[TML] A new tourist ship design

[Jerry W Barrington]

On 1/13/08 6:15 AM, "Timothy Little" <tim at little-possums.net> wrote:

> On Sun, Jan 13, 2008 at 09:06:46AM +0100, Knapp wrote:
>
>> 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.

I think heat loss would be a major issue, as the top of the atmosphere
(calling it 100 km altitude) has 160,000 times the surface area of the
"planetary" surface.  Even solar heat isn't going to be a great help.  Look
how cold it gets just going up a mountain a few km tall!

This leads to another issue:  On Earth, you can get away with the
simplification that the atmospheric column bearing down on an area is a nice
vertical column.  With a tiny planet and huge atmosphere, this
simplification breaks down.  The atmosphere over an area is a cone spreading
to possibly kilometers at the top.

This reminds me of art by Patrick Woodroffe.  Scroll down to Pastures in the
Sky:

<http://www.artistsuk.co.uk/acatalog/LARGE_LIMITED_EDITIONS__PRINTS_AND_POST
ERS.html>