It is a pretty steep curve, you could almost use it as a slide. You are right; it comes out of the cental shaft tangentially, does a 180 bend and ends with the people walking on a platform that lies parallel to the main section of the gravity wheel, then they would walk down some stairs with the full effect of the gravity wheel(maybe an elevator would be better than stairs after hours of walking in low gravity?).
The only problem I see is that it will take them a day to walk back while contantly fighting inertia.
Another idea I had was to have the gravity wheel gradually slow down to Mars gravity and get the people acclimated to the lower gravity.
From a psychological standpoint; which would you enjoy more? Sitting in a large spaceship or a smaller base on Mars? Because terraforming would take so long staying in space could be an option, but what would it do to the emotional health of the population?
ALSO
I think I have enough in the way of planning how to get the ship to Mars, now for actual math and logistics. What would we need to transport:
350,000 species of plants
animals:
6433 amphibians
10,000 birds
31,500 fish
5,400 mammals
8,225 reptiles
Millions of species Archeae(microscopic non-bacteria life)
and even more species of bacteria!
add it up: 414,358 non-microscopic life. Many need a male and female, so double that, now to preserve genetic diversity you need to multiply that by somewhere around a hundred(or have 4 geneticaly altered versions that have ALL of the chromosomes of the entire species!
). What are we up to now?
82,871,600 specimens. Almost 83 MILLION life forms!!!!!
NOW add the microscopic life. :blink:
Considering that we can now produce living creatures from DNA and "blank" embryos, it is possible to stuff a Blue whale into a test tube and ship it in a block of ice.
If the DNA of every species could be preserved this way in space, what would it take? Estimating 100 million vials of DNA with each at about 1"x5" per tube that means that the vials alone would take up 500 million square inches(Stupid American! Everyone uses metric! :rofl
. We now have 1.27 billion square cm or 1,270,000 square km! (check my math, I'm not used to metric) Australia is 983,482 square km!
This is just for the DNA; add the equipment for cold storage, the whole automated lab that grows all of these. Then you need food, water, and shelter for all of them while they are growing.
We may need to drag a planet along with us...
When I said big, I meant it.