Space Colony Construction

>>14864450

Lots and lots of tungsten, probably. It'd be pretty durable in space.

>>14864450
Space mining from Jupiters moons, mars moons, and the asteroid belt

>>14864450
Everyone says that, but realistically it's incredibly inefficient. They could just live out there instead of bringing these colonies into Earth orbit.

They bring asteroids from the belt into earth's orbit for easy access when building colonies. They talk about it, like, all the fucking time in UC Gundam shows.

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>>14864450
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(planet)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn

Build a seed system that can mine the resources to create more of itself, self replicating factories.

If you are talking about a specific setting/universe then idk

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>>14864450
You don't need space resources to construct them.
The material for even a thousant of these space colony are nowhere rare on Earth. Right now we are using more of those materials each month than what would be needed to build a space Colony every weeks.

The only reason we keep arguing for deep space mining is that the current means of putting stuff into orbit are not "economical" within our current Capitalist market.
Nobody is interested to pay to haul 1 000 000 tons into orbit. But it doesn't mean we can't or don't have said material and we are not technologically capable of doing so efficiently.
For example THIS MONTH we produced 4,937 thousand metric tonnes of aluminium. And a Space colony wouldn't be all aluminum.

So yes, we could easily build 1000 space colony out of Earth's resource.
But it won't happen before
a) we need it / someone 'rich' want it
b) it become technologically feasible
c) and can be done fast enough (no point in building one for 50years if technological evolution would have made you reconsider it entirely)

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city when

>>14864450
Why is that ring sometimes in front of the mirrors and sometimes behind them?

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>>14864465
Colonies are put in lagrange points because its like a space sargasso sea. If you put something there, you can keep it there without too much station keeping.
Besides, these colonies can't be too far from earth because they aren't self sufficient. They still rely on Earth for certain things.

>>14864604
>Besides, these colonies can't be too far from earth because they aren't self sufficient. They still rely on Earth for certain things.
Like what?

>>14864617
Precious precious salt

>>14864666
Good joke, good joke.

>>14864617
Phosphore, that's no jokes
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/mining.php#id--Element_Bottlenecks

Even getting and reproducing fertile soil will need to have easy access to Earth biosphere

>>14864450
http://www.nss.org/settlement/space/#intro
>If the single largest asteroid (Ceres) were to be used to build orbital space settlements, the total living area created would be well over a hundred times the land area of the Earth. This is because Ceres is a solid, three dimensional object but orbital space settlements are basically hollow with only air on the inside. Thus, Ceres alone can provide the building materials for uncrowded homes for hundreds of billions of people, at least.

>>14864594

they are farming pods and it doesn't really matter which side they are on

This is the space colony model by Wave, and it's not based on the Gundam colonies, just the actual concept. It would be impossible to place on a stand like that with the ring on the other side and still see through the windows of the colony.

>>14864808
>it will run out in 2030
time to stock up

>>14864465
Putting them around earth provides stable orbits, keeps them closer together for easier management and trade, and each of the sides was supposed to specialize in the trade/production of something iirc, which means they sort of need each other.

Also, its to keep an eye on them. The furthest out colonies always go crazy and start killing everyone around them.

>>14864568
>The only reason we keep arguing for deep space mining is that the current means of putting stuff into orbit are not "economical" within our current Capitalist market.
They're not going to be economical in any market. Dragging yourself out of a gravity well is incredibly energy intensive. It's always going to be preferable to use in-situ resources rather than bring our own along, even in some hypothetical future where we have cheap space launch capabilities. Dragging an asteroid in from the belt to your construction facility can actually be really energy efficient, orbital transfers don't take nearly as much energy as setting the orbit up in the first place. This is also the reason why a future Earth would definitely need some sort of military presence to police space, because lobbing asteroids at the planet is just as easy and theoretically something any crazy with their own ship could do. You need to have someone in place to stop them before it gets to that stage.

>>14864451
tungsten is probably one of the worst materials to build a space colony out of. It's extremely heavy which is the opposite of what you want in your space building materials.

>>14864450
The US could have built a half dozen space colonies in ten years back in the 1970s if it wanted on top of maintaining it's existing spending.

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>>14865605
That would depend of what you call "market". Depending of who is making the decision and how much one can spare there is such a thing as "worth the expense". By the time we start considering producing Space-colony we may live in a post-scarcity world where building self-replicating nanobot swarm is more a question of getting democratic support than allocation of budget.

As you said, letting someone with the power to destroy all of humanity would be ill-advised. And we might have to kill anarchist who think they should be free to exploit any free resource available to create their own utopia or space-wall against alien immigrant.

A topic that haven't been mentioned yet is that a space station at more than a light-second from Earth will start having trouble staying within the same "Internet" network.
We've kept improving the Internet with the basis that all links would only get faster, more instantaneous. But for space-colony several light-minute/hours away even syncing local copy of the internet wouldn't solve all problems.

>>14866093
As long the delays are in seconds its all good

>>14866093
And if we had a self-replicating nanobot swarm, it would still be more efficient to work with material already in space than to bring our own. This isn't an issue of scarcity, it's an issue of practicality. The only reason to bring all your material up out of your gravity well is if you're intentionally going for the slowest and least effective means of production as some sort of art piece. If you want to get space colonies built on any reasonable time frame, you're going to work with space-based materials. Like in that picture you posted, Earth plays a role in the supply chain but as much as possible is done with material extracted from the moon.

>>14864819
>the total living area created would be well over a hundred times the land area of the Earth.
I wonder what the total land area of the Sides are throughout the UC. Someone double check these calculations.

>Assume UC Bunches are the same dimensions as O'Neill's Island Three cylinders.
>4 km radius, 20 km length.
>Total surface area is 904.78 sq km.
>Minus the two bases, 804.24 sq km.
>Half the surface is glass, except in the Side 3 Bunches, so all the other Sides' Bunches are 402.12 sq km.
>Without even looking it up, I seem to remember an estimate for the average number of Bunches in a Side to be 30 or 40, let's estimate an average of 35.
>Before the construction of Side 7, we'd have 402.12 x 35 x 5 + 804.24 x 35?
>98519 sq km of artificial land in the Earth Sphere?
>Compared to 148,940,000 sq km of Earth landmass?
>7,000,000,000 people sharing 98519 sq km, not counting the lunar habitats.
>71,052 people/sq km? That can't be right, where did I mess up?

Anyways, I'm pretty sure O'Neill suggested mining the moon and sending material from there to orbit via a lunar mass driver, followed by asteroid mining once enough material had been brought from the moon to make it feasible. I imagine the UC world-builders went with that. The lunar establishments do seem older than the other parts of the Earth Sphere.

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>>14866124
If you can't build all the factory needed to convert the asteroid into a space-colony the practicality can reverse in Earth's favor.

It's too easy to imagine the conversion as requiring only electricity but if your production process require gravity (to shape things), organic material (for seals) or huge quantity of various gas (which may not be dumpable nto space) you might not save anything by bringing resources from space.

The time-parameter can also work against space resources. Even diverting a SMALL Near-Earth asteroid could take dozen of years. Even with Infrastructure for the long run (producing colony continuously) could be slower than using Earth resources.
And we have not talked about Space-Elevator, Space-Tether, Launch loop or Orbital-ring lifter (which could be considered more efficient than space-fabricator)

I'm playing the devil advocate here, I know space-resource would very certainly ease the hulls and 50% of the work.

>>14864819
I think I'd rather live on Ceres than a floating pringles can

>>14864604
Why did you post the Earth-Sun points instead of the Earth-Moon points?

hard-working japanese people

:^)

>>14866474
Shit, you got me there.