Sirrocco said:
As for the how of the ground beneath, my entire justification was "whatever The Island did", but if I really need to justify it more than that, then the dome isn't a dome, it's a sphere, and only the top half is collapsible. Raw materials were environmental carbon and silicon -- it converted the ground it was growing through/on into itself.
The whole explanation is moot, though, if the handwavium can generate a genuine spindizzy. If you're not familiar with the term, it's a antigravity drive from James Blish's Cities in Flight series -- a spindizzy can turn an entire city into a starship, lifting it in one piece off a planet. (In fact, it was more efficient to use on a city than it was to use on something the size of a spaceship.) If handwavium can manage even a tiny spindizzy, I don't need to permeate the soil with handwavium, or hold it in with a geodesic sphere. I just need to turn on the drive.
Hell, now that I think of it, I should have stuck with my orignal plan, which was 250 acres -- that would have been a diameter of approximately 3900 feet, if I remember the numbers I crunched yesterday. I thought that was too big and scaled back, but maybe I should have just gone for it.
Anpwhotep said:
-- Bob
---------
...The President is on the line
As ninety-nine crab rangoons go by...
Quote:The way I envisioned it, it was a two-step process -- the dome is itself a handwavium artifact. It is, in fact, a collapsable dome, grown in place collapsed (and looking like a circular wall around the property), then unfolded and sealed before activating the rest of the systems.
Oh, and Bob, love the concept, but... How? If you've got that much land to hide it in, I guess I can see having plenty of time and space to grow handwavium without anyone really bothering you. Sure. It's your land, you can take it with you, sure. Given the right style of goop, you could even goop the dome segments before you set it up, and let them fuse after, sure...and use some other kind of goop that did the permeate and saturate thing with the ground, even, to bring along your little chunk of topsoil... but how you you set up a geodisic dome that big in the first place? What kind of building materials would you use? What would you do for labor? The thing's enormous!
As for the how of the ground beneath, my entire justification was "whatever The Island did", but if I really need to justify it more than that, then the dome isn't a dome, it's a sphere, and only the top half is collapsible. Raw materials were environmental carbon and silicon -- it converted the ground it was growing through/on into itself.
The whole explanation is moot, though, if the handwavium can generate a genuine spindizzy. If you're not familiar with the term, it's a antigravity drive from James Blish's Cities in Flight series -- a spindizzy can turn an entire city into a starship, lifting it in one piece off a planet. (In fact, it was more efficient to use on a city than it was to use on something the size of a spaceship.) If handwavium can manage even a tiny spindizzy, I don't need to permeate the soil with handwavium, or hold it in with a geodesic sphere. I just need to turn on the drive.
Hell, now that I think of it, I should have stuck with my orignal plan, which was 250 acres -- that would have been a diameter of approximately 3900 feet, if I remember the numbers I crunched yesterday. I thought that was too big and scaled back, but maybe I should have just gone for it.
Anpwhotep said:
Quote:Thanks, me too. And it just struck me that with all the other kludged spacecraft showing up in this setting, the great grand-daddy of them all had to make an appearance.
(I really REALLY loved that series.)
-- Bob
---------
...The President is on the line
As ninety-nine crab rangoons go by...