Flying Inside A Rotating Torus Space Station (Artificial Gravity)?

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11 comments, last by RivieraKid 7 years, 8 months ago

Yeah, but the core of the question is air flow. Whether or not his jump had enough energy to carry him all the way to the edge from the core is kind of an important factor. Also he isn't falling toward the outer ring, he is drifting toward it while moving across a rotating column of air. That column of air would be rotating with the rest of the station and accelerating him.

That column of rotating air inside the rotating space craft is going near the speed of the 'ground'. As you drift toward the ground you'll be moving through air approaching the 60 miles an hour of the ground itself. That's about half of what is needed for skydiving simulators in 1g here on earth. Unless you "Tuck and streamline" it is going to have a rather drastic effect on you and take you along for the ride.

Even if you DID touch the 'ground' surface with a 60mph relative velocity you're still in zero g if you haven't picked up any lateral velocity. In all likelyhood you go spinning and rolling. Your risk isn't in hitting the ground that is moving at 60mph, other than a very nasty case of road rash, your worry is whether or not you're getting smack by a building doing 60mph in your general direction. Aim for a roadway and prepare the skin grafts.

Now, jumping out of the core through a vacuum and smacking yourself against a projection on the inside hull of a ring structure... That's going to be a very different matter.

Old Username: Talroth
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Centrifugal force only works when you're attached to the thing rotating


No. "Centrifugal force" is just the apparent acceleration relative to a rotating object caused by your inertia. If you were in a rotating wheel station, and you dropped an object, the object would still "fall" to the floor, though possibly not via the same path as it would under normal gravity. So, if your craft started out sitting on the rotating part of the station, then it would still have a tangential velocity - this would manifest as an apparent tendency to "fall". If the craft's tangential velocity from the rotation was somehow nulled completely, THEN it would just sit in zero-G, but I think it should be possible to have a "helicopter" that nulls just enough tangential velocity to appear to "hover."

Here is a nice video about the subject that also includes a video game reference.

Short answer, is gravity works, but there are some strange artefacts such as the Coriolis effect

My Oculus Rift Game: RaiderV

My Android VR games: Time-Rider& Dozer Driver

My browser game: Vitrage - A game of stained glass

My android games : Enemies of the Crown & Killer Bees

coincidentally the new Star Trek movie has a lengthy action sequence inside an spherical space station creating artificial gravity by spinning. I didn't give it high marks for realism.

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