Gravity on Stations

jedion357's picture
jedion357
June 2, 2009 - 12:07pm
Anyone have the formulas for computing gravity on a station?

I know its increases the farther one is from the hub which is 0
and is a function of the rotation of a station.

Since bigger stations have greater rotation I imagine they also rotate slower so as to not squash the inhabitants of the outer most deck.


I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers!
Comments:

TerlObar's picture
TerlObar
June 2, 2009 - 9:03pm
I do.  I've posted it before in places I'll have to dig it up and post it again (or just recompute it).
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jedion357's picture
jedion357
June 2, 2009 - 9:11pm
TerlObar wrote:
I do.  I've posted it before in places I'll have to dig it up and post it again (or just recompute it).
maybe a doc or download in this project might be a good idea?

I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers!

TerlObar's picture
TerlObar
June 3, 2009 - 6:44pm
I found at least one of the places I posted info on the gravity and rotation times/speeds for the various sized stations.  It can be found in the Space Wheels topic on the starfrontiers.org site.
Ad Astra Per Ardua!
My blog - Expanding Frontier
Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site
Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine
Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine

Anonymous's picture
w00t (not verified)
June 9, 2009 - 1:08pm
I grabbed the jist of the posts from the Space Wheels post on sf.org for reference in this project.
Great stuff from all who contributed. :-)

TerlObar wrote:

For a standard 1g of gravity at the wheel, here is the rotation speed (time per 1 revolution) as a function of station size along with how fast the wheel is moving linearly around the hub:

Station Size   Time for 1 revolution   Wheel Velocity
------------ --------------------- --------------
1 19.87 sec 31.62 m/s
2 24.18 sec 44.72 m/s
3 34.41 sec 54.77 m/s
4 39.74 sec 63.25 m/s
5 44.43 sec 70.71 m/s
6 48.66 sec 77.46 m/s

So your size six station spins about 2 1/2 times slower than a size 1 station. For comparison, 50m/s is 112.5 mph. Needless to say, looking out the window will probably get you fairly dizzy. As for forces involved, it would be just like building things on the earth's surface. Everything is feeling stresses and forces under 1g of acceleration. Spin direction doesn't matter, and really has no meaning. Look at it from the other side and it is spinning the other direction. Of course, in the standard SF description, the ships dock at the hub so your ship has to match that rotation speed to join up. Matching the rotation at the center-line is easy, drifting off the center-line to reach the hub wall and maintain position is much trickier.


Aethelwulffe wrote:
The easiest way to dock would involve using grapples and winches (once rotation has been matched). A system for pumping water (radiation shielding/water supply/counterbalance) in tanks around the rim to automatically correct for imbalance in the load would probably work. Pumping it from a heavy edge in both directions to the "light" edge would cancel out most of the wobble, without inducing much of a third axis of rotation, but of course some small amount of wobble will happen that would need to be corrected for with manuevering. Depends on what kind of orbit the thing is in. The larger the radius of a station, the smoother the "gravity" would feel. Imagine an apartment building in space with several big pad-eyes at the "top" for cables to connect it to a counterweight several kilometers away.


Will wrote:
Would there be much difference between a toroidial space station and an O'Neill cylinder?


Aethelwulffe wrote:
If an O'Neill cylinder is large enough, you could orient yourself inside it, put down some high speed landing gear and thrust "downward" with your craft oriented parallel to the tangent of the cylinder, and the nose oriented with the cylinder's rotation and just "land" a wheeled craft. Friction from thrusting against the inside surface would accelerate your ship so that it matches the rotation of the centrifuge. Imbalances would still result in wobble. I am not sure how it affects a cylinder vs a wheel. TerlOBar is the one to help with that I think.


parriah wrote:
So, The larger sizes wouldn't put any more strain on the components than the smaller stations? But, suppose there's a central section that doesn't rotate and there's a bering or something between that allows the wheel to rotate, but the ships dock in an area that doesn't rotatThat's going to be in 0g anyway isn't it?(Or near enough to it) The further away from the hub, the higher the delta V on the body. Right?


beowulf wrote:
The larger wheels would have more mass and therefore put a greater strain on whatever was holding the structure together. You could probably use something like suspension bridge cables to hold the whole thing together. Bridge cables on earth are already designed with 1g in mind.

Also, regarding the original post, you need to distinguish between rotation speed and rotation period. A small station could be rotating at a slow speed (measured at the rim), but still have short rotation period (high rpm). A large station could have a high rotation speed at the rim and have a low rpm. Terlobar's chart is a good reference for this.

Yeah, if the central hub does not rotate, standing in there would feel just like the zero g you would get in any other non-rotating station or ship.


Aethelwulffe wrote:
Good analysis. Same thing applies to larger spacecraft. If you have a spacecraft built to SF style (long, narrow, big struts) then the larger it is, the less efficient it will be just due to structural requirements to support it's own mass. Tall buildings are an excellent example. Naval ships are not comparable, as stress are drastically different and not so much constrained by acceleration requirements. Bigger spacecraft will be slower for economic reasons.

BTW, 1200 meters is .75 statuate miles, not 1.8 for the size six station. It would be 2.3 miles in diameter, or 3800 meters. If the thing were 200 meters wide, and twenty stories deep, you would have 15 square kilometers of living space. You could cram 1.5 million humans into that, or more.

The Larry Niven Ringworld is an example of materials science gone mad, as well as an example of the high speeds that are required to give a centrifuge effect in a very large arc (big diameter). Tangental velocity would be 1,200,000 Meters per second to give you less than a gee of acceleration. The force is still only 1 gee, no matter how fast it is spinning. Rigidity is the main concern. If it deforms, you are toast.

The longer a spoke or cable gets, the weaker it is for many reasons. It's own mass, more manufacturing defects in the length, etc.. Stretch plays a larger part as well. All the same, the size of space station we are talking about here could be accomplished with todays materials.