any limits on mechanical seals?

Joe Strout wrote:ß
-- docking more than one ship at a time is only one.
If you have a wheel with empty space in the middle you can
use both sides of the axle.
Depending on the size of the ships and the station you can set up
lots more docking stations along a noncontinuous axle.

I'm afraid I'm not quite following you here. Can you elaborate?
Perhaps you're picturing an axle like this (ASCII art ahead!):

_____ _____
| | | |
___| |______| |___ ...

so that you can dock one small ship in each bend of the axle?
That would work for small ships but what I had in mind was
something different:

Picture a wheel of a bycicle, nave, lots of spokes, tyre and all.
People live in the tyre and, say, 8 spokes (four on each side)
point into the middle towards the nave.
Make the nave really long and slim and attach the spokes
not at two disks at either end of the nave but at various points
along the axis of the nave.
Still with me? You now have 8 spokes, say one of them being
the shortest because it points straight to the nave, following
the radius of the wheel. Two are the longest one because they
are attached to the outer ends of the nave, everything else lies
somewhere in between. The exact layout depends on whether you have
an even or odd number of spokes.

Now remove the nave, having the spokes end in nothing at the
theoretical rotational axle, pointing into emptiness.
The docking ports point along the rotational axle, so any ship
can fly inside in between the spokes, find one end point, go
stationary with respect to the station and match rotational velocity
easily.

Now, with 8 spokes, each spoke having two ports you can serve
16 ships in parallel. Put the spokes in the right order and
you can have a nice spiral approach pattern for the ships.

Here's a picture with two spokes and two ships ("S") parked
at each spoke. You are looking at the wheel from the side:

Wheel: O Tyre. People live in there.
|\
| \ Spoke
| \
S:S | S:S
\ |
\ |
Spoke \|
O same Tyre.



Lots of Greetings!
Volker
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