Every now and then, you end up doing a page that serves no other purpose than to move the story on to the next page. This is one of those pages. I hope you didn't die from excitement while reading it.
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I'll bet you thought you were getting out of this without a science blurb, didn't you? Well, you're outta' luck, turkey! 'Cuz here it is!
Science Blurb Number Something Something: Coriolis Effect
So we've all seen those snazzy space station designs – O'Neill cylinders, Stanford toruses, and the like – where they create artificial gravity by spinning the thing around and everybody sticks to the sides like spin-dried laundry. It's a neat idea, but something always bothered me about them… it's not really gravity; it's "fake" gravity, so could you do normal gravity stuff like play sports? What happens when you throw a ball inside a spinning space station?
Well, it turns out the answer can get plenty weird, thanks to the Coriolis Effect. I won't explain the Coriolis Effect in too much detail here, but basically for these purposes it's what happens when you observe or interact with something while you're rotating (extremely butchered lay definition there). So here's what you'd probably expect it to look like when two people pass a ball inside of a cylinder. Forgive me, my cut-rate Korean animation studio didn't have time to animate the people.
But that's a space station that isn't spinning. What you actually end up with in a rotating space station is something more like this:
Even though the ball takes the same path both times, you get a completely different result because of the cylinder's spin. So instead of a normal ball throw like this:
You end up with this:
So, does that mean you can't play sports on a spinning space station? Well… maybe, maybe not. In the examples I used, it's a relatively small space station with a relatively fast spin. The bigger the station, the slower the spin, the less you notice Coriolis-type strangeness. Since most O'Neill cylinder desings call for really big space colonies, you probably wouln't notice it all that much. For example, in a torus colony as big as the one in the movie Elysium, you could probably hit a golf ball with close to Earth accuracy. In fact, even on Earth, long range artillery gunners need to make adjustments for the weak Coriolis Effect caused by the Earth slowly moving while their projectiles are in the air. So maybe it's not so weird after all.
Special thanks to my science editor GMan003 for answering my questions on this… though he did not approve of my animations, so any inaccuracies there are on me!
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