Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
Spinning space station design
pwhodges:
In the absence of a way to tie a structure to the inertial frame, you'd need two structures rotating relative to each other whose relative rotation could be sped up to store energy, and slowed down to recover energy by reactive braking. In practice a small fast flywheel is used (they have been proposed for electricity storage on Earth).
akronnick:
This has the disadvantage for a spinning wheel station that any change in the reaction wheel has an equal and opposite change in the rest of the station.
Is it cold in here?:
Dual counter-rotating rings, then.
akronnick:
For the Habitat? Absolutely not! That defeats the whole purpose of having a constant 1g environment.
You could build a momentum storage device with contra-rotating reaction wheels, but that's probably not much better than a battery.
Skewbrow:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it so that with the existing technology solar power can more efficiently be used by heating up large quantities of water. Photovoltaic processes are less efficient. Of course, that does not need to apply in QCverse. And also, on a space station exposed to direct sunlight (when not shadowed by the Earth) heating may not be a problem.
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