We all know the pictures of the astronauts on the ISS floating around. We also suspect that a lack of gravity is bad for the body as the muscles go weak and such.
Why don’t spaceships just rotate to cause the effect of artificial gravity through centrifugal forces?
I wasn’t sure if a flywheel would be good for something like this given just how much mass needs to move and how fast it needs to move to produce close to 1G of force. If it can manage something like that, that would be a super good solve for this.
That said, even if it wasn’t a good solution for the actual ring, it might be a perfect solution for the core’s movement. Given that it can be much less mass as it’s pretty much exclusively used for docking, it could basically just be a pressurized tunnel with attachment points for the ring. Spinning that up and down with a flywheel seems super reasonable.
I wonder if two opposing rings would be connected by some sort of circular maglev track where the mechanism would just preserve overall angular velocity but spin the two halves in opposite directions. The spin could be entirely powered by electric motors, and energy could be conserved if it needs to slow down or speed up. That might be a lot of mass, but it might not cost any fuel to get it spinning.