/sci/ - Science & Math

>>9768489
>>9768667
You can't tell the difference if the radius is sufficiently large.
A small radius means different accelerations at head and feet, plus Coriolis forces.
Spinning too rapidly makes you dizzy.
Back when O'Neill was planning space colonies, they decided that 1 or 2 RPM was the safe limit. To get 1 gee at 1 RPM requires at 912 meter radius. 230 meters at 2 RPM.

Of course, you don't need an entire ring. Here's a spacecraft which tumbles end-over-end, the habitable part of the ship counterbalanced by the reactors. This also provides shielding-through-distance.
The low-thrust ion engines art at the mid-point.

>>9672955
There ARE exceptions to the rule.
Here's a design which assumed some sort of efficient nuclear-electric converter. Power without insanely large radiator fins. Ion engines exert only milligees but can maintain that for weeks on end.
Ship spins around the axis of thrust for centrifugal "gravity". You want a large radius of gyration so the spin rate can be low and you avoid Coriolis effects. Rather than a ring habitat, they put the life-system out on one end of a truss, counterbalanced it with the powerplant (see the radiators at the far end?) and set the engines in the middle. Drive is at right angles to the spin-grav but is too small to "tilt" the floors noticeably.

If one of those aneutronic fusion charged-particle-to-electricity schemes ever pans out, this would work.
A ship like this could, of course, never enter an atmosphere or "land" on anything more massive than a large asteroid.