[_carbyau_]

Well ok. But my limited understanding of material science says no. For now at least.

Material strength doesn't scale well to go "properly big big" in the sci-fi sense.

OTOH, I am constantly amazed by what material science keeps managing to do, so I have hopes that maybe one day your dream will be true.

[carapace]

Cheers!

Are you familiar with Bucky Fuller's concept of "tensegrity"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensegrity

https://mymodernmet.com/tensegrity-architecture/

He pointed out that the struts could recursively be made out of tensegrity structures. Or you can make them out of balloons:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensairity

I was being a little coy in my previous comment. The structures I'm thinking of are more like kites than sailing ships. They would "dip a toe" in the water to tack, perhaps, but they would be aerial not marine in nature.

A. Bell lifted a man with his cellular geodesic kites. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AEA_Cygnet

In any event, I hope my dream does come true one day. :) Cheers!

[_carbyau_]

While not aware of the phrase tensegrity I have rarely seen various forms of "floating tables".

Initial thoughts:

- seems like a manner of construction to swap tensile strength in certain spots, thus allowing for an awesome "against intuition" visual effect.

- could be nice from a packaging point of view. Collapsible objects, the wiki link mentions the nasa ball robot.

- maybe it could shift Bill-of-Materials costs through smaller amounts of expensive extremely high compression/tensile capable materials to be offset by savings on larger amounts of cheaper other capable sections.

- I am not convinced it would allow the superstructures much sci-fi requires as the basics of tensile strength, compression strength are still in play.

- As mentioned in the tensairity article, if humanity could make a pressure withstanding, airtight object, say a sphere, around a vacuum with less mass than the air it displaces, we could have architectural "anti-gravity".

Including an airship with a toe in the water. :-)

Finally, I simply don't know enough.(Do we ever?) It looks cool and is worth investigating further. I am going to lose lots of time thinking about, checking out and printing out occasional bits from thingiverse now!

[carapace]

Cheers!

> - seems like a manner of construction to swap tensile strength in certain spots, thus allowing for an awesome "against intuition" visual effect.- seems like a manner of construction to swap tensile strength in certain spots, thus allowing for an awesome "against intuition" visual effect.

I recommend building physical models. It's hard to convey how strong and light these structures can be. Very "against intuition". :)

> - could be nice from a packaging point of view. Collapsible objects, the wiki link mentions the nasa ball robot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoberman_sphere

https://www.nasa.gov/jpl/news/origami-style-solar-power-2014...

Yes. :)

> - maybe it could shift Bill-of-Materials costs through smaller amounts of expensive extremely high compression/tensile capable materials to be offset by savings on larger amounts of cheaper other capable sections.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephemeralization

Bucky again.

(Kevlar tendons and carbon fiber struts...)

> - I am not convinced it would allow the superstructures much sci-fi requires as the basics of tensile strength, compression strength are still in play.

I'm not an engineer, but we can already build some impressive structure w/o advanced materials. Cf. "bamboo scaffolding" (DDG image search: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffcm&q=%22bamboo+scaffolding%22&at... )

I'm imagining swarm cellular kite robots that can self-organize to create whatever size lifting body is needed. I'm thinking about things like how to move millions of people at a time (which we might want to do due to climate change, etc.)

Have you read Vinge's "Rainbows End" (sic)? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End ) There are buildings in the story that are too flimsy to stand up without active control and feedback, something like that could work with these kite-bots.

> - As mentioned in the tensairity article, if humanity could make a pressure withstanding, airtight object, say a sphere, around a vacuum with less mass than the air it displaces, we could have architectural "anti-gravity".

We don't have to go that far (although it would be neat if we could, diamond vacuum bubbles?) Did you read about "Cloud Nine? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_Nine_(tensegrity_sphere)

I've thought about this a lot but not yet gotten my act together enough to do it. I wrote up some of it here: https://lists.sr.ht/~sforman/heliotrope.pajamas/%3C202012290... ("heliotrope.pajamas" is my mailing list if you want to reach me in re: this stuff)

Well met!