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Shape of the Orbital Wires?
by Luiz Simi on Wednesday February 11, @03:59AM
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| Hi,
The whole cycler idea is really wonderful and makes a lot of sense (by the way, this article and its two follow-ups were enough to convince me to buy "Permanence" by Amazon.de). But I have a question: which shape the orbital wires around Jupiter (or the brown dwarves) would have? Would they be coil-like, or what? I have trouble to get a picture of how the orbital wires would look like. |
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Re: Shape of the Orbital Wires?
by Karl on Wednesday February 11, @06:45AM
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Around a planet such as Earth, orbiting tethers will naturally stretch out perpendicular to the plane of their orbit: one end pointing at the planet, the other pointing away. Around Jupiter or brown dwarfs, the gravity gradient is such that this doesn't work except very close to the planet. So you need another means of stabilizing the cable so that it presents the greatest cross-section to the magnetic field. I've heard proposals such as loops or rotating tethers for this scenario. The tethers I describe in Permanence are, of course, a bit fanciful and exaggerated. But I think a loop, traveling edge-on to the field, is one possibility.
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