We all know the pictures of the astronauts on the ISS floating around. We also suspect that a lack of gravity is bad for the body as the muscles go weak and such.
Why don’t spaceships just rotate to cause the effect of artificial gravity through centrifugal forces?
I think a flywheel mechanical energy storage system could both serve as a way to store energy and as a way to manipulate the rotation while preserving rotational energy. To slow down the rotation, transfer the rotational energy to a flywheel, and then transfer it back when you need to go back to speed. That adds some mechanical complexity but it creates a more efficient way to control rotation. Plus with electric motors and solar panels, that should be possible to manage without using any propellant fuel.
I wasn’t sure if a flywheel would be good for something like this given just how much mass needs to move and how fast it needs to move to produce close to 1G of force. If it can manage something like that, that would be a super good solve for this.
That said, even if it wasn’t a good solution for the actual ring, it might be a perfect solution for the core’s movement. Given that it can be much less mass as it’s pretty much exclusively used for docking, it could basically just be a pressurized tunnel with attachment points for the ring. Spinning that up and down with a flywheel seems super reasonable.