[TML] Landing Pads (was something else)

[shadow at shadowgard.com]

On 1 May 2008 at 19:13, Tom B wrote:

> 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.

There's a reason some of those port types were described as "a 
cleared spot of bedrock".


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