From: Michael Lorrey (retroman@together.net)
Date: Fri Oct 10 1997 - 20:24:01 MDT
James Rogers wrote:
>
> At 03:19 PM 10/10/97 -0700, Freespeak wrote:
>
> [...SNIP...]
> >In conception, 'Freedom Ship' seems to be one of the
> >most advanced freedom projects I know of. It's a
> >project to build a huge ship, three times as long as
> >the Empire State Building is tall -- 4310 ft. long,
> >725ft. wide. It will have a superstructure, rising
> >25 stories above its deck. It will have space for
> >at least 50,000 residents, 15,000 personnel, and
> >20,000 guests and visitors.
> [...SNIP...]
>
> There appears to be an engineering problem with the design, namely the size.
>
> In an ideal rigid floating body, the net buoyancy of the object is uniform
> across the entirety of the bottom of the object. In reality this is never
> the case. The problem is that these variations in buoyancy generate
> stressful forces on the ship that grow geometrically as the length grows
> arithmetically. At some point the stresses will tear the ship apart.
>
James,
Are you aware of any use of composites in the construction of large
ships? AFAIK, large hull construction still relies on steel and some
aluminum. I imagine that carbon-carbon sturcutral components and woven
kevlar hull meterial would be a high tech version of the old flexible
hulls of yore, like the eskimo kayak and St. Bernard's boat (that one
that was on the cover of Nat. Geographic 15 or so years ago). Using
multiple such hulls supporting a stabilized platform would seem to me to
be an optimum solution.
-- TANSTAAFL!!! Michael Lorrey ------------------------------------------------------------ mailto:retroman@together.net Inventor of the Lorrey Drive MikeySoft: Graphic Design/Animation/Publishing/Engineering ------------------------------------------------------------ How many fnords did you see before breakfast today?
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