This project started as "Ooh this circular space station thing sounds cool. I'll just open Blender, make a couple of cylinders and go from there. But hold on, how large should I make the circle? I'll do some Googling while I wait for Excel to open up..."
368 days later (Damn so close, I didn't even notice. No I'm not insane, I last worked on this thing like six months ago.) I finally have enough data for a render of my hard sci-fi circular rotating space station.
Six second real-time GIF. 29 rings.How does this future marvel of technology spin? An array of big god damn tires. A single WIP tire pictured below with a 1.8 meter tall male reference model.
All calculations are done with six decimal digits of precision. (In practice, accurate down to two millimeters.) With its rotation, each ring generates exactly 1.0 standardized Earth gravity with a maximum of 1.0% variance. Maximum rotations per minute is 2.0 as most authors seem to agree that anything faster than that would be quite uncomfortable/require a long time to adjust as well to minimize the Coriolis effect. The slowest ring spins at 0.988 RPM and the outermost station diameter is 1.9 kilometers. This is the smallest space station of this type you can create while staying within the limits of 2 RPM. I did the math.
The black and white pattern denotes the maximum number of standard size rooms each level inside the ring has. (2195 rooms in total) I estimate the average population on the station would be around 3576 people but I'm probably going to change my plans on that.
Screenschot of the calculations in LibreOffice Calc.It's shame I can't make a looping GIF though as it takes 40854542873892747854033239281
815605733612264774400 (4*10^49) frames for all the rings to get back to their initial position at the same time which is roughly 4*10^54 years at 30 fps. Fun fact: 4e54 years from now, all atoms have decayed (as in gone) 10 billion years ago.
After manually redoing the rings four times I made this Python script to generate the rings with a single click.
http://pastebin.com/NragHK1kThe data was easy to copypaste by concatenating the table data into a single cell with this custom Calc function:
http://stackoverflow.com/a/2417109/3066568
