L4 settlement part 5

More disparate thoughts

Have a restaurant downtown which includes some special foods that come from Earth but is mostly farm based, maybe have four restaurants of Lebanese, Italian, Mexican and American. These restaurants could serve more specialized wines and cocktails that come from Earth but that are not in quantities enough for all of the apartment kitchens. The settlement committee would need to vote on a method to have people go to these restaurants; it could be that restaurant tokens are issued to citizens in an order such that every citizen gets two tokens per year and they can book their restaurant time at any time based on the resto's reservation system.

Half marathon circuitious path; actually, the total area of the settlement can accommodate a full marathon distance. We would design it so that each quadrant has exactly a quarter marathon distance, this way on race day three distances can be planned, a quarter, half or full marathon.

Instead of having an individual church/mosque/synagogue at each sub-quad; downtown have the most magisterial form of them that can accomodate at least a few hundred people. As I am Catholic I know about having a big Cathedral like the Florence Cathedral in Florence. Similar magnificent buildings can be built downtown for other religions. If, for example, there end up being 1000 Catholic parishioners, have two masses on Saturday and three on Sunday, each with 200 people in the church. If the number of church goers really is much larger from a half million population, then we could consider that maybe a second church would need to be built.

For the university, create student housing adjacent to the university that includes a mix of settlement university students and students from Earth who pay a fee to attend this university which includes the lodging and the meals. The number of foreign students and the fee charged would be up to the settlement committee and the university since it involves immigration and collecting fees and the number of enrolled students. I would suggest that they have a cap on the number of Earth-origin students and a fixed conservative inflation rate on the fees charged so that this body of foreign students does not become a cash cow. Most of the fees collected would go right back to the university for the university to democratically decide what to do with it. It could be to get new research equipment from Earth, it could be to help sponsor a research project that is joint with an Earth university, it could be to help pay for a special scientist to come to stay with the university for a semester, or to pay a bursary for two or three Earth super qualified but fiscally poor students, or really anything which doesn't involve paying any university teacher or staff. 

Still with the university I would want there to be in addition to the programs already listed in previous posts to have a medical school to train GPs, specialists, nurses, paramedics, dentists and others. Perhaps with some of the funds we collect from foreign students we could give some of these medical school students time back on Earth for advanced training. And/or; make it a condition for any foreign student that comes here, that their family can host a settlement student to attend the university in their city or town.

The university could have agreements with a large number of Earth universities so that at L4 we can do any number of space based or microgravity experiments or research where we would take a small fee as part of whatever grant money was provided for that research project. This fee would be added to what we get from foreign students and then redistributed back out to the university's needs as described above.

Some person or people at the university who are head of the space program will have the special access to go to the center of the dodecagon where there is zero gravity. Maybe there is an authorized access only motorized lift from the roof of the seven storey university that can bring two or three passengers the 2440m to the top where inside the artifical sunlight structure is a small laboratory that has equipment to allow for a wide variety of microgravity experiments to take place.

We would have a hotel downtown, probably it would be no different from an apartment block; this apartment block would have as residents just the one or two families or people who work in the kitchen of the dining hall of the apartment block. All of the other apartments within that apartment block would be let out for renting. In this way the visitors from Earth will have their meals provided. As with all other incoming money, this would be collected and then the highest committee would decide what to do with it. Probably in this case it goes into the general pool to buy supplies from Earth.

I had mentioned in a previous post that there could be multiple observatories at each far end of this three cylinder settlement with farm-settlement-industry cylinders all connected. It has occurred to me that with this three joined cylinder complex spinning at 0.6 RPM to create the needed gravity, the view out of those observation areas could be sickening. On the farm side instead there could be a single zero g observatory at the center that extrudes out of the end of the cylinder and does not rotate and where the sun side of it is blacked out. On the industry side we wouldn't build an observation port because this is the end where we have a port that transfers people and cargo to and from Earth. However, in the port station that is built there, a non-rotating observatory could also be built hopefully in a way that Earth can be seen with a telescope.

An example of a school class field trip would be to go to either end so as to see what is out there.

In a previous post I discussed creating construction panels of a thin sheet of metal, a layer of fine regolith dust and then another thin sheet of metal.  Since writing that I learned about cold welding, and so these panels could be built outside of the industry cylinder and then brought in. In this way panels of any dimension could be constructed so that they can be precisely put in place when building the numerous apartments in the apartment complexes. These panels could have a narrow strip of steel that wraps around the panel to enclose the dust within. With more engineering in mind, these panels could be made to be structural in which case the building of the apartments would be made even easier.

Have a warehouse on Earth not too distant from where supplies would be launched into space to get to Earth's gateway station where an L4 settlement ferry goes back and forth. In this warehouse accumulate the goods that are destined for the settlement and package them in spaceship ready shipments. Each shipment could include a wide variety of items for the settlements. These could include boxed mattresses, fire extinguishers, spices, seeds, specialized skin care products, hospital supplies, medicines, flat-packed furniture, school supplies (accumulated through the whole year to have the bulk needed at the start of every school term; simplify by having only Hilroys of different colours, one set of pencil crayons and so on), musical instruments, paint for construction and paint for art, books for the various libraries, anything the university needs, and so on.

While each apartment will have a TV to watch whatever the settlement media company offers, downtown there will be a three or four room cinema to have a true movie going experience with pop-corn and drinks. We would need to obtain the projection and audio equipment to have a big screen. We could pay Earth bound movie distributers for movies that we would download from Earth to our settlement through that tenouous Earth L4 connection. We could also have our own supply of thousands of movies that we pay for permission to show publicly.

In terms of an Earth-L4 internet connection, as L4 is an AU away from Earth,  we may need, or it may be advantageous to have one, two or more data relay satellites that are between our settlement and Earth that have enough fuel for many years of the slight adjustments to keep them in place. I have found that the ISS currently has 600 Mpbs via ground-based antennas called the Near Space Network and a system of tracking and data relay satellites. So using that same Near Space Network, we would get internet access from our L4 station, though there would be an 8 minute delay given our distance.