[TML] Landing Pads (was something else)

[Tom B]

I see from my travels on the Internet that there are all sorts of
additives for soil to give it better bearing strength. Some sort of
polymer goop you mix in is one example. These all increase soil
strength. Increasing the strength of concrete, etc. matters insofar as
the pad won't crack, but you still need the underlying soil to stand
the pressure. Now, if your pad doesn't crack, your PAD distributes
load over its entire surface. So in a roundabout way, it does matter
about pad strength/reinforcement.

But what about all those D/E/F/X star/space ports? Many of them
probably don't have much (some may even be barely compacted dirt)...
X's may be total wild landings. So, the question is how many of the
canonical ship designs, as we envision them, actually can land on
those sorts of ground conditions? How many appear in the images we
think of as representing them to have enough square footage of landing
pads? I'm not even sure the default triangular Scout does. (now, one
possibility is that the struts come down and a landing foot splays out
from around the jack pillar, with 4 segments forming a cross folding
down and locking by secondary hydraulics. That might let the scout
still appear to have small struts and still let it get the large
surface area it needs to land in the wilds on land.

Of course, a loaded Subsidized Merchant is a whole other kettle of
fish. It needs huuuuuge pads. I don't think it should *ever* land in
the wilds without getting stuck.

This is just the sort of engineering minutia that ship designers
should pay attention to when drawing up or laying out plans for ships
(in a hard sci fi game).

On Thu, May 1, 2008 at 5:04 PM, Anthony Jackson <ajackson at iii.com> wrote:
> Ken & Juliane Murphy wrote:
>  > Well, the various sizes of landing strut assumes plain concrete. What
>  > happens if at soem point in its construction, the pad has had a layer
>  > of Crystal Iron (TL 10, IIRC) or something even better sandwiched
>  > into the mix.
>
>  It becomes a lot more expensive. We don't use concrete because it has
>  the best material properties, we use it because it has adequate material
>  properties and doesn't cost too much.
>
>
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"Now, I go to spread happiness to the rest of the station. It is a
terrible responsibility but I have learned to live with it."
 Londo, A Voice in the Wilderness, Part I

"To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like
administering medicine to the dead." -- Thomas Paine

 Thomas Paine