The sci fi solution for boring out the Rock City is the laser cannon invented by Helvitz and ibn al-Walid in 2019 but that's not the end of it since it's going to make a lot of smoke and a whole lot of lava.
Lotho's idea is to use that lava to make ingots which can be used for further construction but there will be far too many of them to use inside the Rock City so, in the absence of any other proposal, I'll go for the moment with building a protective perimeter around the City. There are likely more negatives than positives in that so maybe a bit more thought to their application.
The Helvitz and ibn al-Walid laser cannon design includes a large number of lasers mounted across a wide radius in a circular matrix. The design gets past the narrow beam of a laser by using many of them and then spinning the matrix.
As Lotho also observed, it's going to take an immense amount of power to drive the laser cannon units but we have first built the nuclear reactor which will power the City and all of that juice will be dedicated to the laser cannons.
This aspect of the design is likely as sexy as sorting buttons to some but it's important if the Rock City will not collapse in on itself. Even though it may be solid granite, we will perforate it even more than Swiss cheese so the structural stability is vital or we will end up exceptionally flat and squished at the bottom of an enormous pile of rubble.
Lotho also estimated the overhead needed for the spacing between floors to give sufficient strength so it won't collapse. We will use rigid oversight to ensure the drilling of the homes does not bore out too much of the walls so there needs to be rigid oversight on how much space between each one. Between those two things, there should be sufficient strength, horizontally and vertically, to support the structure as a whole.
Any increase in size for the sake of the structural overhead means either a reduction in the number of floors and / or extension of the horizontal spread of them. For this we can get Guitar George because he knows all the chords and he can figure out the precise dimensions we need.
We haven't diverged from that aspect for a while and the additional consideration is heat. From what I've read, the temperature in a cave will be the average temperature of the region. I've also read of one major cave diver who had been down six thousand feet where he reported it was 113 degrees. However, he also visited another extremely deep mine, possibly in Africa, where he reported it was extremely cold.
We saw the geothermal gradient in a previous article in which the temperature should rise one degree for every seventy-one feet in depth. That doesn't explain the cold in one of the visited mines but I'll attribute that to an unexplained anomaly for now.
Based on that specific for temperature increase, we should rise twenty-eight degrees for two thousand feet of depth so that will require extensive cooling.
Therefore, we review first the water system for dealing with that. The source of the water may be natural from rivers or from desalination plants we will also build. All of that water is channeled into the City where it's processed and purified then circulated through the city. Some of the water goes to the nuke reactor for to regulate temperature inside it and it is subsequently channeled with the City water to cooling towers nearby.
That water system won't cool the lower regions of the City so we will circulate the area from the entire City with refreshment from the ground level. Cooler air from the top of the City will be circulated to the bottom and then subsequently exhausted to the atmosphere. In this way, the City always has fresh air and that circulation will give the overall cooling we need since warmer air won't be circulated back because it becomes exhaust after that.
Lotho's idea is to use that lava to make ingots which can be used for further construction but there will be far too many of them to use inside the Rock City so, in the absence of any other proposal, I'll go for the moment with building a protective perimeter around the City. There are likely more negatives than positives in that so maybe a bit more thought to their application.
The Helvitz and ibn al-Walid laser cannon design includes a large number of lasers mounted across a wide radius in a circular matrix. The design gets past the narrow beam of a laser by using many of them and then spinning the matrix.
As Lotho also observed, it's going to take an immense amount of power to drive the laser cannon units but we have first built the nuclear reactor which will power the City and all of that juice will be dedicated to the laser cannons.
This aspect of the design is likely as sexy as sorting buttons to some but it's important if the Rock City will not collapse in on itself. Even though it may be solid granite, we will perforate it even more than Swiss cheese so the structural stability is vital or we will end up exceptionally flat and squished at the bottom of an enormous pile of rubble.
Lotho also estimated the overhead needed for the spacing between floors to give sufficient strength so it won't collapse. We will use rigid oversight to ensure the drilling of the homes does not bore out too much of the walls so there needs to be rigid oversight on how much space between each one. Between those two things, there should be sufficient strength, horizontally and vertically, to support the structure as a whole.
Any increase in size for the sake of the structural overhead means either a reduction in the number of floors and / or extension of the horizontal spread of them. For this we can get Guitar George because he knows all the chords and he can figure out the precise dimensions we need.
We haven't diverged from that aspect for a while and the additional consideration is heat. From what I've read, the temperature in a cave will be the average temperature of the region. I've also read of one major cave diver who had been down six thousand feet where he reported it was 113 degrees. However, he also visited another extremely deep mine, possibly in Africa, where he reported it was extremely cold.
We saw the geothermal gradient in a previous article in which the temperature should rise one degree for every seventy-one feet in depth. That doesn't explain the cold in one of the visited mines but I'll attribute that to an unexplained anomaly for now.
Based on that specific for temperature increase, we should rise twenty-eight degrees for two thousand feet of depth so that will require extensive cooling.
Therefore, we review first the water system for dealing with that. The source of the water may be natural from rivers or from desalination plants we will also build. All of that water is channeled into the City where it's processed and purified then circulated through the city. Some of the water goes to the nuke reactor for to regulate temperature inside it and it is subsequently channeled with the City water to cooling towers nearby.
That water system won't cool the lower regions of the City so we will circulate the area from the entire City with refreshment from the ground level. Cooler air from the top of the City will be circulated to the bottom and then subsequently exhausted to the atmosphere. In this way, the City always has fresh air and that circulation will give the overall cooling we need since warmer air won't be circulated back because it becomes exhaust after that.
4 comments:
The ingot idea was more to facillitate removal. As your other choice would be a lava river that flows uphill
Your HVAC system is in essence a global warming engine.
I was thinking a 'global warming engine' might be extreme but multiplied by many Rock Cities and they become collectively a global heat pump. All that heat needs some productive purpose or we make an existing problem worse. Humans generate that much heat anyway but that doesn't obviate the need to deal with it.
I was thinking a holding reservoir on the surface but that's just a heat pump too, only slower. The water won't be hot enough for cooking but maybe we need our physicist inventors back into it to design a heat collector which, aha, drives a turbine to send power to the system. Hmmm
Whoops as that isn't cooling the water, only applying it to purpose. The water will still be hot.
Those ingots should be excellent for removing the ingots but they still need a purpose too or we wind up with a brick landscape out there.
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