/sci/ - Science & Math

>>9182988
>>9182979
>>9182929

Ok retards here's a lesson on engineering
Say a rope of 1" diameter can support up to 500 pounds and that a 1 mile long stretch of it weights 100 pounds, 1 mile would weight 100 pounds, the next segment would have to support those 100 pounds, the next one 200 and so on until you have a 5 mile long stretch, no biggie you make the rope 2" thick, great now it supports 1000 pounds but also weights 200 pounds but w/e we need to make mine asteroids for silicone or iron, very rare minerals, but now we can only go up to 2.5 miles, plus our original 5 miles, no biggie we make the rope 3" thick, but it weights 300 pounds... See what I'm getting at? We don't have magic ropes, steel rope would end up having a diameter hundreds of miles long, even carbon nanotubes would be miles long and take up more resources than are literally available on Earth, we would have better luck turning the large hadron collider or Harvard's linear particle accelerator into a rail gun and pointing it to space.
T. Civil engineer