Comments by "Kevin Street" (@Kevin_Street) on "" video.

Thanks for a truly fascinating video! This is a subject I've heard almost nothing about, and it's really interesting. Thank you for explaining it so well, and for finding those relevant video clips! It must have been quite a job to track them down. So the Coriolis forces are more noticeable with higher rotations, and larger rotating bodies could spin more slowly to simulate the same gravity. They should have put that centrifuge on the ISS! We could have had years of data on centrifugal effects without the interference of Earth's gravity by now. Anyway, it seems that bigger is better when you're trying to simulate gravity with rotation. For something smaller like a spaceship on a long duration trip, it might not be worth it to put in a centrifuge, because the crew would have to train to relearn things as simple as picking up a coffee cup, and there'd be additional strains on the ship itself. Imagine using a big water tank wrapped around the living area as a radiation shield and then spinning the ship! That tank would be constantly sloshing around, creating different pressures on stuff like pipes and seals.
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Neal Stephenson has a spacecraft like this in his novel Seveneves. In the book there are lots of little spacecraft called "arklets." When two of them are joined by a tether and spun around their center of mass they form a "bolo" with simulated gravity. Tethers and spinning are a very interesting idea that could have wide application in the real world.
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Presumably anything being transferred along the cable will be much smaller than the total mass of the system. Would it change the center of mass that much?
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