| 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! |
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!