What fun could you have with a fountain design in artificial gravity?

[A.T.]

It suspect a stream might break up due to interaction with increasingly fast-moving air.

I meant an approximate helix winding around the rotation axis. The airspeed would be decreasing as the water is slowed by drag.

 

[DaveC426913]

I meant an approximate helix winding around the rotation axis. The airspeed would be decreasing as the water is slowed by drag.

I had thought about that. Different places in the colony would produce different results. Interesting locations might include:

• equator (my designs)
• pole (your designs)
• axis (a very long fall, and very wet)
• somewhere between equator and pole (where you'd get planet-like Coriolis curvature)

 

[Ibix]

1250m radius cylinder
0.5g surface gravity
0 altitude (i.e., on the rim of the cylinder)
10m/s fountain velocity
94.8° angle (my 100° was a bit off - probably a messed up degrees-to-radians conversion).

 

[Ibix]

I've checked the above in Maxima, and I calculate the loop is about 10m high and 60-ish cm wide. That matches the aspect ratio of the loop drawn above. The 40m loop with a ~6m width comes from feeding in 20m/s launch velocity and angle of 99.7°:

So I probably changed the launch velocity and forgot what I'd done this morning. Sorry.

 

[Ibix]

And, of course, if you tilt a bit more anti-spinwards (102° in this case, still at 20m/s):

 

[DaveC426913]

And, of course, if you tilt a bit more anti-spinwards (102° in this case, still at 20m/s):
View attachment 371712

That's very cool. I like the effect.

I'm concerned about the "muzzle velocity".
20m/s is 45mph.
My "research" suggests that 20mph is terminal velocity for water streams/droplets. It would rapidly slow down from 45 to 20mph and, in doing so, break into droplets and probably not complete the arc in the same way.

(That being said, this is for a story, and is therefore is merely described by observation. I could probably get away with some writer's license. Furthermore, if any reader were to go to the trouble of proving me wrong; I would be extremely flattered. The Great Larry Niven had fans who would put his math through the wringer. High praise indeed.)

 

[DaveC426913]

Now that I'm playing around with this cool toy, I'm finding other story points to explore:

What would baseball look like?

Pitcher throwing a spinward pitch at 60mph would have to aim up at about 6 degrees to put the ball across the plate in the strike zone.
Ump throwing it back antispinward (at 60mph) would have aim up about 2 degrees to put it in the pitcher's glove.

(or vice versa, depending on which way they orient the baseball diamond)

And, of course, every throw across the field would be somewhere between 2 and 6 degrees.


I guess the game would be full of "errors". (That's what they call it when someone misses a catch, right?)


(By comparison, a pitcher/ump in 1g on Earth normally throws a 60mph ball at about 2 degrees above horizontal.)