Kalezian said:
You could create an artificial gravity ship fairly easily by having it rotate. The downside of course is that the habitats would have to be built on the edges of the rotation, cutting valuable space down dramatically.
Still though, even if we did make a spaceship that was able to produce artificial gravity, we would still have to develop the technology to make it self sustainable.
Think outside the box, I don't know why the "spinning donut" is so popular surely I'm not the only one to have come up with the "rope trick"
basically two ships lasso each other to spin around a centre of gravity mid way between the high tension cable. You wouldn't need a constant rocket motor, just a boost to start rotating, and the weight carried by the cable and fixing would only be as much as the ship would weight to be suspended on Earth.
Could make it easier and have everything at half rotation, half earth's gravity.
The great thing about this is with a long enough rope you can have quite a slow rotation/min yet a large ship can have more or less the same "deceleration" (fake gravity) on the "top" of the spaceship as the "bottom".
Then when the ships need to land they just disconnect and could land on the surface keeping orientation down. (obviously, unless they have ridiculously powerful engines it lands on a planet and stays there)
The favourite thing I like about this design is you have two ships that are inherently separated, the engine of one ship could blow up catastrophically and the other would be very likely to survive needing only moderate repairs. They act as each others life boats. So they could soldier on the rest of the way in microgravity, though this would be most useful for a colonisation of Mars.
