Space Elevator or Mass Driver?

>How much damage would a collapsing space elevator do?
Depends on where you break it. A space elevator's center of mass is actually far off enough that the Earth's spin creates enough centripedal force to pull the tether outward. The elevator is under tension, not compression, that's why it can be so slender instead of needing a huge base to support it. Anything below the break will fall, anything above it will fly away into space. Break it at the top (which would be easiest for the Zeon analogues) and it smashes into the Earth. Break it at the bottom and the whole thing takes off into orbit.

>Could someone just control the exit point of a space elevator to throttle travel from the surface to the stars?
Sort of. You can get off the elevator at any time, it just means you'll have to lift more of your own mass to get the rest of the way into orbit. So controlling the endpoint means rising ships would be far less efficient, have to devote more of their mass to rockets and fuel and therefore have less for armor and guns. It would be an advantage, but if you want to make sure no one can get to you you'll want to control the base of the elevator.

>Would a mass driver rail system take up a tremendous amount of land, making protecting it a pain in the ass?
That really depends on the tech you're using. If like most Gundams you're assuming weaponized particle beam accelerators or linear electric motors, you've probably got some pretty strong magnetic field generators. It would probably be a few tens of kilometers long. Which yeah, sounds awful if you've got people swarming in on it from every side, but isn't too unrealistic as a military cordon. Modern militaries can secure that large a region, give them giant robots and I'm sure they can.

Might I suggest that instead of antigravity for your ship, you just look at some real nuclear rocket designs? Like, a closed-cycle gas-core fission rocket can lift a pretty impressive mass into space, in theory. We can't actually build them yet, the materials technology we have would cause them to explode. But future materials technology could build them. We could build open-cycle gas-core fission rockets right now, and they're actually even stronger than closed-cycle designs, but no sane person would ever build one. Open-cycle gas-core fission is really only appropriate for deep space use, the exhaust is composed of hypersonic uranium plasma. Maybe you could put one on a really nihilistic pilot's mobile suit, though. They get insane speed unmatched by any mobile suit in existence, and it causes immense devastation to everything around them. It's win-win.

>and no significant tech advantage, unlike actual Zeon
Eh, Zeon's tech advantage lasted for about six months, then they had exhaused all their advances that were actually useful and not just gimmicks. Meanwhile the Federation kept on cranking out tech that was both practical and effective.

Yeah cool, let me just stop all weather while you do that.

>Might I suggest that instead of antigravity for your ship, you just look at some real nuclear rocket designs

Well, the setting's fluff is based on Heinlein's Future History timeline, where safe nuclear rockets were a dead end for a long period of time due to how destructive and volatile an unshielded power pile was (written back before we understood how nuclear fusion worked) - not that nuclear rockets themselves weren't safe, but that fuel production was dangerous, to the point that fuel had to be manufactured in space where any nuclear explosion wouldn't result in the same catastrophe that wiped out the hypothesized moonrace.

The antigravity engine, on the other hand, is also based on future history tech, where a scientist invents antigravity specifically to make comfortable diplomatic meetings between humans from different worlds (the moon, mars, etc) possible, except as applied to propulsion, which functions by essentially breaking physics.

It's basically an excuse to put a miniature version of THAT engine into the final boss's MS and have Granzon in a not-gundam game.

Mass drivers could be buried, with only the end exposed

Or you could do like SOMA and have them underwater, with the end floating on the surface

Space elevator(s) up to a a planetary ring that serves as a giant mass driver for flinging things into distant orbits.

One idea to consider is the 'inflatable' space elevator idea. Essentially, its a launch platform on top of an assembly that you pump water to in segmented sections, slowly creating a kind of pyramid water-filled bouncy castle type thing with a flat plane on top stable enough to launch your rocket from. The goal isn't to get it all the way out into space, but rather to get it so high up that you dramatically reduce the fuel and equipment needed for a rocket launch.

Its also easier to build than a traditional space elevator (you don't already have to have a presence in space to build this) and its considerably safer, since it can't really 'fall over', though if lower rings burst you will get flooding, that's easy enough to prepare for and fix after the fact.

