Aerovator, Angel fleet, Polywell

[ciphergoth]

Ideas that are currently entertaining me:

• The Aerovator: a spinning wing 2,000km long whose tips rise 100km up and travel at 8 km/s which unlike the Space Elevator can be built (just) with today's materials.
• The Angel fleet: Counteracting global warming with a fleet of 16 trillon solar shades in space between the Earth and the Sun (we can use the Aerovator to put them up)
• Polywell fusion which if it turned out to be possible would save the world - plus we can power the Aerovator with it.

Comments

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't be surprised if this were the sort of problem that killed the idea - the guy who writes it has thought through issues about tensile strength etc but he's pretty open about his ignorance on complex matters of aerodynamics. Still, there's some hope that the sheer length of the wing would actually reduce the impact of problems like this, the way tall buildings are better at surviving earthquakes...

[martling.livejournal.com]

The high tension combined with the length does intuitively suggest a longer wavelength of oscillation, but I'm not sure if that means the forces involved will be any less severe.

One thing I do know is that subsonic, transonic and supersonic aerodynamics are three very different things, and that one of the big problems with designing supersonic aircraft is coming up with a shape that works for all three regimes. Whether you could accomplish all three with something that's basically just a ribbon, and be able to actually bootstrap the rotation, I have no idea, but it sounds tough.