Science Forums 2

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by GAHD

Weight training in an environment that messes up your inner ear with Coriolis forces and precession while effectively doubling the loads on your flesh...sounds fun.

Have you no sense of adventure?!

(Note that this is coming from someone who’s idea of a fun night at Caesars Palace was to ride their vaguely out-of-focus “3-D motion ride” non-stop for a couple of hours, struggling after the first half hour or so to keep the contents of his stomach in his stomach. Some of us have never quite gotten over childhood dreams of training to be an astronaut)

Originally Posted by Pyrotex

You guys are right. Go with a centrifuge. But forget the NASA / test-pilot style of centrifuge. Think carnival ride!!

I agree. Carnival ride tech is more accessible than aerospace – a cunning shopper can buy a ride pretty cheap, a good starting place for a “2 g training room” prototype.

Many carnivals ("fairs", "circuses") have rides that are basically centrifuges. One is a circular floor with a high wall, making a circular "room". You stand at the edge with your back to the wall. The room spins faster, until everyone is "pinned" to the wall. Sometimes they drop the floor at this point to make the ride scarier.

This would be, I think, a “Round Up”, known by various other names, such as “Zero Gravity”, “Meteor”, and (from my own short carny career) “Cloud 9”.

Consider a variation: the wall starts out flat, co-planar with the floor. You stand on the wall. As the floor starts spinning, the wall is slowly tilted inward at just the right amount so that if you're standing correctly, the horizontal component of the centrifugal force (outward) is just enough to balance the tilted-gravity force (inward).

Sounds workable, with some hydraulics to handle the tilting.

I think having the whole room in an windowless, fairly soundproof box is a design necessity, not only for safety, but to pull off the psychological illusion of being in stronger than Earth-normal gravity, rather than being in a rushing box.

To avoid the nausea-inducing effect GAHD mentions, you’d also want the turntable to have as large a radius as possible, trading off against the higher speed required (, so each doubling of radius requires the room’s speed to be increased by about a factor of 1.4) – unless you put this thing in a partial vacuum, it’ll need to be kept well-subsonic.

Thrown stuff from or at spinning rides is always an injury concern. Though I never saw any blood-drawing or worse injury, the Cloud 9 or my experience was notorious for spraying crowds with hapless riders’ coins and others pocket contents, which caused the occasional “that could have put out an eye” outcry from worry-prone marks customers. Spitting was another problem rider behavior, though since it usually wound up back in the spitter’s face, was more funny than serious.

A turntable isn’t a necessary feature of a design. One could, for example, build a circular track along the lines of a steel roller-coaster, though it would take a lot of steel and concrete, need some sort of drive motor for the car, and, I think, be vibration-prone.

My present favorite idea for a machine that could be built on a reasonable budget is a variation on another carnival ride, the “swing carousel”, AKA “Wave Swinger”, “Flying Carousel”, “Chair-O-Planes”, etc. Reinforced and with the individual swing seats replaced with a couple of sturdy, streamlined boxes hung on opposite sides of the ride, I think this design, would work for a 2 g training room.

A design advantage of hanging the room rather than tilting it via hinges and actuators is that the floor is automatically always apparently horizontal. All the design needs is a motor and a motor speed controller, both of which can be fixed.