I’m already late for the first appointment of the day… :/
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Oh, you just *HAD* to start muttering on your treknology… You really only need two plates – offset from the center of rotation, pulling in opposite directions on the opposite sides of a single mass.
Of course, part of this depends on how hard you’re bending the laws of physics over and raping them – as if it produces more energy than it consumes, you’re violating the laws of thermodynamics. Still, if you’re telling the speed of light to be your special friend, what’s a little bit of violating the law of conservation of energy.
Current large scale flywheels, used for commercial power levelling (you run it as a motor to store energy, as a generator to extract it) use magnetic bearings for essentially zero friction, and maintain fairly high levels of vacuum to reduce air friction. However, an Orbital, not really going anywhere except round and round its convenient planet, could use photovoltaics or focused starlight to drive a simple steam engine to generate power, transmitting it to the Orbital which uses flywheels for 1) attitude control and 2) power storage for times when out of range of one or more powersats. This would be one of the various near-space hazards that local traffic control has to route incoming/outgoing clippers from – you don’t want to get in the way of one of those power beams. Of course, with fusactors (fusion reactors, I presume), not sure you really need solar collectors, or any trickiness like that.
Of course, you’ve had to skip the implications of 3D printing in general (not that it was well enough developed when you started writing these things, much less when you started laying out the universe in your head), so there’s that. The computer systems show signs of having plateau’d off quite some time earlier – save for holographic displays, and cost, we could have ship tablets with a terabyte or two of storage right now, so the computers of the Lois or even ship’s tablets seem majorly underpowered. Seriously – consider the implications of a 128GB microSD card… 8 of them makes your terabyte. ($119 at NewEgg – *SCARY*)
Still, one might expect that the CPJC* keeps fusion-powered constant thrust relatively high G packets to themselves for control purposes… The transit times suggest that the Clippers are only going out perhaps twice as far as Pluto, at around 1/10th G constant thrust, so the fusactors heating water to plasma and expelling it getting 1G or so should be lightning fast.
Skipper, Very glad to hear you sounding back to normal
Concerning station power. I had just assumed orbitals were primarily powered by a number of large Fusactors.
Regarding tablet and ship systems. Although they did not strike me as overly powerful for computer systems set 340 years in the future, I just imagined that they were so sophisticated that they appeared low-key and unobtrusive to the point of being unremarkable.