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I first happened upon this marvel of engineering on this recent CNN Travel video story. Digging around the internet, I then found this late April story on CNN.
London's new see-through Sky Pool is first of its kind:
The Sky Pool is a 82-foot (25-meter) transparent swimming pool stretched between the 10th stories of two residential skyscrapers in southwest London's Nine Elms neighborhood -- and it's only open to the apartment complex's lucky residents[*].
[...] The pool was put through extensive strength testing at the Reynolds factory [in Colorado] before making its journey to the UK by road and sea. It was then lifted into place by a 750-tonne mobile crane, supported by a 50-tonne crane.
[...] "After a series of technical drawings and behavioral analyses, the dimensions of the pool were decided," says the Embassy Gardens website."
With sides 200 millimeters [(7.9 inches)] thick and 3.2 meters [(10.5 feet)] deep, and with a bottom 300 millimeters [(11.8 inches)] thick, the 50-tonne acrylic pool will span the 14 meters [46 feet] between the buildings, with steps and filtrations systems sitting either end, and five modes of lighting to add to the feeling of magic."
[...] "Once you swim off, you can look right down. It will be like flying," says Brian Eckersley, director of Eckersley O'Callaghan.
[*] a two-bedroom unit starts at just over £1 million (~$1.4 million).
Entry on Wikipedia.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PinkyGigglebrain on Tuesday June 08 2021, @05:45PM (1 child)
Assuming it is rotating to create centripetal force to simulate gravity.. Which would not be necessary for the sphere to perform it's primary purpose of collecting all possible energy from the star it encloses. At best it would only need enough spin to stabilize it's position around it's enclosed star, which wouldn't be anywhere the speed needed to simulate a 1G field.
If a mega structure was needed for habitation then a ring would be all that would be needed, much simpler to build, less material needed and you wouldn't have to worry about the structural issues of having the Dyson sphere's "North" and "South" regions "hanging" over the parent star with zero outward momentum to keep them from trying to fall into the star while the equatorial zones were trying to fly away from the star at 10m/s due to the spin.
As Larry Niven pointed out in his novel "Ring World" a ring with a radius of 1AU (~93 million miles) and a width of 1million miles would provide nearly 3 million times the habitable area of the Earth on it's inner surface. So it would probably be a long time before anyone complained about over crowding.
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 08 2021, @06:07PM
> As Larry Niven pointed out in his novel "Ring World"
A little more probable is Arthur Clarke's ring around the earth, with elevators up to it -- in this 2001 sequel:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3001:_The_Final_Odyssey [wikipedia.org]
Well worth reading if you enjoyed the earlier books in the series.