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Comment by kolinko

9 years ago

Perhaps if you're building a cellar. If you want to make a 10-story building - even in a virgin terrain, it's a complicated operation.

Not to mention that you need to make the materials such that they resist a huge side pressure, water leaks and so on.

Psychological costs are also costs.

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kolinko

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Retric  9 years ago

Water leaks are not going to be a problem on mars. Significantly lower gravity 3.711 m/s vs 9.8m/s also drastically lowers pressure from burrowing.

clock_tower  9 years ago

Wide-open spaces, even enclosed ones, can reduce the psychological burden of confinement quite a bit -- there's a variety of Russian strategic-missile submarine with a swimming pool, for example. This subject also comes up frequently in SF (science fiction, not San Francisco, which has the opposite problem); there was some discussion of it on the "Atomic Rocket" worldbuilding guide, IIRC.