xxxxxx@shadowgard.com wrote:

>     Beanstalks have problems too. Like what happens if they fail, and
>     limits on how much up/down traffic they can support.

You can get around some of the safety issues by having an engineered
breakpoint at (say) 100 km altitude. If the thing breaks there then
it will fall right along the planetary spin axis so you only need a
safety zone 100km long and a few km wide. There are plenty of places
even on Earth which you could use. Hawaii?

Traffic capacity is handled by having lots of separate cables and using
self-powered crawlers on them. But...

>     Frankly, given Traveller tech, good old anti-gravity will do just
>     fine. Think along the lines of a huge tanker or container ship that
>     just shuttles between ground and orbit.

Fundamentally, I agree. A beanstalk is a show-off project, *unless* you
want to posit reasons to limit orbital grav traffic. Engine noise.
Objections of the local population to sonic booms every day and night.
A desire to not have very large ships (which do occasionally fall out of
the sky) cruising around overhead. So *much* atmospheric grav traffic
that it's hard to carve out ground-to-orbit (and back) corridors.
Psycho-social or religious issues. And so on.

Jonathan