>>13706909I don’t think they’re The Worst idea. For longer trips it might make sense to have a really big cycler space station. So you park your starship on it then you can spend the transit to Mars or Jupiter or whatever in a gravity ring, with a big land/aquculture farms for fresh food, have the finest local delicacies like wines, goat cheeses and sushi, etc.
Although 9m (and even 18m) starships are big, their form is dictated by the need to fly. By using in-orbit steel construction we can make truly Unconstrained designs cheaply and easily. Infinitely more comfortable, with fuckhuge overbuilt everything: radiation shielding, life support, so much air volume you could just turn off the air recyclers and it wouldn’t matter for years, etc.
I don’t think they’ll ever make sense for the moon-too quick to matter. For Mars they’ll only matter if there’s like 10,000s of people doing the transit together. For Jupiter it’s hard to say because the trip is so long you’d definitely want spin gravity, but for a long time not many people will go there.
Of course if we get nuclear powered ships where we can brachistrone directly to Mars and thus reduce flight times cyclers lose their appeal. They have basically no appeal if we get drives that can push at a constant 1g.
