 |
Arctic Exhibit |
 |
Joined: Sat Aug 30, 2014 11:53 pm Posts: 99
|
Sean wrote: Four things. - One, if the materials ARE strong enough, for their mass, then the structure COULD be 'C' shaped, and still spin. It'd be lopsided, so down would suddenly be more toward the baseboard in much of the structure, but it'd still be mostly toward the outer rim.
- Two, if the enemy is shooting at the wheel, they've been found and might as well turn the gravity back on.
- Three, the teraport has already been established as capable of converting inertia to mass, and vice versa. If the structure is about to fly apart, because it's just been fired upon, port the thing to a new location, but with a quarter the rotational speed. This lets you, reasonably easily, go about repairing the damaged bits while the plumbing, mostly, doesn't get too badly mixed with the air. (Oh, and issue a requirement that EVERYONE sits down..and maybe add some polymerizing agent to the toilet feed water. Splashes in reduced gravity would be rather unpleasant.)
- Four, there is no reason not to build a habitat, out of the available supermaterials, that can survive a 1G spin without a hub, likely even in the event of a break, then go ahead and build that hub anyway. For starters, that 0G hub would be easier to dock in, is still a decent place to put the reactor, and can serve as a backup to the rim should the rim get cut.
- Materials: you often have to make do with the materials you have, not the materials you want. Even then, you are limited by your design and restricted by your needs. The image I like to use for this is: picture a mobile weapons platform fast as a fighter jet (Mach 2+), with the agility of a helicopter (VTOL/hover/reverse and side movement), the armor of a tank (35+cm of reactive/composite/etc), the firepower of a battle ship (9 16 inch cannons, 12 5 inch cannons, 40+ long range missiles, etc, etc, etc), and small enough to park in a 2-car garage. Except we don’t have the materials to make that happen, never mind the technologies. Sure, you can declare ‘well,use PTUs’, except PTUs are the resource of scarcity and nobody’s demonstrated possession of a working PTU printing press. Using them to house every living being of an empire won’t pass inspection as viable.
- turning the gravity back on doesn’t necessarily work, if you’ve been shot at things are going to be failing. Better to have a design that ‘fails safe’ and not ‘fails by creating new problems.’ High density power sources, like those used to power/manipulate gravity have also had an annoying tendency to get shot at in this conflict (read: tend to be made into the component that fails) by parties on both sides of this conflict. Your hub reactor would get shot out, potentially taking out the structural support of the hub itself, and then turning on rim reactors to assert a different gravity source may simply turn them into fresh targets.
- if the structure’s just been fired upon, you’re under attack. Standard attack doctrine is to deploy your own TAD, denying teraport capability to the opponent. Depending on using teraports during a defensive action seems foolhardy. The attacker has demonstrated spotter capability, it’s not hard to imagine them giving their spotters TADs.
- lets be honest, you are at war. On a war footing, do you consolidate your assets into a single juicy (and indefensible) target, or do you distribute them?
I think I see where the comic is going with this. I don’t know if I’ll agree with it, but I’ll grant that artistic license exists to let artistic things happen, and I don’t doubt that there will be art involved in the destination of this particular sub-arc. I’ll hush now and watch things unfold, there may even be a good answers presented for my concerns, but I’d honestly prefer to see them from the author first. He’s shown a high level of attention to detail time after time, I doubt my concerns were flat out ignored in his solution.
|
|