this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2023
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I'm not sure about this, but I guess it depends on atmosphere. If The atmospheric pressure is weak, which is very likely for a low gravity planet, I'd guess domes would be better due to making a much more efficient pressure vessel than rectangles. If The planet does have a relatively high atmospheric pressure, traditionally shaped buildings are probably cheaper to make than domes.
I don't think the skyscraper would be rectangular but likely more circular which would make them extremely strong. Our current technologies could easily build them and with compartments, they would be relatively safe. Building them would be quite difficult.
A comparable dome on the other hand would be subject to incredible forces if it was to be a single unit but hold that of a skyscraper. A dome of say 1000 foot diameter, would experience some 2 billion pounds of force at sea level atmosphere. It scales up bad and for anything large it is not practical nor do we have the technology or materials. Small domes on the other hand are quite practical and make a great deal of sense and we could build that.
In reality, a skyscraper would just be a tube with a pressure dome on top.
But they don’t really need to be that strong unless there’s expected impact.
Like lighthouses are circular to be strong because they need to take the ocean pounding.
Rectangles are nice because you can subdivide them into smaller rectangles and doing construction with a bunch of right angles lets you use lots of modular pieces (picture yourself at Lowes in the building materials section: everything’s a rectangle).
The larger the dome the exponential the forces become. A thousand foot dome has 2 billion pounds of force acting on it. We don't have materials to handle those kinds of forces.