Oh, and you obviously deflate it between uses, so if there is something like a shooting war or natural disaster, you can just pack your space elevator away and wait for a better day, instead of the constantly exposed traditional elevator.

Whether you want that to be the primary form of space elevator is up to you, but if nothing else it could be a project that the feddies attempt during the way to get something into space on the cheap, and with less chance of sabotage by space forces since you can technically build it in secret.

I feel like you'd need a lot of water for that

Welcome to Elmer Fudd's Science power hour.

youtube.com/watch?v=dc8_AuzeYKE

youtube.com/watch?v=KerG4ILWEa4

Won't work - the effects of tidal forces and oceanic weather can eventually destroy any physical structure, especially a long straight one that generates huge amounts of stress all on it's own. The shockwave of firing the thing would kill most oceanic life within a kilometer or so because sound is amplified through liquid mediums.

Good news, water levels are rising.

But that's bad news

>How much damage would a collapsing space elevator do?

Not a whole ton, actually. Certainly not an extinction-level event. A big part of the threat of giant meteors hitting the Earth isn't just their mass, but also the speed at which they're moving. A falling space elevator isn't going to pick up much in the way of speed; in fact I'm pretty sure its falling speed is going to be hard-capped at a maximum of 9.8 m/sec, and probably slower. A significant meteor will be traveling much faster when it hits the Earth.

You probably wouldn't get *too* much of a notable climate shift, for example, if any at all. Hell, you could probably even be fairly close to the area where debris fell and be just fine.

>Could someone just control the exit point of a space elevator to throttle travel from the surface to the stars?

Depends on how fast the elevator rises, I guess, but I'm inclined to say "yes".

>Would a mass driver rail system take up a tremendous amount of land, making protecting it a pain in the ass?

I mean, sort of, but not really? It would take up a comparatively huge amount of land, but the Earth is big and even major countries like China, Russia, and the United States have huge tracts of land that aren't really being used right now where they could be installed.

>get it so high up that you dramatically reduce the fuel and equipment needed for a rocket launch.
That's not how launches work. The fuel required to get up to the edge of the atmosphere is fairly negligible compared to what you need to escape Earth's gravity. A space elevator doesn't just take you up above that atmosphere, it takes you way, way up - someone earlier in the thread have a quote of 30,000 kilometers, compared to Earth's diameter of 8,000 kilometers.

Unless I badly misunderstand the proposal, you're talking about building a water-filled bouncy castle the size of the moon in order to get any appreciable advantage.

>let's just literally use 1/10th of the water on earth instead of a ramp
yeah... good plan

>The shockwave of firing the thing would kill most oceanic life within a kilometer or so because sound is amplified through liquid mediums.
Baffles around the sides and a dewar design.

The ocean is big, and the impact is negligible.

>especially a long straight one that generates huge amounts of stress all on it's own.
No one is suggesting we use a fluted pencil barrel on our space gun.

>the effects of tidal forces and oceanic weather can eventually destroy any physical structure
When not in use: Find trench. Plug/seal barrel. Submerge/lower front end.
Weather and tidal forces have been solved.

>in fact I'm pretty sure its falling speed is going to be hard-capped at a maximum of 9.8 m/sec
Go back to intro to physics please.

You know how long a space elevator would be?

This long. (Width not to scale because then you couldn't see the fucking thing.)

Protecting that will be a bitch and a half. Building something like this is a truly and utterly Cyclopean undertaking. You also want to stick to the equator when you build it. If it comes down, it's going to be pretty fucking bad news for anyone underneath. The top anchor point will be a space station, the bottom exit point the elevator entry, both small enough things that there won't be much business going on as long as there are enemy forces present, since bullets will be flying.

>in fact I'm pretty sure its falling speed is going to be hard-capped at a maximum of 9.8 m/sec, and probably slower.

Show your work.

If it breaks at the base due to a land war, it'll just fly off, cable and station both.

Yes? And if it breaks at the top the black line marking the equator won't just be there on the maps.

>How much damage would a collapsing space elevator do?
Watch Gundam 00 and find out.

Spoilers: It rains massive building sized debris all across the top half of Africa.

