Reading the article pulls me back to the expanse. What a great show. I recall the authors wrote an article expressing how wrong they were to predict that Ceres had no water [0].
Nah but that's probably the smallest gripe one can have with Ceres station. Spinning up a planetoid so it has 0.3 g negative gravity and doesn't tear itself into a quintillion pieces is quite a bit more questionable.
Yes that whole world aspect is one of the few in the ‘verse that are wholly impractical. The only way you could do it is encase the object in a super strong tensile mesh or shell, in which case you might as well build O’Neill cylinders out of its mass instead.
Wouldn't a mesh or net be significantly less mass than a whole enclosure of metal? Plus, with a meshed asteroid, you get "free" radiation shielding due to the mass.
I'm guessing the casing would have to be hefty stuff and a lot of it to hold in all that mass under ~0.3g of outward centrifugal acceleration.
Of course you might be able to do some stuff internally as you hollowed out the thing too like perfuse it with high tension wires kind of like steel reinforced concrete, but it seems like a huge job at least on par with building giant space stations.
Still you might be onto something with the radiation shielding.
Inyalowda, the more you share, the more your bowl will be plentiful
my favorite show ever, imo best sci fi show ever. Ceres station in the books/show is a really cool idea even though it's got several reasons why it couldn't actually work
[0]: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/dear-dawn...