Wow, I really fucked up a copypaste up there.

>>23449395
I respect you don't go into quote hell.
Summing it up:
First, I never argued O'neill cylinder are unfeasible, they are just the fancy kind of colony.
Of course they would be stronger than a "mere bridge", but nowhere close to the level needed to survive nukes unless (another) anon start bargaining to only count "accidental nuking outside". That or we use vastly more conservative numbers for the one-week-war.

Which is where the bridge comparison came up. A rotating colony isn't passively stable, needing constant maintenance to not break apart from material fatigue & vibration.
We seem to agree a colony would break apart during reentry, which is peanut compared to nuclear attacks.

Anon argued that politics would justify making them extra tougher, I nuked that argument down, they had no reasons to design for more than efficiency & environmental danger. They even had more reasons to go cheap...
Anon went on a rant about the mineral provenance, it was irrelevant, if we want such colony to survive nuke spam, we need to put more effort or abandon the O'neill design, more effort require more logistic, meaning less colonies...

Talking "environmental danger": Asteroids capable of say Beirut-like explosion have no more probability to hit a space colony than Earth's cities right now, the smaller stuff that burn in the atmosphere would cause no problem to UC-tech level. Radiation shielding don't require any extra thickness at that scale.

Talking "nuke spam": Even with "terrorist with nuke" as a start, this is NOT a problem you solve by making colony nuke-resistant, and as I said, against a military force trying to make stuff inside safe from nuke would only ensure a need to destroy the colony to take it out.
The blastwave would flatten the inside, the heat would remain in the metal, the atmosphere, the heat would weaken the structure enough for cascade failure...