Re: Open Air Space Habitats (excerpted)
Forrest Bishop (forrestb@ix.netcom.com)
Tue, 25 Mar 1997 19:36:02 -0600 (CST)
You wrote:
>
>Forrest Bishop wrote:
>>
>> Open Air Space Habitats (excerpted)
>>
>> Daylight can be either provided naturally, using a suitable
>> arrangement of mirrors, or artificial. The design
>> presented here uses one or more artificial suns rotating above the
>> atmosphere at a slower rate than the
>> habitat is spinning, so as to give a 24 hour day. These lights need
>> about a million megawatts (a terawatt) or
>> more of electricity to power them, which might be provided by
>> photovoltaic cells covering the exterior. For
>> positions farther from the Sun than Earth is, this power source can
>> also be augmented or supplanted by off-
>> World Solar Power Satellites beaming energy back to microwave
antennae,
>> as well as separate mirrors to
>> increase the energy reaching the solar cells. To keep the lit
portion
>> of the ring from lighting up the nightside,
>> a shade is included as part of the rotating artificial sun system.
>
>I still take exception to placement of objects within the ring, unless
>they are held in place by spoke wires made of monofilament. THese
should
>be numerous for redundancies sake.
They are.
>
>One thing I'm interested in checking out is the possiblity of using
>Raisch and Puthoff's ZPF theories to build virtual lenses in space,
>which could be used out at distances like that described to focus
large
>volumes of solar flux to provide not only illumination for the ring,
but
>concentrated light for power needs. Such lenses would be of zero
"true"
>mass, merely warps in the time-space fabric that is the Zero Point
Field
>that act to bend the sunlight to the designers needs.
>--
>T
I try to stay within known science and engineering practice in
my work.
Forrest