Infrastructure for a Neptune town

[Phillip Huggan]

I'm getting a good idea of how to make sapphire walls. At this point habitability at the outer planets is healthy potentially. What actual equipment is need to make living hubbed there for a few years, so it is as healthy as is living in a mining small city now?
Precision stamping sapphire yields rotating mill towns around a tether's middle. Smaller is safer at first. A mine at Triton is needed. Grinding, stamping, sorting and lasering meteorite ore yields some products; processing nanotech isn't heavy for some easy products. Things like depressurization textiles and ship hull patches are likely shipped from earth for decades. Power is needed. Solar from inner can charge batteries sent to outer. There is tidal, wind, beam-caught, magnetic, ion, geyser-steam, wave...all needs to be installed in hostile environments, but likely a mine product are these infrastructures. Carbon coatings will preserve the life of sapphire shells.
An opportunity is to use ices from moons for structural coatings. They might not be stable rotated. It is the preferred radiation solution. Neuroimaging and space medicine need a school out there. Fire suppression may be solved by venting to space a partial room and detaching broken part parts and to space, or nanoinsulation gunk. This is lethal. Decompression may not necessarily be injurious.
Optical computers are needed as a redundancy. A radar network around Neptune might see many future low payload solutions. Are ices under Triton's surface safe to set up sapphire vacation shells inside? I see ice tectonics crushing my present nanotech. Whatever cord harvests tidal energy from a Moon's centre of rotation, is a material for Triton surely. Eventually, we can locate above a metal surface brecchia but below ice we brick on it, but such is a Gargantuan mass of town to make. I envision a forest in a rotating asteroid belt interior. I envision much of our created mass in space to be forests and aquariums. These need to be heated, filtered, GMO-ed (NOT synthetic)...to what ambient temperatures, environment visibilities? Deep sea vent, polar, and extremophile species are useful. The habitats would be separate from housing tether towns. People need build up towns that have elements of both nature and novel neon media and stuff not photoned aesthetically yet. We will need stuff to do, such as space science and space entertainment media creation, and interesting leisure. All this latter stuff may be heavy. I'll list by mass and brainpan specialty, keeping in mind the jump from a Mir length of time to years in space. Without the risk of launch, space becomes the better place to live under gvmt this century.

 

[Phillip Huggan]

1500 is liveable. 14000 surely is. 500 no school no clubs. I'm counting on VR from nearer locations to make the community seem bigger with a 2-5 hour delay. Also rotated crew and good holo NPCs, space vacation destinations, should make it seem like my guess of 3500. 1/10 the size of Three Gorges dam can be the base under or on Triton. 50x50x50m and maybe 4 million tonnes of mass. I'd go the same for two oppositely rotating towns at tether ends somewhere near Neptune. 6 tethers and 12 cities is 52 million tonnes including the mining town. $1000T at 2043 Earth lifted prices so far; in situ or somewhere cheaper to make stuff is the mission.
Optimal light good enough to make a roof look like a duller sky is possible with sapphire; not sure. A reconfigurable town square is needed. 1 million tonnes assuming good photons media maybe enough to keep vacuum and bldg systems intact. Gyms, Arenas, fields, ice fishing holes, vehicle racing, land science and industry, all are likely 20 million tonnes: the spread out active living parts of a city are maybe alot of ongoing construction.
Life needs to be aesthetic but fur is no good. Power may be scarce so every ten degrees of heat matter for ecosystems. Moss can be cold but flowering plants may be rare. Heated floors can enable moss and lichens. Heated stems maybe needed. Deep sea vents are good. Imagine a dome under Triton where you can't see the sapphire, then inside the dome is a teardrop volume turning light red and revealing a heated volume with jellyfish. This isn't too massive but the temperature gradient alone will be hard on equipment as you start at some -80C bacteria and go to -20C seas from one side of pool to next. This will be payload expensive to avoid depressurization. I imagine twice the leisure payload is this city planning must. Chemistry may aid water filtering and ecosystem garbage cleaning. 20 big ships, 50x20x10m. Outer Solar System Fleet. Consumes ion.
Science lab. Heavy, much stuff lifted from Earth needed. Maybe 5 million tonnes mass. Recycling and in situ matter here as 150M tonnes of mass is too heavy from Earth, barely half infrastructures outlined.
The RF Coil stuff goes good on Enceladus. The factory payload will be that bases's earlier problem. The medical and heavy materials science lab equipment would be heavy. Some parts will be made at Earth and some fused on at Triton. Some in situ power is easy to make, some is very advanced. If tidal tethers or tethers connecting Triton winds to the laser relay other end of the tether, have to be made on Earth, they will be expensive. Ices are easy to cut with in situ lasers. The labs need to make use of newer materials in space, so this might be expensive to scale up on Triton. Metamaterials in space is unknown to me where needed to be built. I assume I can nanotech mot of it. Colony thrusters are RF ions mostly. A fraction of stuff at each planet base is manufactured with a fraction of the cost to Earth.

