The original "Mobile Suit Gundam" anime (1979-80, 42 half-hour
episodes) featured O'Neill "Island 3"-type space colonies, plus a
variety of space warships. On several occasions, the warships would
enter through an axial airlock, then fly around the interior.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Suit_Gundam>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_3>
This is clearly a more extreme situation than residents cavorting
around the axial region with human-powered wings. Or is it?
A rotating cylinder, and anything in direct contact with the cylinder,
will experience centrifugal force. Obviously air must also couple to
the floor of a colony, otherwise residents would endure an unending
windblast.
But what if you're in the air *between* the axis and floor? What, if
anything, causes you to "fall" to the floor? If you had an initial
downward (outward) radial velocity, you'd soon pick up a tangential
velocity from the air; but do you accelerate radially?
My Visualization of the Rotating All :) is obviously incomplete.
***
These dynamics also apply to the climactic scene at the end of season
2 of "Babylon 5," when Captain Sheridan leaps from the axial tram just
before it explodes, and leisurely floats toward the floor (where he'll
have a sudden and very unwelcome finish), long enough for a dramatic
rescue by an un-canned Kosh.
They apply, in a more complicated fashion, to the rotating "towns" of
Karl Schroeder's "Virga" series (to date, _Sun of Suns_ and _Queen of
Candesce_), which are open-ended cans rotating within an oxygen
atmosphere contained within a planet-sized balloon. And in particular
to anybody who comes drifting in from the end at an angle that will
intersect the floor.
***
Note that "Gundam" does not have conventional SF-style antigravity. It
does have "Minovski particles," which explain everything else: they
block radio and radar (hence visual-range space combat), they
constitute lightweight radiation shielding (hence nuclear-powered
mecha and beam weapons), and they're funneled into lightsaber-like
weapons.
They might also serve as a "repulsorlift"-like cushion, because during
the series, the heroic _White Base_ travels around Earth's surface. I
think a "hypermagnet" was mentioned once or twice in dialogue, so
maybe it repels against Earth's geomagnetic field -- rather like the
flying carpet in the _Hyperion_ novels.
Nice trick, though. Earth's field is a puny 0.3-0.6 gauss, compared
to the 100 gauss of a toy iron magnet, 2,000 of a rare-earth magnet,
and 10,000-30,000 of an MRI chamber or maglev train.
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