Asssorted Ideas for Moon & Mars Habitats
by Peter Kokh
Flat floor for Domes:
You make a very shallow cable and truss structure in which the cable produces enough tension to keep the floor flat despite the tremendous buildup of undistributed pressure at the center of the floor. In other words, the same kind of tension handling device they use to make bridge supports. An engineer would have to evaluate the stresses and make the final design. But this way, you might be able to have a hemispheric inflatable. Of course, the seal (and grab) of the inflatable to the floor system would have to be perfect, with no weaknesses.
Idea for deployment of a torus-core inflatable structure.
The assumption that the payload bay is longer than the core stack is not necessarily going to be the case. But if it were, the bulk of the fabric envelope could be packed forward of the core, giving the core room to be larger. The area immediately above the core complex and within the ring to which the ribs are attached and within the winch cables could also be packed with items if snagging could be avoided. - Just an idea that occurred to me. Keep in mind, that the basic idea behind the torus architecture with works core in the middle is to get the most deployable habitat volume out of the set constraint of the (whatever launch vehicle) payload bay size.
There are a lot of engineering problems to be solved with this architecture. Those adopted by the TransHab team are not necessarily the only, nor the best solutions.
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