L4 Settlement part 6

A lot more disparate thoughts.

For the apartments and the dining hall kitchens, have only a water source that the temperature is not regulated and have a tankless hot water heater in each apartment to feed hot water to the bathroom sink and shower, and in the dining hall kitchen for the sinks and the dishwashers.

Have those four restaurants mentioned in a previous post make use of a single commercial kitchen. On the opposite side of the restaurants, have a reception hall for wedding and other large parties, and have the reception use same commercial kitchen.

Have an immense shoebox shaped space warehouse/port that is attached to the center of the end of the cylinder on the industrial side such that the box does not rotate but that the cylinder does. Have an opening between the two at the center that has a door that can be atmospherically sealed. The door will have a person sized opening that is within a large cargo opening for large items.

This microgravity space box will have numerous zones:

• A room temperature atmosphere included storage area for shipments to/from Earth that require atmospheric pressure and can't be frozen. 
• A -10c temperature atmosphere included freezer room for anything that would do better frozen.
• A large enclosed space with no atmosphere and no temperature control, to store anything for shipments to/from Earth that can be held there.
• A large spaceship port - an enclosed space that has an enormous door that is big enough with a wide margin to allow a space ship to enter and be tied down. There will be air tanks such that once the ship is tied down and the door is closed and sealed, the air tanks can be emptied into this space. When it is time for the ship to leave, the air is returned under pressure into those tanks. The ship would be tied down to an enormous disc that can rotate such that we can have the ship come nose first in, and then once in at any time it can be rotated 180° so it can be nose first on exit. I don't know if this is a good idea, but I was thinking there could be a mechanism to push safely the ship to exit the port with enough force to exit the L4 gravity well. Of course there would need to be an equal and opposing force but I figure this could be managed. Doing this would use the plentiful electricity we have rather than the previous fuel on the ship.

With all of this warehouse space having almost zero g, the insides can be empty and four storeys high but have lots of hooks embedded in the floors, walls and ceilings. Those hooks with some straps can be used to fix cargo such that it doesn't float around. For safety, workers will always be tethered in these large empty space volumes as otherwise they could find themselves somehow within the center with no method to get out of the center.

Within the industry cylinder up against the end where this end-box is, there will be the administration office that is the place where, with many cameras inside the box, the logistic manager will work, and where warehouse workers will go to hangout and receive instructions as to what needs to be done in the box 

For example, we might receive a shipment of 500 tankless water heaters but the rate of construction only has a need for them at a rate of 12 per week. So every Monday, for example, a warehouse worker will take 12 units and with the ease of zero g, move them into the industry cylinder. Once there, an elevator will move them down the ~2504m to get to the sub level to then have a different worker move them, now under 1g, to the construction site.

Continuing with this microgravity box, there would be space for atmosphere and non-atmosphere zero g manufacturing, for machines to be built that do mass production of anything that benefits from being manufactured at microgravity.

Still more with this very large microgravity box, some of it will be a laboratory under room temperature and atmosphere zero g experiments. Another will be for no atmosphere experiments. And another will be for 70 Kelvin experiments.

And finally this end-box will have an observation area that has atmosphere and has a clear view in the direction of Earth, with a handful of fixed telescopes to allow for a better view.

Different topic - clothes. There will be in each quarter a clothes exchange shop where any citizen can bring clothes at any time and any citizen can retrieve clothes at any time. I also thought that bulk t-shirt orders from Earth could be made for school age kids from K-12 that would be given to the students with their school supplies on the first day of school. We would hand down the t-shirts until the shirts are worn out. Similarly shoes, socks and underwear of a fairly wide variety will be ordered in bulk and simply distributed evenly to each of the four quarter clothes exchange shops.

Have the HR manager have a sub office for census, registration and passport control. Census would be every month for the early months as we grow from a few 100 citizens to a few thousand. Then the census could be every quarter until getting to 10s of thousands, and then it can be annually. Census could be taken simply by having people respond to an email or mobile device notification. Registration would be for things like births, marriages, divorces, deaths, incoming immigrants, outgoing emigrants and Earth students. Passports would be issued for any citizen going to Earth. Perhaps we would work with the Passport Canada office such that we use their services by validating all of the information and then simply sending them the info for them to produce the passports and send them back to the settlement.

