The shape of prime base

[mmartin798]

Originally Posted by dragoon500ly

Second problem is the footprint of the excavations. Spoil. hundreds if not thousands of tons of it. Its got to go somewhere.

This is a big problem. The three rings suggested here will produce a little under 593000 cubic yards of material. This would take a Cat 797F Mining Truck about 1977 trips to haul away from the main bore hole, around 791000 tons.

If you bore near a natural cavern, you could just dump underground. Another possible solution could be to drill a network of shallow horizontal wells over a couple square miles and pump mix of water and pulverized rock into them, raising the ground level a few inches from below. Kind of like fracking, only with liquid rock into softer loam.

[dragoon500ly]

Originally Posted by mmartin798

If you bore near a natural cavern, you could just dump underground. Another possible solution could be to drill a network of shallow horizontal wells over a couple square miles and pump mix of water and pulverized rock into them, raising the ground level a few inches from below. Kind of like fracking, only with liquid rock into softer loam.

Wonder what the long term effect on the base would be?

This keeps presenting more arguments for smaller and fewer bases. Or moving spoil from one dig site to another to create artificial hills or even landfills.

[nuke11]

We discussed a nuclear tunnel boring machine a few years back either here on on another list. I did a search for this on Google and there is alot of crap, but I did find this excellent science paper on "Micro-Thermonuclear Plasma Tunneling
by Rock Melting" some excellent information and lots of details https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/1d8...0cf06af911.pdf

I do believe melting rock is the best thing to do.