I don't know how big that dome is, but I'd guess easily a couple of miles across. The lunar horizon (on a flat surface) is, as best I can figure it, 1.6 miles. I somehow doubt that the artist took that into account.
So figure that the dome is 40% of a sphere that is about two miles across. If the dome is pressurized with a Earth-normal atmosphere, I come up with something like 25,225 tons of pressure on that dome.
Steel Beach had a rather descriptive chapter of what happened when a few segments of a large Lunar dome blew out. I would suspect that the reality would be worse.
...and shouldn't the Earth be smaller...seems like it was in the Apollo pictures
ReplyDeleteNew to your blog via Badtux. Very nice. As a science fiction fan (but not an engineer) I did a similar calculation, and found like you, that the greatest force acting on such a dome was the atmosphere trying to push its way out. I realized that even a quite thick dome of concrete or stone would have a hard time resisting that force. I imagined it would probably have to be constructed like an inverted suspension bridge, with many cables across the dome anchored deep in the circling foundation to spread the load, using tension, not compression.
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