Europe, Russia discuss 'orbital shipyard' plans

Fred J. McCall wrote:

Push the pins all the way in, Derek. It's only an orange. The head
of the pin on the surface of the orange is your power array. DOH!

In scale, that still leaves you kilometers above the surface of the
orange 'moon'.

When you look at the *actual* polar areas of the moon, you find that
solar panels have to either be a) flat to the ground (in the limited
areas of flat ground that are available) and thus inefficient as hell
with the low light angle (when they are illuminated), or b) on *lots*
of *huge* towers (think: the Eiffel tower isn't even big enough to
serve as a cable brace for these towers) holding the panels at a less
acute angle and still not permanently illuminated.

I shouldn't have to explain this to you, Derek - but there's this new
stuff called 'wire' that lets us transmit power over distances.

The ability to transmit power of distance is pretty useless when there
is no power to transmit.

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

http://derekl1963.livejournal.com/

-Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings.
Oct 5th, 2004 JDL