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The Skysphere

theskysphere.com

90 pointstechaddict00915 comments

I LOLed a bit at the low cost on this and the authors treehouse. Its kind of like cheap ham radio antennas, where the wire to put up a 160M dipole is only $10 but it costs $3M to buy a piece of land big enough and unregulated enough to put it on.

Aside from that, cool project.

Where I live people would make the windows open/removable and call it the worlds most expensive and outlandish deer hunting tree stand.

Looks more like a cool piece of architecture. The "tech" isn't outlandish. Nifty though.

Not exactly a "cave" if its up on top of a tower :-). Looks like a fun sort of observation tower. Wondering how it fairs in a lightning storm.

Sorry for it. Edited the title to tower now :)

> Wondering how it fairs in a lightning storm.

"I thought about this some time ago, lighting takes tge path of the least resistance, so theoretically it will just travel straight down the main column and into the earth"

From his facebook https://www.facebook.com/theskysphere

There is that, but there is the whole 'coil' thing. Generally conductors have something called the 'skin' effect, which is that as they conduct the electrons move along the outer surface. So the skysphere's outer surface forms a ring where the current will move out to the edge, and then back to the center before going into the ground (or more literally coming from the ground but that is not important here). The change in current in the outer rings will create a magnetic pulse inside the ring that is proportional to the change in current, per Ampere's law. And for conductors that are inside the sphere part, they will experience a very large change in magnetic flux, which will then induce an electric current in any conductors they have inside of them.

It is entirely possible that every piece of electronic equipment inside the sphere will be destroyed by the resulting EMP. Or simply magnetized. But I'd really want to compute flux lines based on the lightning hitting the top, splitting down for four 'rings' (Kirkoff's law) and then going on down via the center into the earth.

I was slightly disappointed to discover he built it on the ground, was looking forward to seeing him handle pieces up in the air. Could be done, although obviously harder / more interesting job.

I'm sure the last thing he wants is suggestions but rotating the floor would be interesting, also folding and unfolding the floor and stuff would be interesting, and probably help with wind load calculations.

The Tui gave his Kiwi status away!

Hah, yeah. I was wondering where it was, thought it could be NZ, but Ireland and Scotland look pretty similar.

It was the Tui that confirmed my suspicions.

Cool idea, terrible website.

Not sure why you got down voted, the background is basically text camouflage.

http://i.imgur.com/Zmj6z7J.png Way better in just black.

I was scrolling down the page wondering why he was dismantling it... Mondays.

By the end of 3 years it is no longer high-tech.

this is really cool. and I can see him recovering the $ just by airbnbing it

It's like giant mcdonalds playground equipment with furnishing and lights. I wouldn't say time well spent, but to each their own.

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