Odds are it'd burn up on reentry. It could be made that way on purpose in case of accidents, too.

>Odds are it'd burn up on reentry.
Ballistics suggest otherwise.

>It could be made that way on purpose in case of accidents, too.
Psure if it were designed in such a way that it did so, it wouldn't be suitable for use as a space elevator.

>how much damage?
The hard sci fi novel Red Mars covers (in addition to several lengthy chapters on geology) the effects of a space elevator falling on that planet. It's reasonably cataclysmic.

>9.8 m/sec
Kekd.

>Probably have to opt out of alternative efficient means to get into space, since it would significantly reduce NOTZEON's ability to strangle notfeddie war efforts.

Not necessarily. Consider the cost, speed, and payload of each of these options. One of the 750-ton elevators can transport 20 tons at a time, and it might take it weeks for that 20 tons to reach orbit. Its advantage is that its cheap - but it's slow, and it's got a small payload.

A mass driver will get things into orbit much faster, and will be cheaper than conventional rocketry, and could have a payload larger than the small elevator. But it's going to cost more, and its payload isn't going to be the same as a mega elevator.

What a mega elevator does is make it super cheap to get cargo into orbit. A single massive elevator with multiple freight train-style climbers is going to be shuttling hundreds to thousands of tons into orbit per day, and depending on the design it could take only a few hours to get those trains into orbit. It has massive payload, is very cheap to operate, and has very high speeds.

Essentially the mega elevator is going to be the core of space operations for anybody with access to one. Smaller elevators will be the purview of private enterprises (a shady corp might build one dirt-cheap to circumvent laws surrounding the use of a mega elevator), and mass drivers will still be around to get vehicles that can't ride the elevator into space. They're usable, but losing the mega elevator would still be logistically crippling.

David Pulver has a small write-up about a space elevator in GURPS All-Stars 2004. I'm not suggesting you switch to GURPS (it has mixed mileage with mechs according to people who have used the system), but the treatment he does for the elevator in the Meridian setting helps put into numbers what you can do with a giant space elevator.

Didn't Mars at that point not have much of an atmosphere to slow down/destroy the elevator, though?

>at that point
In what world can you call a story where mars gains an atmosphere hard scifi?
Please tell me someone did not try to legitimately suggest that was viable.
Gravity + gas laws + geometry say it's not viable.

Yes, it can be done, but it would be very temporary. The amount of gas you would need to have pressure be at levels suitable for humans would be such that the 'end' of the atmosphere would experience notably less gravity compared to earth, and combine that the death of the dynamo effect means that you would have to put massive amounts of resources towards unsustainable living that would only last a few centuries at most.

>tl;dr
mars colonization, like space elevators, is for memelords and should never happen because it is more inefficient in terms of energy/resources than the alternative.
Orbital colonies or bust.

(What? You think asteroid miners are going to want to deal with more gravity well than necessary? Are you stupid? They're going to be dropping off all the iron, organics, water, and other non-precious metallics at the nearest colony)

Hundreds of millions of years is "temporary"?

Less gravity, atmosphere stretching much further out relative to diameter compared to earth, negligible magnetic field.
I don't believe the number is hundreds of millions.

The Dynamo of Mars stopped no later than 3700 Mya, and its atmosphere reached it current density at the end of the Hesperian, around 3000 Mya. That's about half a billion years of atmospheric density over the Armstrong Limit, and that's the bare minimum estimate.

But mars barely has an atmosphere. It's only like 0.006atm at the surface, and (relatively) cold.
After we bring in dozens of times more gas and bring it to a livable temperature the rate of loss will increase.
The rate of loss will many factors more than then current rate.

// am I being stupid or will the atmosphere be spread out a distance ~7 times greater than on earth (relative to diameter)? (~1/2.65 the gravity) ?

>In what world can you call a story where mars gains an atmosphere hard scifi?
The same world where a story with computers that are arranged in such a way that they cool things instead of generating heat, and where cyberbrain-controlled engines open a portal to the Big Bang to propel starships, is considered hard sci-fi.

I'm talking about Revelation Space

>In what world can you call a story where mars gains an atmosphere hard scifi?

