Henry Spencer wrote:
In article ,
Christopher M. Jones wrote:

...Additionally, to generate 1 gee of
gravity through this method would require a mass/energy on
the order of that of the Earth.

No, only if you insist on having 1G at a distance of some 6400km. At
one-millionth the distance, you need one-trillionth (10^-12) the mass.
Still kind of a lot, mind you...

I already thought of that. The problem is one of
density. Realistically, you can't get convenient
chunks of matter that are denser than about 18 g/cm^3
(e.g. Uranium). This is not all that much more
than the average density of Earth (about 5 g/cm^3).
Disregarding compression, to achieve 9.8 m/s^2 of
gravity on the surface you would need a spherical
mass approximately 1,948 km in radius, weighing
about half a billion trillion tonnes (5.6e23 kg).
Certainly that's a factor of ten off the mass of
the Earth, but it's still a tad much.

You could get away with a lot less mass if you had
extremely dense materials (neutronium, strange
matter), but being able to build structures using
such materials is speculative at this point.