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You know that I`m a great supporter of the Paul Birch`s concept for making supramundane habitats onto mesh of rotating orbital rings. ( See http://www.paulbirch.net]www.paulbirch.net ). According to him only bodies with surface gravity greater than 1 gee are practical to be covered with a terraformed shell -- in order the SG of the shell to be at 1 gee. But, regarding the strong possibility to be found way standard humans to inhabit, spend whole lives and freely move for body to body, and environment to environment in the SG frame from 0 to >1 gees, i.e. to be solved the bone-loss poblem; than designing less than 1 G habitats appears feasible, practical, economical and even attractive.
For example the tube worlds construction diameter is restricted by the maximum of the materials tension strenght, hence the speed of rotation -- if we make rotating space colonies with say, martian equivalent of pseudogravity within, than the maximum diameter of the colonies could be far more than the discussed 400 km for quarz and 5000 for diamond.
From the other hand in our system exist planets which have less than 1 G SG, where supramundaning of them is considered unapplicable by the quoted autor. Venus has ~0.9 gees on its surface. Many times was proposed by aggregating of the floating in the 50-60 km altitude huge raft-colonies the planet to aqcuire new habitable non-interupted solid surface...
But, if we using orbital rings system make this shell on altitude where the gravity diminished to the , say martian value (~3500 km hight) , than this new terraformed surface would have about twice the surface area of Venus -- designed and sculpted at will. Another higher level on , let say, earth moon`s SG level ( ~7500 km higt) gives another ~4 times the surface area of the underplanet -- in the example Venus.
Venus is closer to the Sun and these successing shells would have the necesarry ~100 Watts/m2 to be pleasantly terraformed. The outer shell will be illuminated directly from the Sun , the inner and the real surface of Venus artificially with processed light.
The orbital rings system would possess lins between the shels and the real surface, eventually going out to connect with the interplanetary momentum loop network. The material for the construction would come from the planet`s solid and atmosphere + additional volatiles from the outer system.
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