# Is this station design likely to cause balance or vertigo issues?

This is a follow up to a previous question that I thought should be a new question instead of just discussing in the comments of that one.

This is an idea for a space station on the surface of Eris (but could work on other celestial bodies), using rotating rings to simulate gravity. The idea is that these rings would sit horizontally on the surface of the dwarf planet much like you would expect in space. Instead of the floor of the rings being the inner flat edge, the rings would be slanted forming a sort of downward cone shape. You could imagine it much like how a freeway or racetrack is banked around turns.

Ideally the rotation would produce centrifugal force pulling the occupants towards the edge to simulate gravity, however, the slant of the rings would counteract the existing low gravity of Eris which is roughly 1/12 of Earth's. The closest real world comparison I could think of would be the Gravitron amusement park ride, but on a massive scale.

The previous determined that the appropriate angle of the ring's slant would be roughly 10 degrees from the vertical plane, making the floor of the rings nearly perpendicular to the surface of Eris, but not quite. From what I understood, the ring size was negligible for the slant angle, but important for calculating the appropriate angular velocity to produce simulated gravity.

Would a ring station of this design be likely to cause issues with balance or vertigo if an occupant moved or turned too quickly?

Originally I had also been working with the idea that the ring might be fairly large, with a diameter of 10 km and height (width?) of 100 m. I am currently playing with the idea of multiple, much smaller rings measuring 2-3 km in diameter and width of 50 m. I would appreciate an answer for either case.

As far as I understand, it is believed that such issues would only occur in very small rings (meaning only a dozen meters or so in diameter). With larger rings it shouldn't be an issue except when quickly transferring from one ring to another. These of course are all theories though, and none of them take into account the idea of an external source of gravity.

As a clarification, I actually want the vertigo issues to occur as it will help propel certain aspects of my story. I just don't want to write that my main character spinning around quickly during a fight caused them to get slightly dizzy if realistically they wouldn't.

• You may check out SpinCalc. It does not account for natural gravity, so just set Centripetal Acceleration to the number that you need (less than 1g). – Alexander Dec 19 '18 at 21:26
• First step should probably be calculating difference of gravity between head and feet. See this answer for equations. You want this difference small, because in your case it will also mean change in angle of perceived gravity. – Mołot Dec 19 '18 at 22:00
• A question where centrifugal and coriolis forces aren’t imaginary artefacts. Hooray! – Joe Bloggs Dec 20 '18 at 11:02

If you plug in this limit of 1 radian per second into the radial acceleration formula, $$a = \omega^2 R$$, then you find that the minimum radius is 39 meters, which is likely a lot smaller than you're going for.