Stomach turning transport ring in Orbis Starports

[5PIDER]

The trucks are magnetic. A jumping station wouldn't affect anybody inside due to the use of Alcubierre drives.

Futuristic showers probably spray from all sides or something similar, but the star ports are so massive in their rotation, the water would hardly be affected anyways.

 

[Jintosh]

The fine tuning of rotation and mass due to take-offs and landing actually helps make more sense of the limited timing you are given to land/take-off, and why there are such high consequences for those who fail to comply. Not only is it needed so that efficient use is made of the limited docking space, but the station's mass would make inertia a huge force, so compensating for changes in mass would need to be implemented at the right point in time to have an effect at the time the ship lands/takes off.

 

[Soda Popinski]

I just targetted a docking ship across the hangar. About 700 meters. So definitely not 2km interiod diameter.

As far as off balanced stations, cargo that can be loaded into your ship within seconds can probably be moved around as ballast quite easily.

 

[WO-One]

The inner diameter of the docking bay is 1Km (1000m).

I base this on a friend being docked directly opposite me and having him registered as being 984m away. Allowing for the measurement point to be (probably) the CofG of each ship and the height above the deck floor on our landing gear, I'm extrapolating the last 6m.

 

[Edith_The_Hutt]

So a few more observations on these trucks after playing around with the debug camera:

• They definitely have wheels and don't seem to run on any sort of obvious rail system.
• The roads they run on have right angle turns running onto unused roads which run parallel to the axis or rotation (longitudinally?) down next to each of the landing pads. I'm guessing this is supposed to be the way cargo and other goods are transported between docking pads.
• By turning off rotational correction inside the station it's possible to see that the trucks heading anti-spinwards are stationary, indicating that these trucks are traveling precisely the speed that the station rotates beneath them either with or against the direction of spin.

And a few thoughts on the gravity of the docking ports (results rounded to 2 significant figures):

• The internal gravity can be calculated as: (Radius of Rotation × 4 × π²) ÷ (Period of Rotation²). I timed the Period of Rotation of the station to be about 90 seconds so this can be simplified to: Internal Gravity = Radius of Rotation × 0.0049
• Given the updated figure of 700 metres for the internal diameter of the station from Soda Popinski we can work out the gravity at the docking pads to be about 1.7ms^-2 or 0.17G. This seems pretty reasonable for docking work, given the huge cargoes and ships involved. It also means the trucks are traveling at a far more reasonable 55mph
• The figures from WO-One (1000 metres for internal radius) come out as 2.45ms^-2 or 0.25G. Still pretty reasonable.

Which leads me to conclude:

• Those trucks traveling anti-spinwards are really not stable, they're effectively weightless, the slightest bump or jolt is going to send them drifting into the middle of the docking port.
• Those right-angle turns are going to be really uncomfortable for anyone on board, and there's no way the road should be flat to accommodate them.
• Rotational correction probably makes commanders feel slightly sick, but far less than combat rolls do, try to remember this when heading towards your docking pad upside-down.
• Docking pads have about the same gravity as the moon. Are we going to see this in the walk-about expansion? Can I jump on top of my ship?

 

[GJ51]

I always wondered what would happen if someone living in a coriolis station was to jump. Would this person still be subject to artificial gravity?

It must be a pain to play football in these station.

They would get crushed by an Anaconda...