Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT 9-13 May 2011 (1921-1925)
Method of Madness:
PW - Thanks so much for that! I'm downloading the ePub version right now.
--- Quote from: Deadlywonky on 14 May 2011, 13:09 ---to generate 1g artificially, you would need a habitat with a radius of 224m to spin slowly enough so that you did not get sick every time you turned your head (minimizing Coriolis forces) resulting in a ring habitat with a circumference of 1.4km on the outer wall
--- End quote ---
That sounds like the setup for an overly complicated "your mom" joke.
Skewbrow:
--- Quote from: Deadlywonky on 14 May 2011, 13:09 ---to generate 1g artificially, you would need a habitat with a radius of 224m to spin slowly enough so that you did not get sick every time you turned your head (minimizing Coriolis forces) resulting in a ring habitat with a circumference of 1.4km on the outer wall
--- End quote ---
In an attempt to reverse engineer your figures: that radius gives a centrifugal acceleration very close to 1g, if the angular speed is exactly 2 full revolutions per minute, so I assume that was the target. Apparently by calculations and testing they have found that at that rate the nausea is tolerable.
Trying to figure out the cause of nausea is giving me a headache. At the moment my best theory is that it is caused by the difference of Coriolis forces experienced by the person's left ear and right ear. Unless I fumbled the math that difference is at its peak, when your nose (= the direction of your rotating head that bisects the angle between your ears) is pointing in the 'bending' direction of the floor. Another way of looking at it is that your one ear is then travelling along the rotation of the habitat while the other is travelling against it, and thus the ears experience different 'local gees' causing nausea.
When your nose points in the direction of the "flat floor", then the motion of your ears is parallel to the axis of rotation, and then the Coriolis force is equal to zero.
Anyway, 1.4km /30 seconds is slightly over 100 mph. That outer wall is really moving.
Is it cold in here?:
Space station options: get acclimated to the Coriolis force, as people get used to being on rocking ships, or do a small station on a long tether from a counterweight. Refinement: make your nuclear reactor your counterweight, using the distance to reduce the need for shielding.
Why am I spending a sunny day designing space stations for imaginary people who already have their own?
Deadlywonky:
Because it's great fun.
Skew, to the best of my knowledge (one of my lecturers at uni), the nausea is caused by a form of travel sickness: if you are standing, facing the direction of spin, and you rotate your head 90 degrees to the left, your eyes tell the brain that the body is stationary, but because one ear is accelerating into the direction of travel, and the other accelerating away, the perception is that the head is tumbling forwards, as this is not backed up by the eyes, the nausea results.
Cold, that is an idea that's been trialed, NASA looked at it on some of the Gemini missions (11?), and were able to generate a small measurable (but not felt) acceleration around the ATV using a long tether. It is probably the most practical method for a small habitat at the moment, but it would be very difficult to dock any spacecraft to the module, due to the circular flightpath, unless you had a docking tube running to the center of rotation.
one proposed method is having a centrifuge area where the astronauts sleep, as they'd be immobilized they could be exposed to much greater rotation, hence the module could be much smaller. as a result it could be part of a ship (although from memory the destroyer from B5 didn't have anything big enough to be realistic)
Is it cold in here?:
Try this only with an empty stomach:
Get in a swivel chair, spin around in it like a kid would, then lean forward.
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