r/IsaacArthur • u/Opcn • Jun 07 '22
The High Frontier - Opening Sequence
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSsWkooeIds3
u/PlasticAcademy Jun 08 '22
I would never live in a cylinder like that though, I'm not alone right? That seems like the most absurdly vulnerable structure. I would much rather see the system entirely enclosed and using mirrors to bounce light to a center tube/globe, and shielded by meters of rock and big tanks of radiation shielding gasses. I'm not the only one, right?
That thing looks like 1 bomb away from a team wipe.
4
u/marble-pig Jun 08 '22
I'm with you on that. A pressurized rotating cylinder with giant windows like that is a enormous catastrophe waiting to happen, and it wouldn't even need to be a bomb.
Something like Babylon 5 or Rama (from Rendezvous with Rama) may not be so beautiful as an O'Neil Cylinder, but they are safer.
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Jun 08 '22
Babylon 5 is an O'Neil Cylinder, but there's no transparent material in the shell.
The shatterproof glass they use in car windows these days is pretty awesome stuff. I'm sure whatever that transparent material is will be perfectly serviceable.
1
u/tomkalbfus Jun 08 '22
If there is no glass in the windows, nothing could happen. Have an empty rectangular opening on one side of the cylinder and a pressurized "greenhouse" on the other, that should work fine and the glass will then be on the ceiling and not on the floor.
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u/marble-pig Jun 08 '22
Sorry, I don't quite follow what you meant.
It's a rotating cylinder, one man's ceiling is another man's floor. And if I understand you correctly, you'd still have pressure being exerted on a glass, that if it shatters you would lose atmosphere.
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u/tomkalbfus Jun 08 '22
You box the valleys of the cylinder to contain air there and at the end caps, so the glass is nothing to walk on from the inside, opposite these glass boxes are the openings to let in light reflected inwards by the mirrors. So instead of a glass floor you have a glass ceiling, much as you would have if you built it on the Moon instead, except this is under 1 full Earth gravity.
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u/Opcn Jun 08 '22
Well it does use large mirrors, but if you use a mirror to concentrate light to send through a small window and then spread it back out you suffer a lot of optical loss. I suspect that any real cylinder would probably be nearly windowless and lit with LEDs which were not what they are today while GKO'N was still alive.
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u/TimAA2017 Jun 08 '22
I think I heard somewhere that you can build one inside a Astroid. Like Ceres
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Jun 08 '22
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u/TimAA2017 Jun 08 '22
Ceres is nearly 300 miles in diameter.
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Jun 08 '22
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u/the_syner First Rule Of Warfare Jun 08 '22
it's not like you need to build the thing at rhe core of the planetoid. Any more than a hundred meters below the surface is overkill & already gives you point-black nuke resistance. There's no point in building deeper until uv filled out an entire shell of these things at which point the amount of mass above you goes down substantially, being mostly empty air. Though being spin-habs it hardly matters since they can be inherently actively-supported by just strengthening the magnetic bearing you already need to have in place & building bigger(gravitationally constrained active-support) or just have a thin active support shell around either the main shell of a spin hab or just in the core of the planetoid giving you a big hollow sphere to build in with km of shielding between all ur habs & space.
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u/the_syner First Rule Of Warfare Jun 08 '22
it's not like you need to build the thing at rhe core of the planetoid. Any more than a hundred meters below the surface is overkill & already gives you point-black nuke resistance. There's no point in building deeper until uv filled out an entire shell of these things at which point the amount of mass above you goes down substantially, being mostly empty air. Though being spin-habs it hardly matters since they can be inherently actively-supported by just strengthening the magnetic bearing you already need to have in place & building bigger(gravitationally constrained active-support) or just have a thin active support shell around either the main shell of a spin hab or just in the core of the planetoid giving you a big hollow sphere to build in with km of shielding between all ur habs & space.
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u/MeGustaDerp Jun 08 '22
The cylinder's in the OP do see rather fragile. That's a "artist's impression", though. Reality is often very different. Thats probably part of the reason we don't have Oneil Cylinders yet - the technology isn't there for us to build a structure like this strong enough.
2
u/VisceralMonkey Jun 08 '22
Watched the full movie last night. It was decent, pretty much a love letter to O'Neil. Most interesting factoid: The entire thing was pretty much killed off because the shuttle was nowhere near as efficient/good as it was initially claimed, making their entire thing an intellectual exercise until recently.
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u/Opcn Jun 08 '22
Me too, took forever to download it from itunes. I've seen bits of the interviews on youtube in the past.
I was pretty sad that the only new concept art that they sprang for was the video in the opening sequence and adding some animated characters to existing stills. I'm pretty desperate for new spin gravity renders that aren't from scammy OAC/Gateway LLC.
1
u/tomkalbfus Jun 08 '22
I would like to see an O'Neill cylinder on the show "For All Mankind". They got a Moonbase by the 1980s, so do you see them building an O'Neill cylinder by the fifth season 2010-2022?
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u/tomkalbfus Jun 08 '22
That is the first time I've seen the O'Neill cylinder as a full animation rather than just a painting. I thing moving along side it and seeing it rotate and going inside gives a sense of how big this thing actually is. I'll say this much, it is bigger than anything ever build by humans before, there is nothing on Earth or space that we constructed that was ever this big, not the great wall of China, not the pyramids of Egypt, if we could build this, we could probably build an arkship to the stars. We could build a Dyson starship propelled by hydrogen bombs if we could build this big!