On Thu, Sep 25, 2014 at 07:34:30PM +0100, Timothy Collinson wrote: > Yes, I may yet go bigger with both commercial and community. Say, > 40,000,000 apiece. again, not short of space. I haven't seen the book at all, but something seems a bit off with the figures. Did you say that the 'mid' quality residential space was about 4 dtons per person? That seems very small by our spacious surface-dweller standards, even in cities. I skimmed a few different city apartment listings, finding an average of about 10-15 dtons per bedroom, so possibly close to 10 dtons per person for personal living space alone. That does not include any internal access or shared facilities. Checking out a couple of apartment building plans, I would add another 40-60% for those. So I'd estimate more like 15 dtons per person for mid-quality long-term living areas, still not including larger-scale access equivalents to streets, walkways, subways, or similar. 4 dtons seems more suitable for something like cabins or compact hotel rooms designed for at most medium-term occpancy than for lifetime habitation. It's well below the average living space alone (without any access) for most of the more crowded cities on Earth. As another comparison, it's a bit less than half the minimum legal size for construction of residential buildings in London (again, personal living area alone). Even allowing some room for cultural variations, I would certainly at least double those volumes given for residential volume, and if you wanted the sort of spaces typically found inside Western apartment blocks, quadruple it. I'm not sure if there is separate provision for volume occupied by various forms of transit and service access within the station. That needs to be available not just for residents but also for freight transport and construction equipment, with large enough cross-section to permit anything that might conceivably need transporting within the station. That may include replacement structural members and such. > LOL! Lovely thought for this beasty! But no, it's just 'supposed' to be > maintaining a geosync orbit.... them's the rules. I can't see a way of > fudging them. Just out of interest, what sort of power output and thrust do the rules say is the minimum permitted for a billion-ton station? - Tim