I had ChatGPT-4o assist with determining the light fixture for the settlement. I asked it to mimic 85% of solar insolation producing only 360-700nm wavelengths of light to avoid the worst of UVA and UVB that causes skin cancer while also providing the correct wavelengths for photosynthesis. It determined that using our brightest available LEDs the light source would need to be 250m to 500m above the surface of the dodecagon. Given this I have revised the construction of the whole settlement, now it will be an inner cylinder of 2200m radius that has a vacuum within, but has the LED light panels on its outer surface which faces the dodecagon at 2500m circumradius. These two are connected by sparsely put cables as there will be no force that causes the central light cylinder to fall, but we will want it to rotate with the rest of the station. As before, below the dodecagon with a radius of 2504m will be the sub-level and the whole settlement will be as before, 10km long.

Given this new construction, nothing changes with respect to the settlement interior for the people, except that now it isn't possible to see as far around the cylinder as it would have been with a 2200m ceiling. One big difference is how much less atmosphere will be needed since we are no longer filling the whole cylinder. I had not calculated the nitrogen needed for the full cylinder, but for this new cylinder within a cylinder I asked and found that 49,612 tonnes of ammonia would be needed to get the Nitrogen gas required to fill this space.

In a previous post about getting the Nitrogen from ammonia mined at the Kuiper belt, instead of having a single ship to go there, we would create a continuous process. First send to the Kuiper belt the mining apparatus to gather up any asteroids that have ammonia. Then, every month, send a cargo vessel out to that mining apparatus to be filled with the ammonia asteroid. Do this continually, monthly, until the first cargo vessel returns and deposits the ammonia so as to produce the Nitrogen gas, and then now no new cargo vessels need to be created; the first one can be sent back again. Once that first one arrives, every month we will receive a shipment of ammonia to convert into Nitrogen. If we can get these cargo vessels to transport ~10,000 tonnes each, after five months we would have the Nitrogen gas needed, and then going forward we can store the ammonia and sell it for profit.

I asked ChatGPT-4o if we had a ship that could produce constant acceleration that provided 1g for the passengers to the midpoint and then decelerated at 1g to the 1/3 point of the Kuiper belt and use a Jupiter gravity assist, how long would it take, and I got 15.6 days. If we were able to produce an engine that provided such constant accel/decel this would be a game changer for the retrieval of ammonia.

There are five or six municipal pools in my town; in this space settlement we could create one for each sub-quad, near the daycare-dining hall-primary school; in this way part of the kids education could include swim lessons. Similarly we could create at the university complex an Olympic sized swimming pool and a lap pool to allow for swimming and diving competitions. In each case the pool would ingress into the sub-level to the required depth of the pool such that it would be mostly flush with the dodecagon surface.

Further roles that people would need to fill now include lifeguards at these pools, restaurant and reception hall waiters and waitresses, the kitchen crew for preparing the meals, serving them, busboys and dishwashers, logistics people to work in the external box warehouses, and to be moving cargo from there to wherever it is needed for the industry, farm or settlement. I am assuming that with a population of half a million people that there will be enough population to have all of these roles filled just by the desire of the different people to do different things. I do not know if there will need to be an incentive for any roles that few or no people want, but that need to get done. I do not know what could be an incentive, but perhaps for these least liked jobs we can have short shifts and ask many people to do them. 

If products arrive from Earth and are intended for the furthest distance of the farm, that could be as far as 20km away as the industry cylinder might be 5km, the settlement 10km and the farm 5km. Given this I have thought to add train tracks and an electric train to the sub-level to transport mostly cargo from being received from the warehouse to then be moved out to where it is needed. In fact, there could be a train line at each of the four cardinal points of the outer cylinder. Similarly, from that portal that exists between the rotating industry cylinder and the stationary warehouse-box, there could be elevators to descend to the Industry cylinder surface at each of the four cardinal points so as to meet up with the trains.