L4 Settlement Part 10

More disparate notes

Adjacent to the hospital downtown will be a ground floor blood/plasma donor clinic and blood test (and other medicinal test) center where donors can give blood and plasma and any citizen can go to get the blood tests, or other tests done that their doctor has asked for. On the second and, if needed, third floor will be the Public Health Agency whose mandate it will be to help improve the physical and mental health of everyone in the settlement. This agency will also make any policy decisions that are backed by scientific evidence and implicated by public health. In this same building could be where there is psychiatry and psychotherapy offices.

In past posts I looked into the travel time between an Earth mid LEO Gateway station and our L4 settlement. I asked about 1g accel/decel or an 'existing technology' which gave 2.5 days or 908 days respectively. The former is impossible while the latter is too long. Today I thought of a different idea; what if we had our ferry travel between L4 and the LEO Gateway station where it provides some amount of thrust for the first quarter and then reverse thrust for the last quarter and coasts in between. I found that doing a 2 m/s2 acceleration for the first quarter, and then coast, and then decel at that same rate would cut the time down to 6.72 days. I used an example of 10t of payload to represent a large group of people heading back to Earth during the University's summer break and this required 320t of methalox fuel where, for example, the SpaceX Starship's capacity is 1200t. I redid the calculation with hydralox and found only 78.5t was needed. That acceleration rate would provide 0.2g for 2.24 days, 0g for the middle 2.24 days and then 0.2g for the decel 2.24 days, so the passenger experience will be mostly weightless or near weightless for that ~one week duration. Being weightless will make it easier to turn the ship 180 so as to face the other way during the coasting so as to provide the reverse thrust to decelerate. With this new much faster way to get to/from L4 from Earth, we could very easily match departures from L4 to coincide with takeoffs from Earth surface such that we meet at the LEO gateway station at about the same time. In this way people/cargo from our settelement could return to Earth while at the same time, people/cargo from Earth can be transferred to the ferry to go back to L4.

For the farm cylinder livestock I have further thoughts. For the goats, since there will be about 17 per farm, they can have full run of the hectare assigned to them. From the industry cylinder, or perhaps constructed outside of it into coldwelded pieces, will metal fences that are high enough to be goat proof be made with an option for a gate or two. These tall fences will surround completely the goat hectare. There will be a gate for the farm worker to get in and out, but there could also be a gate that is between farm one's goat hectare and farm two's goat hectare. The idea is that we start with 15 goats in the very first farm. They procreate and eventually reach 20. At about that time we open the gate between farm 1 and 2 to allow five goats to start in farm 2. Now both farm 1 and farm 2 will procreate where farm 2 will keep growing and farm 1 will feed any excess past 17 to farm 2. We would join all of the goat hectares with gates this way so as to be able to move the goats among them. There would be numerous low and high bushes planted within the goat hectare so as to give the goats something to eat and as well some interest to their land. Water sprinklers attached to the ceiling will water these bushes and get the goats wet too. Once the goats in farm 1 are no longer milk producing they would slowly get culled and then new goats from a different level would be brought down to replenish that farm. Over the goat hectare there can be fairly dim lighting except for one area in the center of their area that has an area twice the size of all of the goats together that is as bright as the sun (or as close to as bright as the sun as we can get). This way if the goats want bright light, they can go to it. This light as would all lights, would dim in the evening to be mostly dark at night.

For the chickens, for the purposes of making it easier to get the eggs for 988 hens/hectare, and also for the purposes of starting with smaller batches and moving them to bigger ones; I have divided the hectare into 44 seperate chicken pens each of 220m2 and each holding about 22 chickens and each would have it's own coop. So when we get a first batch of ~22 chicks, they would grow in a warm place somewhere on the farm and then get put in plot 1 of the chicken hectare. When we get the second batch of ~22 chicks we can reuse that same warm place somewhere on the farm, and then the second batch into plot 2. This would continue until all plots are full. Eventually the chickens in plot 1 will reach the stage in life where they aren't producing as many eggs or aren't producing any at all. This would be the time to cull those chickens and then start a new batch of chicks.

Somewhere in the farm cylinder there would be one farm whose chicken area is at least partially set aside for the production of chicks that sadly have most of the males euthanized after hatching, and then the rest made ready to deliver to any farm that has a plot ready.

For the ground crops - potatoes, carrots and corn, we would use no-till farming to help build up the soil as we will start with a 2 parts asteroid regolith dust and 1 part Earth soil mix that has various prokaryotes and worms mixed in. With respect to worms, these we will get from Earth and keep that first shipment seperate so as to first create a worm farm, and then from that worm farm we will distribute randomly the worms out into the ground crop hectares. It may be necessary to have a tractor for the farm, so we would import an electric one from Earth that gets shared among the farms, perhaps 1 for every six or eight farms; we'll have to see what uses they fulfil.