I think the take-home from all these arguments is really that the system just has so many ways to fail and failure in the case of a system like this is going to be catastrophic!
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I think the take-home from all these arguments is really that the system just has so many ways to fail and failure in the case of a system like this is going to be catastrophic!
Oh yeah, I mean if there is a catastrophic failure then you have almost 1 GJ of energy being released per kilometer of vacuum, so like a quarter of a ton of TNT which basically means if something catastrophic happened it would be like there was a line of dynamite the length of the tube that would go off (doesn't sound like a lot but if you are in the tube or at a loading zone then things can be violent and if there are battery arrays for the solar panels then you just increase the potential energy in those locations)
Not to mention that the sudden re-pressurization would result in the whole system gaining a whole lot of thermal energy, probably burning everyone inside.