So I was asking the other day for confirmation of some calculations about centripetal acceleration. Well, in my usual overboard fashion, I created a little CGI script to help myself play around with different values for size, speed, and effective gravity for my station:
http://www.shunn.net/cgi-bin/centri
You provide two of the three values (ac , r, and/or Δt) and the script calculates the third. You can choose the units for input also; if they differ from G, meters, or seconds, respectively, the results are provided in both the default and specified units. You can also set the display units for the blank value.
The results print in a table that provides acceleration values for different levels of the station, moving closer to the hub.
The script is written in Perl, with most of the units conversions provided by the Math::Units module. Perl is not the best for casual math calculations, so there are sometimes small rounding errors in the results. Also, the script isn't really designed to squeal at invalid input. I didn't want to spend more time on this than I had to, although I still did.
The initial values when you access the script are the ones I finally settled on for my station. (Yeah, it's big. But the station figures in two stories I've already published, and I intend to write more, so it was probably past time to nail down its dimensions.)