I mean, that's not physically impossible by any means. It just takes lots of time and lots of large machinery.

The faster rate of loss will be roughly the same as the last time Mars had such a thick atmosphere but no magnetic field, and a comfortably survivable atmosphere would last for much longer than the time between an ape learning to control fire and a man walking on the Moon.

... so it's just Africa

I'm not confident enough in my atmospheric physics to do that calculation, but it sounds like you did the math. Mind showing your work? Honestly curious.

From what I know, the books work on the assumption that as heat and games are released into the atmosphere, greenhouse effect helps keep the heat in and rising temperatures release more gasses from the surface, so the process becomes self-reinforcing. I'm not sure at what level it finally stops at, or how long that expected to last in-universe.

As for the 'why not space colonies' question, the first settlers go to Mars in much the same way people go to Antarctica today, primarily as researchers. Things get more commercial, large corporations start setting up hab-blocks and bubble cities, and it just sorry if spirals from there. They're interested in terraforming, but it's really kind of a side goal for most of those involved.

>But mars barely has an atmosphere

Not when you bring in Bad Science, which conveniently handwaves the lack of atmosphere and dead core!

You'd be surprised what counter-measures an engineer could come up with.

As an example, it could have segmented charges set up to seperate the elevator into pieces small enough to break up upon reentry in emergency situations.

Or there could be smarter ways not made up by a guy with no background in extreme architecture.

Speaking of which, do we have any in the audience tonight?

Motherfucker I'm an accountant, I don't know building math

How much damage would a collapsing space elevator do?

Depends on how it collapses. If the wire snaps on planet side, the cable will start whipping around in low-orbit, becoming a future hazard for space missions. Space trash but a hundred times worse.

If the cable snaps on the station side, the cable will start to fall and wrap around around the planet, fucking up anything that's in the equator of the planet until there isn't cable left.

So what about a orbital ring then?

>it could have segmented charges set up to seperate the elevator into pieces small enough to break up upon reentry in emergency situations.
>build the world's terrorist target with explosive bolts
Eh... There may be something you or I are missing.

>Or there could be smarter ways not made up by a guy with no background in extreme architecture.
The only other alternative is to have rockets with massive gimbal spaced along it's entire length, substantially decreasing lift capacity. But then instead of majority empty space getting colony dropped, you just increased space debris by a couple dozen dozen times.
inb4 but it'll burn up because carbon nanomemes. Look up project westford. Carbon nanomemes could never be cleaned up, they're too dark, too small, and too brittle.

>If the cable snaps on the station side, the cable will start to fall and wrap around around the planet, fucking up anything that's in the equator of the planet until there isn't cable left.
>implying tension is predictable and will magically disappear
There is no telling where and how it will flail other than that it will have a small bias to follow momentum.

That's one way to make new ski resorts.

bump

So the short version is that space elevators are pretty much a meme and asking for trouble. Also, getting up past the atmosphere still means you have to burn fuel to get into orbit, which makes the levator a small economy for the cost, danger and everything else.
Mass drivers take up a fair amount of space, but they aren't nearly as hard to defend. Also there's like two places (one in africa, one in china I think) where you can make one (on the equator, flat ish area up against a mountain) with near future tech. The ocean idea in interesting if you can fix the massive pressure problems and the fact that you are starting much lower in the atmosphere with much denser air. Overall I'd lean heavily on mass drivers (possibly just for freight, shuttling humans up on regular rockets so they don't get jellied) with maaaaybe one space elevator as a giant glowing "Fuck my shit up" sign.

Love a good orbital ring.

Have you ever heard about such thing as gravity?
The station should be built in L1 point so that it will stay in place just by its own.

L1 isn't geostationary - you couldn't have the elevator attached to the Earth. I suppose you could leave the end dangling, but that's sort of a case of solving one problem by introducing 50 more...

>Also, getting up past the atmosphere still means you have to burn fuel to get into orbit
Uh... wat???

A space elevator's center of mass is by definition in geostationary earth orbit (36,000 km). You're waaaaay past the atmosphere by that point.

