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-Z- (Z@Gundam.Com)
Sat, 28 Aug 1999 23:25:40 -0700
At 18:37 8/28/1999 -0400, you wrote:
>Now tons (ok maybe a bit less) of rocks fall into Earth every year. But
>they have very little effect because most of them are small enough to be
>burnt off in the atmosphere. Now while a colony itself is huge, it's a
>hollow tube. So effectively it's a 1 meter thick sheet falling thru air.
>The frictional burning must be incredible. In fact, if it has 18-60
>Gigaton of energy there's no way it won't burn up a 1 m thick object
>before impact.
>
>What do you think?
There's still the docking bay/industrial blocks on either end to consider.
I've yet to see exact dimensions for them, but they're at least a kilometer
across and as deep as they are wide.
The sunward (portside) bay block is large enough to contain six docking
bays arranged in a circle around the central entry port. Each bay is large
enough to hold five docks, each of which is large enough to accomodate
three 300-meter ships. Somewhere in all of that is a solar power station
capable of generating a gigawatt per hour and an unspecified number of
microgravity industrial labs.
Even if the rest of the colony boils off, those bay blocks are going to
behave as semi-solid bodies, akin to carbonaceous chondrites if not
nickel-iron or stony meteoroids, except that they'll be coming in on the
aforementioned shallow arcs instead of the Deep Impact linear trajectory.
And I'm not sure that everything in the meter-thick hull will burn up
before impact. The "ground" panels have landscaping to an average depth of
5 meters, with a variance of 1 to 10 meters, with six major cityscapes and
six suburban residential areas, each of which covers an area of 41.4 square
kilometers (16 square miles). The suburbs have "rabbit hutch" apartment
buildings up to six stories tall, the cities office buildings up to 25
stories. There may be up to a hundred thousand elecars and several
thousand trucks and at least three tram lines with dozens of linear cars
each. The "sky" panels consist of an estimated 250 million quartz glass
blocks, each a cubic meter in volume, in a titanium frame. Those blocks
may fuse together in some places and disintegrate in others to produce
hundreds are potential impactors.
And if, as we've surmised, the "sky" panels are filled with water, either
by original design or as a result of precipitation and condensation, we
have a few tons of free-flowing liquid to make things even more interesting….
-Z-
-
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