[TML] A new tourist ship design

[shadow at shadowgard.com]

On 14 Jan 2008 at 11:19, Timothy Little wrote:

> On Sun, Jan 13, 2008 at 12:48:30PM +0100, Knapp wrote:
> > As I understand gravity (not well) I thought that if you had one g
> > it would fade with the square of the distance.
> 
> Natural gravity does in such situations, yes.  Artificial gravity
> might not.
> 
> 
> > So this would give the air the same depth as on the Earth.
> 
> If it did fade as the inverse square, no.  Inverse-square means
> quarter acceleration at twice the distance.  For Earth, that "twice
> the distance" is more than 6000 kilometres.  For a 500m ball, it's
> quarter the acceleration at 500m, and all the air escapes within
> seconds.  The fall-off would have to be a lot slower than inverse
> square.

Which would require some very impressive distributed gravity 
generators *in* the air. 

> So unlike Earth, heat from the surface will have negligible effect on
> the atmosphere.  The ship would have to directly replenish heat in the
> air, somehow, without cooking the surface.

Waste heat from the floating gravity generators that are there to 
keep the field from dropping off too fast. :-)


--
Leonard Erickson (aka shadow)
shadow at shadowgard dot com