A reasonable design for the elevator will probably be twice as long, so the forces pulling the cable are equal at GEO. At 53,000 km, you will attain escape velocity by simply letting go of the cable, and easily maneuver to lunar orbit, L1, or L2. A 72,000 km cable will spin fast enough to get you almost anywhere in the inner solar system.

>Also, getting up past the atmosphere still means you have to burn fuel to get into orbit, which makes the levator a small economy for the cost, danger and everything else.

The space elevator doesn't just go past the atmosphere. If it did then it will just be a very tall building, with the lower bits carrying the preposterous weight of all the stuff on top.

Instead a proper space elevator reaches out to geostationary orbit. It'll be a rope hanging down from the top station, not a pillar reaching up. By letting gravity and centrifugal force balance out, you reduce the material strength needed from just plain fucking insane to something we might perhaps be able to make one day. We'll just need a lot of it, since the bloody thing will be over 22000 miles tall.

This means that just by getting off at the top, you will be in orbit. That said an elevator that "only" got you out of the atmosphere would still be a huge help, because at orbital velocities air drag is a fucking brick wall. Counteracting gravity before you're in orbit eats up a huge amount of thrust, and thus fuel, every second, but trying to quickly get to orbit means the air drag will eat up huge amounts of fuel instead. And in order to get out of the atmosphere you need to go up, but getting into orbit means going sideways. So all in all, starting outside of the atmosphere will reduce the fuel consumption per kg of payload to a massive degree.

>A reasonable design for the elevator will probably be twice as long, so the forces pulling the cable are equal at GEO.

With the main elevator cable material probably being really expensive, I'd probably just put a heavy counterweight a bit past GEO instead.

Funnily enough in an RPG i'm in we just colonized mars, and finding mass to put into Mars was one of our first problems

From everything i'm hearing honestly, Mass Drivers are the better idea IF you can somehow create a way to negate the effect of the firing shockwave on the cargo (and earth)

>Have you ever heard about such thing as gravity?

Ever heard of centrifugal force?

A space elevator is built so that gravity and the centrifugal force balances out. Now these two forces don't affect every part equally. The top moves the fastest, so the centrifugal force pulls it the most. The base is closest to Earth, so gravity pulls that the hardest. This means that if you break it off at any point, whatever is below the break will come down, and everythign above it will fly up. Break it at the base and unless you manage to do it exactly at the base, and with no loss of material, you'll shift balance slightly in favour of the centrifugal force, and the entire thing will slip into space.

Neither.

Mother. Fucking. Orbital. Skyhook.

It's a giant spinning cable in orbit. Why is it spinning? Once every rotation, the speed of the end of the cable will nearly sync-up with the earth's rotation. You grab on, swing around, and get flung out of orbit.

But wait, the cable doesn't have to be nearly as long as a space elevator. Why? Partially because it's spinning, and in a lower orbit. Also, the cable doesn't actually reach down to the ground. It doesn't have to deal with weather and such. Also, the cable doesn't need to perfectly match the Earth's rotation speed, it just needs to go slow enough to grab on.

Well, how do you grab on to the cable if it never gets closer than 100 km above the Earth and a minimum speed of 3.6 km/s? With a rocket? No, we aren't barbarians! You simply hop on a hypersonic scramjet that accelerates to Mach 10, swoops upwards, and then glides back down to a gentle landing. Oh, and that's actually the least "sci-fi" part: we've already built a scramjet that can reach Mach 9.6.

Hey, where does the thrust come from, then? You can't get free momentum just by spinning around: when you launch yourself from the cable, the cable will equally be pushed backwards towards the Earth. And if it doesn't have any rockets, how does it stay in orbit? You turn the thing into one bit electrodynamic tether aka: fuckin (electro)magnets. The whole thing is big enough that you can generate thrust by using electricity to "push" against the earth's magnetic field. We've actually already used this tech with small satellites.

Unlike a space elevator, you can actually build this thing without sci-fi materials like carbon nanotubes. And you don't need nearly as much material. The main problem is that you still need an absurd amount of mass (relative to modern standards, still tiny compared to a space elevator). So you gotta launch a bunch of materials up into orbit, or find stuff in space and haul it down into orbit.