 

[Phillip Huggan]

Year 2043 From Neptune, the Neptune *System* is 9.1x cheaper to manufacture than from Earth, Saturn 6.6x, Jupiter 2.3x, Earth 1.75, Uranus 0.8 (more expensive than from Earth), Belt is 0.6, Mars 0.21. Triton at 4.5 is obviously the cheapest place to make stuff for itself and nearby tether colonies. Ethane ice. Meteorites. Cryovolcanic turbines and well power. Neptune is 4 given sapphire exterior rotating colonies offer various g's. Tethered wind on Neptune maybe.
Enceladus 3. Various power sources. Good tidal power. Saturn 2.5. Maybe far away enough from some Earth threats. Jupiter 1.5. Radiation a risk; also weathers Moon surfaces. Terra 1 (crew). Gravity well. A jet turbine might be impossible now to make even at GEO. Moon 0.5. Dust and hard pan soil. 3 Earth captured NEOs would be 0.25. Hard to justify all that thrust fuel to bring them to Earth orbit, but a base, carbon, propellant and ore would all be useful. Uranus 0.2. It is far away from Neptune in 2043 or would be higher. The Mars moons are 0.17 and avoid oxide and g well while offering some solar. A nugget of aluminum would interest me as would capturing a NMObject.
50 million tonnes. @ $50M Earth lift to GEO is $2500T. With the 3.3 multiplier making stuff mostly from Saturn and Neptune, $800T is the cost. Now you focus on closed-enough loop nanotech manufacturing. Here, 3/4 of the cost is recovered using the products in the tool and die equipment. Products made quicker cancelled by uncertain which R+D leads to nanotech. Now it is a $200T base. It generates annual human capital $20M/yr/person. $50B/yr in minerals sales to Cis-Lunar orbit, $10B lite. The lite version is 150 people and isn't as fun, but assume $30T cost. The manufactured products should be enough to develop the solar system and Oort, and populate it with forests and aquariums. Quark can have a job out there so the income ladder will be open to anyone healthy. The technology spinoffs are better for the full version; consider 3 ISS crew can only R+D less than 0.5 a person needing to attend to station operations. A parts list follows with examples from each Solar System body.

 

[COLGeek]

Are you a sci-fi writer or just like post to write random thoughts?

 

[Phillip Huggan]

Maybe a videogame programmer. My sapphire nanotech is advanced enough to use in non-radiation environments. Mostly I think meteorites will be on Enceladus because it will resemble the way gold is found near the interface of gravelly till and granite after glaciations. The till is the slush at Enceladus. The granite is the underlying ice not tidally melted. For Triton, it has ethane and has not been weathered by the Sun or radiation much. That is good mineralogy. A mining engineer in Kenora explained the earth gold process to me. I would be happy to debate the finer points of nanotech or space mining with anyone at NASA.

 

[COLGeek]

There is a difference speaking of "what is" vice "what may be someday". Debates with NASA would need to be based on real science rather than fantastical notions.

 

[Phillip Huggan]

Some are fantastic. For alumina I plan to start with architecture. My debate will be with the CSA at first, until in situ space is needed. Since 2005 a planetary mill will make good alumina nanoparticles. They need sintering before being able to be a decant structural product. I wouldn't trust it right away for space vacuum.. The mill traces an arc in 3d, where a bearing and wall meet. Within this arc sapphire alpha is made rather than is lost to crappier sapphire as is the materials science usual for milling. I intend to make equipment that increases the volume of arcs per unit work. I can eventually obtimize the particles too. Present models aren't looking into sapphire-specific lattice slippage. I can make my own sapphire UHV chambers and models in time.
Metamaterials were moderately classified is the only reason I can potentially demonstrate them in higher than atmosphere fields. It is lab space in the six figures; if it is suddenly declassified and grant-funded it certainly isn't fantastic tech and it won't be my observatory 1st.
Right now femto-lasers leave deep scratches in the surface of alpha-sappire grain faces if you cut them. I intend to fine tune the process and join grain edges together. Perhaps not single grained enough for transparent products, but they are structurally sound if heat treated and maybe good for other applications. This maybe most rests on dielectric constant materials science; they are combining 5 elements and hopefully keep up the R+D for piezoactuators (to move lasers). I'll be able to demostrate art gallery exteriors later this decade, and greeting card highlights mid decade, past then I will go to space trade shows and stuff. I expect the CSA to be the 3rd leading space agency if the notion of metamaterials within RF ion engines works. Part if the multiplier post is if there is a market for milled or stamped Niobium-Aluminum, it can be so made. Whether someone invents an application is the fantastic part as health effects on Earth slow things now. If we had space centres astronauts are more concerned with not depressurizing than metal exposure, the timeline might not seem fantastic assuming new products.