Do you know what a big problem is going to be in orbital
construction, once we get serious about doing it in bulk?
Inertia, in free-fall situations. You see, while an object’s
effective weight in free-fall may become nil, its inertia
remains unchanged. This means that once an object starts moving,
it keeps moving – and it can only be made to stop moving by the
application of sufficient force; you can’t count on
gravitational pull to help do the work for you. The end result
is that you can easily be in a situation where you’ve got
something with ten tons’ worth of mass moving in one direction…
and eventually impacting something that can’t shrug off an
impact with ten tons’ worth of mass, and will thus crumple or
shatter under the strain slowly, but inexorably. Nothing you
can’t work around, but it’s something that you have to plan for.
And why am I telling you this?