Eden project does seem the most apt, the roof is a dynamic structure giving so much more that just protection from weather.
Hydrogen from water, carbon from CO2, fluorine from?
Quote from: RonM on 10/28/2016 02:36 pmThe panels are the same shape if the dome is based on an icosahedron. Each panel is an equilateral triangle.Do you mean domes of only 20 faces? Once you tesselate and distort vertices to remain on a sphere obviously they must become something other than equilateral, simply because they were equilateral while perfectly planar.To me the 20 face variation is not that interesting because the size you could transport would probably be even smaller than ITS volumes.
The panels are the same shape if the dome is based on an icosahedron. Each panel is an equilateral triangle.
Each of the 20 faces can be arbitrarily large if they are constructed of smaller equilateral panels. Yes, I understand that framing the sub-panels to keep each face flat will not be trivial but might prove easier than dealing with multiple shapes.
...pressure vessels of greater volume need thicker walls to maintain the same pressure safely. I think I heard somewhere that the 'dry' mass ends up being proportional to the volume, not the surface area.
You can get around that scaling law by holding the wall's interior and exterior pressures in close lockstep...
You don't need a mind-boggling amount of glass for shielding if you use sections of liquid water kept liquid by a layer of Martian air acting as heat insulation. Please see diagram.
Also, keeping it clean (see-through) could be difficult, with all that Martian dust on the outside.
The dome needs to hold air pressure and add some radiation protection, but it doesn't need to be a shirtsleeve environment. Keep the buildings inside the dome well insulated and wear a coat or jacket while walking around the inside the dome. That would save energy trying to heat the dome. Frost on the inside of the dome might be a problem.If the dome gets too warm from sunlight (which I doubt), then it shouldn't be made of glass.Anyone have some approximate numbers we can use to determine the interior temperature of the dome?