Habitat Location as a Focus?

[stevebowers]

I'be been thinking about putting habitable structures near the axis of a conventional cylinder habitat. The bulk of the population could live in the structures while they could use the cylinder's inside surface as parkland for recreation. This does cause a small logistical problem though; if the structures near the hub rotate at the same speed as the outside surface, that would reduce turbulence in the cylinder's atmosphere; it would also mean that the gravity in the hub would be lower, but the coriolis effects would be greater nearer the hub. If you live near the hub you'd need to be accustomed to both low gravity and strange side effects.

Or you could not rotate the central structures at all, making them microgravity environments; this could cause some turbulence, depending on how far away from the inside surface of the cylinder these structures are. If there were a gap of several tens of kilometres the turbulence would be much reduced.

Or you could have the habitable structures rotating more rapidly, this would make the gravity inside the central structures greater, but also increase the coriolis effects near the hub. It would also increase turbulence, unless the rotating structures are quite a long way away from each other.

We describe very large McKendree cylinders as often having counter-rotating cylinders inside, to balance out the angular momentum, but there are some problems with that. Snce these cylinders would be counter-rotating at relative speeds of thousands of kilometres per hour, even an air-gap of a hundred kilometers would be barely adequate to prevent some friction. I think there would need to be an atmosphere roof (and maybe a stationary shell as well), incorporated into the design between the counter-rotating cylinders, to reduce atmospheric friction effects.