Also, the amount of time spent at different g levels may be critical. Perhaps a few hours a day at full g are all that’s needed to keep us healthy, and I’m sure sleeping quarters and work spaces will be in the high-g areas, where people will spend most of their time. Cargo storage, air locks, machinery spaces and docking facilities will probably be in the low-g areas.

Remember, gravitational acceleration increases with the radius, but with the square of the rotational velocity, so you’re better off with a big station spinning slowly than a small one spinning rapidly. The big problem will be if the spinning station becomes unbalanced and starts violently precessing, say as a result of even a minor collision or internal explosion or other unanticipated mass transfer. A large, lightweight (flimsy ) structure can probably be designed to handle a constant spin, but any oscillation would probably shake it apart.

(Lots of good plot ideas there, like sabotage of the automatic mass distribution and balancing system!)

I was using a ridiculous size, being 10K, with an empty 1K hub for docking on and octagonal deck, that is a 1K cylinder, 1K long through the station hub that had eight flat surfaces.

I have the gravities worked out so there would be 0.0077G at the hub, and 1G at the outer level.

Lotsa floors, lotsa room. Shuttle elevators and cross trams. Had a lota fun working it all out.

If you walked in the direction of spin, your weight would change very slightly, but not so anyone would notice it.

Heinlein’s Orphans of the Sky had a very large cylindrical ship, with multiple levels having varying weights, and zero-G at the core.

Incidentally, working with radians when doing rotational motion problems makes a lot of the calculations easier. A radian is 1/2pi of a circle, so a full circle equals 2 pi (6.28) radians, or 1 radian equals 1/2pi circles = (1/6.28)x 360 degrees = about 57 degrees. The radian is defined as the angle which equals to a length of one radius measured along the arc. So in my example of a ship with a radius of 5 meters, 1 radian equals 5 meters in length. If we were talking about a ship with a radius of 10 meters, a radian would be 10 meters, and so on.

The Discovery spacecraft in 2001: A Space Odyssey had a relatively small centrifuge that would have had to spin quite rapidly to create 1G. In the movie, there was full Earth gravity in the centrifuge, but the issues were mostly ignored. (Full credit to the movie producers for at least specifying a centrifuge at all, instead of the cinematic standard of just assuming a magical artificial gravity in spaceships.) In Arthur C. Clarke’s novelization of 2001, the small centrifuge spun fast enough to generate lunar (1/6 G) gravity, a more realistic 6 RPM or so.

Dan, if your large spacecraft is cylindrical, you won’t get sideways motions from axial movement on a single level. We get Coriolis force on the Earth as things move toward or away from the poles because the Earth is spherical, and every latitude has a different rotational velocity.

Moving from one level of your spacecraft to another will generate Coriolis forces, but if you’re going up a ladder it won’t be that noticeable. It might if you’re using a fast elevator.

And that formula calculates well in MS Excel.