/sci/ - Science & Math

I was thinking about Tarkinanon's sphere ship argument and came to the conclusion that the ideal long range, long term colony ship is shaped like a tic tac.

He postulated that you could build a sphere, fill each hemisphere with propellant, and use the "equator" of the sphere as a ring habitat. However, this would only give a few dozen to a few hundred feet (depending on sphere size) of usable space. Assuming 100 feet of usable deck, elongating the sphere even slightly by inserting cylindrical sections at the equator would double the usable space for a single 100ft section added. Triple for two, and so on. So the optimal colony ship design would be an O'Neil cylinder with the ends capped by propellant filled hemispheres. The only flaw in this plan would be the requirement for a large and sketchy propellant pipe straight though the middle of the drum. Since you're building this in orbit, you can accept fairly low thrust values and simply burn for longer. So maybe something like a single NTR pushing your giant tictac along as milli-g acceleration.