Also, you can adjust the size, speed, mass, and materials based on your needs. You can start small and work your way up to bigger skyhooks that are more-easily reached using jets instead of rockets. Of course, a small skyhook is very useful for transporting construction materials for your large skyhook (or eventually, your space elevator).

If you wanted to get fancy, you could even use a mass driver to launch payloads up to the skyhook.

A fascinating idea.

Is that picture correct? It seems incredibly counter intuitive to catch the payload in the wrong direction.

Hang on. The skyhook is rotating towards the scramjet as it comes in to dock? Isn't that going to be a pretty dicey docking maneuver?

Okay, now, what would it take to knock a skyhook out of orbit and toward, say, Sydney?

it would mostly burn up in reentry, maybe do minimal damage because it is unguided and some of the debris can end up in an urban area.

You should be drawing the opposite conclusion from this thread.

Space elevator will be cheaper in terms of power consumption and would almost inevitably support a large space station midway between the base of the tethers and the anchor holding it taught. A space elevator would optimally be made of extremely light but flexible and strong materials, likely carbon nanofibers or homogeneous graphene sheets which compose the tethers. A space elevator would also be constructed to split into hundreds of smaller pieces of debris in the event of a structural failure, and these segments would likely be equipped to either burn up if they're high enough for reentry or deploy parachutes which will allow the light tether material to drift to the surface if they're too low. Damage would probably be minimal. You could control a space elevator in two ways, either capture the midway station which will hang somewhere between the base of the tethers and the anchoring weight at the other end, or initiate a ground invasion to capture the base terminal where the tethers are anchored, preventing anyone coming down from getting out and preventing anyone out from getting back up.
>Would a mass driver take up a tremendous amount of land.
If you're shooting people through it yes, because they need to be accelerated slowly or they'll die. If you're only doing cargo the barrel can be much much shorter because cargo can't be killed by a much harder acceleration.

A space elevator I have heard would have to be made out of carbon nanotubes. The problem is that even though they are light enough, and strong enough to take on this job easily, we can't make them long enough. Assuming they break I think they should burn up.
Now something new I have been hearing about is the "launch loop" which promises the ability to get objects near LOE at a low cost, while only needing materials, and tech we already have.
Problems with it is the fact you would need multiple countries to play nice if you don't want to run the risk of someone breaking this thing, and big budget to construct it in the first place.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_loop

Kevlar could do it in a pinch, but it couldn't do much more than hold up it's own weight. I assume then that you'd need triple or quadruple as many tethers made of kevlar where carbon nanofiber or graphene would be far superior. A space elevator could be done now if we had the will to do so, it just wouldn't be able to hoist as much weight as one with nanomaterial tethers.

>A space elevator could be done now if we had the will to do so

No, we can not make fibres of this stuff longer than the circumference of the planet.

Well nobody ever will with that attitude.

>Assuming they break I think they should burn up.

Yeah but that's no fun

I'm definitely not convinced by the "burn up" position. For one, at the very least the lowest section won't be falling from high enough - it's just be like a very tall skyscraper falling over. Considering the base of the elevator will be heavily populated (even if it's built somewhere remote, the support facilities will necessarily be fairly extensive), that alone would be nuclear-bomb level.

Actually, come to think of it: how fast would it actually fall? It's not like cutting the end suddenly removes all centrifugal force, just the portion of it needed to perfectly balance out gravity. The dynamics here would actually be a little tricky, I think...

>Actually, come to think of it: how fast would it actually fall? It's not like cutting the end suddenly removes all centrifugal force, just the portion of it needed to perfectly balance out gravity. The dynamics here would actually be a little tricky, I think..

If you cut it very far out, then gravity will end up only slightly overpowering the centrifugal force, meaning the initial acceleration downwards will be small, so at first the impact velocity will also be small.

However, this thing is ridiculously long, so past the first tiny little bit even a pretty low acceleration will result in a pretty hefty velocity. And as the whole thing travels closer to Earth gravity gets stronger and the centrifugal force gets weaker, rapidly increasing the acceleration.

