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