can cover the now-shady outside surface with radiators.

I assume we break up the colony into at least two segments so they can be counter-rotating.

Forgive me, what is the benefit of having counter-rotating segments? Does it reduce the overall angular momentum of the object...?

No, but it prevents precession IMO.

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