@DenOfEarth @tonwood @cptbutton @nyrath @Wyatt_H_Knott @me @tkinias @SFFMagazineCovers Paternoster is pretty hazardous in one gee.

I feel like the most practical solution other than elevators is to include a cogged rack rail to the side of the stairs, and design wheelchairs to lock onto and hang from these rails. Helical screw drive can be designed to fail safe.

Hmm ... cogs aren't needed. The rail could just have holes like a hose clamp.

@DenOfEarth @cptbutton @nyrath @SFFMagazineCovers I think that a helical staircase around a central hand pole could work well.

As you get to lower gravity heights, you start "bounding" rather than walking, and you increasingly rely on the central handhold rather than the stairs.

Maybe a helical handrail on the outside will help.

@DenOfEarth @nyrath @SFFMagazineCovers I think the idea of spiral staircases in spin gravity stations have been largely forgotten/abandoned because they suck.

If you've got, say, 1 gee of spin gravity at the rim, gravity is going to be too low at the hub for "normal" walking. It's awkward, and fabricating these stairs is weird and awkward compared to, say, a helical staircase within a simple tube.

@DenOfEarth @nyrath It's mostly a coincidence. Quintessentially, the reason it's a logarithmic spiral is because the stairs are constant slope. A constant slope (in polar coordinates) results in a logarithmic spiral.

But the pitch of a golden ratio spiral is about 17 degrees, which is only about a half of the 30 degree pitch shown in this illustration.

In other words, this spiral is steeper than a golden ratio spiral.

Furthermore, it gets steeper than 30 degrees near the center, deviating

@Aaron_DeVries @tabmcleo I agree. It's not a bad idea.

It can even be a good idea, long term, as it may eventually be a good place to "mine" for resources.