Exact numbers will of course depend on how thick and dense the pillar is, where you cut it, and will also have to include air resistance in the calculations.

That picture is indeed correct. The problem you're trying to process is that the skyhook is in a low orbit, so that motherfucker is fast. The contra-rotation of the hook counteracts that motion, ideally describing a perfect cycloid (well, a cardioid really), so that the hook is near-stationary at the attachment point.

This is as hilarious as it is informative and I cant fucking breathe

IT'S A SPEECH IMPEDIMENT MAN

That fucking diagram.
REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
WHY WOULD YOU OPPOSE MOMENTUM!

Also doesn't all this system do is defer energy? The payload just shifts the orbits.
Also, that diagram is shit because the satellites orbit is magic and curves away from the planet.

>Also doesn't all this system do is defer energy?
terribly sorry, didn't finish reading the post.

I partially take back my mars meme comment. There is a condition under which a mars colony isn't a total meme.
Should humanoid waldos become viable, then having a small colony capable of sustaining a few dozen dozen people permanently would be reasonable.
The waldos would be used to construct production facilities of advancing technological ability, eventually getting to the point where additional waldos could be made. The waldos would then begin to mine an airtight cavern below the surface for the sake of a permanent colony. From there progress is made advancing production facilities and stockpiling resources.

Because of the lower gravity and atmosphere on mars, superstructures are actually viable and not meme-tier. So it is not impossible for the order of progress to be:
mars expedition > mars colony > asteroid mining > dropping metallics and organics onto mars > construct launch super structures (because propellant is literally life for the colonists and is too valuable to waste, for the time being) > create orbital colony components on mars > put them into orbit > Make Martian orbital colony / space ring / whatever > begin specialized manufacturing

Basically, irl factorio minus the coal, water, trees, and oil.

That's basically the plot of Red Mars. It goes Mars expedition > Mars colony > mining (both asteroid and Martian) > create launch superstructure (dropping from asteroid to Mars, rather than the reverse) > making everything > ???.

Along the way, things get messed up by ideological differences between the original colonists, between them and later waves of colonists, and between all of them and the governments (and corporations) back on Earth. Eventually that leads to World War 3 (and the spillover onto Mars), some major acts of terrorism, and so on. The terraforming that happens is mostly the realm of specific scientists doing it because they feel like it (designing mars-tolerant vegetation and so forth), but it's made clear that the biggest impact is coming from companies just releasing waste heat (and nuking each other, later).

You really should give it a try. Some of the science is probably a little it off date, since it was written in the 90s, but it's quite well-researched. I'd challenge anyone to find something harder with the same scope.

Well it's going to follow the planets rotation.

It's light and has a lot of tension, just intuition but it should have more than enough energy to oppose momentum. Also keep in mind, that we only care about relative momentum.

>it should have enough energy to oppose momentum
Physics Gestapo, activate! REEE the STEMless Ones back to a fluff thread!

...just kidding. The exact behavior of a broken space elevator is a tricky problem, but it depends on enough variables that as long as you keep it reasonable they're probably justifiable. Just try to be careful in your choice of words.

>Just try to be careful in your choice of words.
It should have enough energy such that the existing momentum does not make the effect of tension negligible or nearly irrelevant.

Better?

plz no die.

>If you wanted to get fancy, you could even use a mass driver to launch payloads up to the skyhook.

Well shit, problem fucking solved. Gives you plot point launch windows, things to blow up in space, lets you put things into orbit effectively without the use of chemical rockets, or even just with a full tank of gas.

It's okay user, orbital mechanics are counter intuitive and don't make sense until you're up there. This would work though, even if the math gets finicky.

>It's okay user, orbital mechanics are counter intuitive and don't make sense until you're up there.
I'm willing to accept these, and that the rotating satellite would experience sinwave motion because gravity, but even so, the orbit on the diagram in wrong.
Please prove me wrong if I'm wrong, but I don't think I am.

Yeah, the line looks heavily exaggerated for some reason, but over a long distance with an elliptical orbit and a for some reason flattened earth, it could look similar.
Though if you look, it seems to be rotating at the counterweight, not the rotation marker that describes that line.

It's a mess and you're not wrong.