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Ian K said..Macroscien said..
i suggest we could use magnets instead of water.
Magnets fountain to be exact.
If we shoot up magnets in atmosphere less/ airless environment -
then magnets will fall down converting all gravitational energy into kinetic
then using "magnetic trampoline" at bottom we could send those magnets back to exactly the same high.
Bouncing indefinitely without any extra energy needed! by magnetic trampoline I simply understand some magnetic rail / pipe to redirect returing magnets 180 degree.
Yes magnets would get away from the watery friction. I'll have to think about it.
I jumped onto his "orbital rings" video. The last in his series of mega space engineering concepts. (Will I get sucked into his earlier ones? ) Seems to make sense? Everyday materials! Not even carbon fibre. A lot of it though!! Can't see the human race lasting long enough to get that together.
Drive your car to the moon, hopping between concentric rings along hollow tethers! Way to go.
Before to go into habitable orbital rings
I proposed few experiments that we could do NOW.
Lets sent into our orbital micro gravity : thin but strong line, could be something like spectra.
we make ring small , then bigger and bigger /
We spin it faster and faster - so centrifugal force keep the perfect round shape.
But then unexpected happen.
We will not be able possibly to increase size of this circle indefinitely, and speed even when well below tensile strenght of material.
As some point harmonic frequencies come to play.
The longer the circle then more difficult to control.
Like by analogy problem with controlling our plasma in our toroid fusion vessel,. Suddenly bulbs comes to play and nothins seems to be like we imagined in safe place.
We need to smooth and dislodge first those before we could go even further.
Summarizing. Theoreticaly we could buy at nearest finish shop 40,000km of fishing line, made of spectra,.
load on Falcon 9 and ship into space.
Unroll and make full loop around the Earth.
Don't you think so?
I doubt. Those nasty harmonic frequency will kill our looping device.....Obviously orbital ring will face exactly the same problem by magnified by factor of x
BTW
I did invent orbital ring ( independently) so there is only matter of egg and hen question, who was first, But that doesn't bother me at all .