#soooo many fun problems to solve and design goals

[dead-generations]

with rotational artificial gravity it appears, from a maths and chalkboard engineering perspective, that there are exponential benefits for increasing diameter up to a point. it does seem to be a go big or go home situation.

there are two basic reasons for this - the first is that as you increase radius you increase circumference by a commensurate amount. for a torus, the area of the circle described here is inconsequential - it should only be filled with the struts etc connecting the centrepoint to the circumference. mostly empty space. your circumference is your living space. This is also true for a cylinder, where the habitable space is the interior surface of a cylinder and the "area" is mostly empty air.

the second is that you can decrees the necessary rotation speed to generate the desired "gravity" considerably. Basically, you spin a 1 kilometre torus slower than a 10m torus to get the same "gravity" pulling you away from the centre point.

This is desirable because it reduces the Coriolis force, which results in two big problems for rotational gravity. the first and most obvious is that falling objects follow a curved path, the higher the force the more extreme the curve. the second is that it affects your inner ear - i forget the number right now but we know about how many rpm a human can tolerate before their inner ear causes significant disorientation and continuous vomiting, I believe it is 2 rpm?

the issue is that the bigger it is, the larger the forces involved, which leads to significant issues of sheering and means that failures become more catastrophic. I wish I had the maths in front of me but this generally leads to a diametre of about 1km being the sweet spot, iirc.