L4 settlement part 2

With a population of half a million with living spaces divided roughly into four equal quadrants there would be 125,000 citizens in each quadrant. Further dividing  the quadrant into sub-quads, each sub-quad would have roughly 31,250 citizens. Building apartment complexes that fit 120-150 residents and using 150 as the dividing amount, 31,250 citizens would fit in 208 apartment complexes. If I define an apartment complex to have 20 studio apartments at 46m2, 30 two bedroom apartments at 55m2 and four three bedroom apartments at 65m2, add a dining hall and kitchen, three laundry rooms and a central ground level courtyard I found the total would add to about 3000m2. As this will be a three level apartment complex, each floor would then have 1000m2. So in the chart below of one sub-quad there are 208 apartment blocks in about a 30mx33m block size.

In addition to the numerous pink apartment blocks is the purple path, which is a circuitous path that does a full half marathon circuit through every sub-quad, that is, through the entire settlement. It would be used twice a year for a marathon and half marathon race. There is a primary school near the center, this is for daycare and elementary school aged kids that only come from this sub-quad. In the upper right corner is the high school, it is in that corner as that corner is the center of the Quadrant. The other three sub-quad corners that meet there will also have something significant at the corner. The high school receives students from all four sub-quads (ie, the entire Quarter). There is a commercial area also near the center in a gold colour, there are dark horizontal lines, these are pedestrian paths that wrap around the entire perimeter and there is a green line to the right, this is a moving walkway that goes to/from the downtown area.

As a sub-quad is 971m by 625m, not every sub-quad will have a 150° change of inclination at a dodecagon vertice within it; if any did, the plan above would simply have a column empty of anything, like the empty column that is about the fifth one above. It can be seen that there is plenty of empty space for rearranging the plan for the apartment complexes to allow for a tennis complex, for example.

I did the above planning as I was curious if the population I had chosen (half a million people) would really fit well with the dimensions I picked (2500m circumradius dodecagon of 10km length), and it looks like it fits nicely with a human scale density.

Principally along the purple park line, but definitely all over the 'streets' of the sub-quad there will be trees grown in pots. A mix of decorative ones and ones that produce something edible, like olives, figs, apples, cherry, lemon and other citrus would be grown. 

I was also curious about the centrifugal force that provides us gravity. How much does gravity change depending on how high up we build? I did an analysis and found that even if the university or hospital goes up to seven floors, the top floor would be 0.9977g where at the ground floor it is 1.0062g.

Next I was trying to figure out what all of these apartment buildings and other buildings will be made of. It would be very expensive to bring in building supplies from Earth, so we would have to make do with what we can find nearby. For sure now that we have an industrial cylinder that has gravity, we can more easily create a brick factory that uses asteroid regolith as a base. Instead of making cinder blocks, bricks can be made that are 4x8x16 instead of the standard cinder block of 8x8x16. If we can make millions of these 4x8x16 and develop the mortar we could do a large portion of the construction with bricks and steel beams.

Depending on how much metal we can obtain panels could also be made that have one thin sheet of metal and then a layer of fine regolith dust and then another thin sheet of metal. If these panels could be mass produced they could also be used in numerous places.

The next thing I thought about was this idea of running the settlement like a social democracy with no income, no cash and no expenses and decisions made at various levels by the citizens who rotate into positions of authority. Obviously for teachers, nurses, doctors and farm workers they all have a specific role to play which gives them a place to go and something to do at specific times. Everyone who is not a farm worker will be expected to do a minimum, say 3 hours, per week at the farm, so for people who aren't in those specific roles, what will they do? So I thought of a bunch of different other roles: journalism, music and visual arts, sport coaching for a wide array of sports, sports teams and leagues management, hair dresser, sex worker, maintenance in terms of janitor but also fixing and renovations, infrastructure team, asteroid mining team, and any job inside the industry cylinder.

If a person is found to not be doing anything except for the minimum farm working hours, the sub-quad committee could meet with that person and try to work out for that person what they could do or try from the numerous different options. 

Additionally, from the earliest school years the kids will be taught that living on this settlement works as a social democracy where each is expected to play a role. Adults who are already filling a role could be called upon to come to a classroom and speak to the students to talk all about the role that this adult fulfills. As more and more different roles are displayed and explained to the students, each student may be able to form an idea of what role they intend to fulfill as they get older. In the later years of high school more detailed and specific information, like what is expected of you for each role will be given.