Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to I was assuming . . .

TB is right.

The Coriolis "force" wouldn't be noticed walking on the hull, but as one went up or down relative to the ship's centerline (assuming the ship was spinning around an axis running down the centerline, in a fore-and-aft direction). Of course, just walking on the curved inside hull surface would probably be somewhat disorienting, as the film "2001" suggested. Coriolis forces would become noticeable with moving objects, as in a game of catch. No doubt it would take some getting used to. Astronauts could amuse themselves by playing wiffle baseball, where a throw or a hit would send the ball off in weird trajectories.

Incidentally, working with radians when doing rotational motion problems makes a lot of the calculations easier. A radian is 1/2pi of a circle, so a full circle equals 2 pi (6.28) radians, or 1 radian equals 1/2pi circles = (1/6.28)x 360 degrees = about 57 degrees. The radian is defined as the angle which equals to a length of one radius measured along the arc. So in my example of a ship with a radius of 5 meters, 1 radian equals 5 meters in length. If we were talking about a ship with a radius of 10 meters, a radian would be 10 meters, and so on.

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