More seriously though, rotating habs are more difficult to spin properly than Clarke knew. The Russians discovered this and kept it to themselves.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=1VPfZ_XzisU

I personally like the idea of spinning up large asteroids but the Dzhanibekov Effect will cause a lot of sloshing. If I understand it right, you have to spin them along the long axis, not like O’Neill cylinders. Two separate habitats at opposite ends of an air shaft. Clarke rings have to be careful about docking platforms. In fact they might need an inertially separate structure floating near them to handle loading and unloading of cargo, and then ferry materials back and forth across the “air gap” using very small vessels or robotic arms.

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m4rtink a day ago | parent [-]

IIRC O’Neill cylinders type 3 cylinders were supposed to be built in pairs - even the first picture on the Wikipeda article has them like that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder

Wouldn't that cancel out some of these forces ?

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hinkley a day ago | parent [-]

The thought of an entire space station being reliant on none of four bearings three times the size of a football stadium ever needing maintenance and never seizing up is terrifying.

You can’t just spin down a station like that for maintenance, can you?

I believe technically you’re correct, but practically it’s unworkable.

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rini17 a day ago | parent [-]

Noone says it's easy. But at least have inside a small rotating cylinders for 1-2 persons to sleep and exercise in. Should be doable with active stabilization so that it isn't sloshing and not endangering anything if it seizes.

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hinkley a day ago | parent [-]

I'm somewhat fond of the 'bolo' design - several habs cabled together and spun.

While the cables are now a new 'single point of failure', Tethers, Inc had (has, as it turns out they have not gone under as I suspected) some pretty compelling ideas of how to avoid that by using a mesh instead of a cable, so micro-meteoroids couldn't sever the cable with one extra-lucky hit.

	▲	rini17 20 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That has issues with getting in and out. It's possible to solve everyhing, like have a zero-gravity "hub" in the middle, reachable from the habs by lift climbing the ropes. Or have pulleys reconfiguring whole habs as needed. But again anything moving in space and with life support sounds like massive r&d effort.