[TML] A new tourist ship design

[Timothy Little]

On Sun, Jan 13, 2008 at 09:06:46AM +0100, Knapp wrote:
> Could people then, in space, walk on this ball?

I see no reason why not.

> Would it be safe?  Would it hold the atmosphere?

This is trickier.  Earth's atmosphere is held by the escape energy
being much greater than the atmosphere's molecular thermal energy.  If
the 1g effect extends only on the order of a few hundred metres, the
atmosphere would disappear very quickly indeed.

To retain the atmosphere for significant lengths of time, the 1g
attraction would have to extend at least a hundred kilometres.
Possibly even more, though the bulk of the atmosphere would still be
within 10km as it is on Earth.


> Would it be nice to sit on the ball and look at the sky?

Not if there's no atmosphere :-)

Given a deep enough "gravity well", I think there could still be a few
niggling problems.  You may need to explicitly heat the ground, for
example, to replace convective and radiative heat losses from an
atmosphere hundreds of times larger than its area.  Convection
patterns would be really odd, though I don't know what effects that
would have.  Probably nothing that would matter to a tourist.

On the night side, it would still be quite light.  Similar to just
after sunset, where the sunlight is still passing through and lighting
up the air.  If there are any clouds, shining on them too.


>  Does this work within Traveller rules?

I don't think Traveller explicitly says the conditions under which
grav plates work, so I'd say it's at least plausible.  My personal
view is that grav plates always come in pairs: one above, one below.
Otherwise they would effectively be tractor/repulsor beams, which
aren't available until higher tech levels.


- Tim