[thaumasiotes]

> there's a limit to how small you can make your spinning habitat before the difference between "centrifugal force" and gravity is too pronounced for our long term comfort

There is no such difference. The constraint you probably have in mind is that you want the force of gravity at your head to be the same as the force of gravity at your feet. This is a problem with actual gravity too; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghettification .

[jerf]

No, the vestibular system gets "annoyed", which is to say, permanently motion sick, if you spin something too small. Our vestibular system is not designed to deal with Coriolis force. You have to keep it below a certain threshold or you'd rather not spin at all... which is, in some sense, exactly why we don't spin the ISS, or, rather, designed something ISS-sized to spin. It's too small. You need a certain size in the rotation axis.

If the solution was just to spin our tin cans the problem would be solved.

[thaumasiotes]

From what I read on Wikipedia:

- The Coriolis force is a different effect than the centrifugal force.

- The Coriolis force is unrelated to the radius of the rotating object. This is not true of centrifugal force, so while it doesn't make sense to talk about Coriolis forces resulting from spinning "something too small", it does make sense to talk about them from spinning "something too small" subject to the constraint that the apparent gravity from the centrifugal force meets some threshold such as g.

- The Coriolis force is a tidal effect, inasmuch as it is described by the tidal equations of Laplace ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_tides#Laplace.27s_ti... ). That would make it an example of the tidal constraint that I originally suggested.

Have I made a mistake somewhere? The third point seems kind of shaky.