This Luna colony is located on the terminator of the Moon, where light meets dark. The whole thing is on tracks, and every évening' the whole colony moves slowly across the terminator from the light side to the dark. In the morning it moves back again. The net effect is an artificial day/night cycle.
-- simonj, Nov 30 2007

Mercury 2.0 Mercury_202_2e0_20(the_20planet)
This author posted oodles of stuff then vanished. However the concept proposed in the above idea for the Luna colony is essentially that proposed in Mercury 2.0, or at least proposed in the annotations. [bungston, May 23 2008]

If you made the whole thing rotate, you'd be able to operate a twentyfour hour colony with 2 shifts, both of whom work during natural sleep/wake cycles.
-- zen_tom, Nov 30 2007


+ I'd try it.
-- xandram, Nov 30 2007


Just about any lunar idea gets my tick +
-- xenzag, Nov 30 2007


Um, it would have to be on tracks, indeed, and trundling around the moon at a good clip. The terminator moves, as there really is no dark side of the moon. So you should say that it would speed up and slow down to cross the terminator, and would have to travel clear around the moon in one month.

The average speed at which the traveling colony must move depends on the latitude--the closer to the poles that it is, the slower it can move. At the poles, it can simply dodge in and out of the shadow of a mountain.

Really, the lunar sky never lights up like the sky here on Earth. So if you shade the colony from the sun (with a giant parasol), and block off the light reflected from the surrounding lunar surface (with a screen or wall) it will seem like night. Of course, that's practically a tent . . .. [ ]
-- baconbrain, Nov 30 2007


--------(+)
-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Dec 01 2007


also good if someone launches a nuke at you... [+]
-- xxobot, Dec 01 2007


What baconbrain said. The far side of the moon is incorrectly named the 'dark side'.
-- st3f, Dec 01 2007


Disappointed - I thought this was a lunar habitat for terminator cyborgs.
-- nuclear hobo, Dec 01 2007


T1, T2, or the abysmal T3 ?
-- normzone, Dec 02 2007


Aparrently there will be a T4 as well, not sure if the Governator is involved.
-- simonj, Dec 02 2007


I figure this is a joke, but I'm going to MFD it anyway. [...] Bad science.

Edit: On the other hand, maybe simonj recognizes that the terminator moves, and maybe the tracks go all the way round. So I'll remove the MFD.
-- ldischler, Dec 02 2007


I don't understand the tracks. Does simonj mean tracks like on a bulldozer or tracks like those used by railcars? Couldn't they just build a giant platform with a lot of regular wheels?
-- Moonguy, May 23 2008


Why not move it using a walking dragline? You can get a lot more mass on those babies.
-- ye_river_xiv, May 25 2008


Couldn't we reach the same objective by darkening the windows to make it look like the light's out? It would certainly be cheaper.
-- PauloSargaco, Jun 02 2009



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