Quote Originally Posted by factotum View Post
I'm thinking of the O'Neill cylinder type of space station (e.g. Babylon 5) where the station is basically a hollow tube with habitation and planted areas on the inner surface. Such a station would likely be a kilometre across or more, so there would, indeed, be *plenty* of headroom for a plant species that only reaches 30m. If you had a station with much more restrictive headroom then you obviously wouldn't use such a large plant--Brother Oni only specified bamboo because it's one of the fastest growing plant species around, AFAIK.
I was actually thinking about Babylon 5 in particular, but I wasn't 100% sure about the dimensions. IIRC, they had at least something like 60 "decks" worth of station along the outer wall of the station, possibly some other crap in between, then a central park area with transit going along the axis and sufficient radius for a fall from out of one of the transit cars into the "ground" of the park to be fatal.

Again though, the same issue stands--that isn't "free" or "spare" room. It's enclosed, pressurized space in one of the most shielded parts of the station where you can pick from an effective gravity value anywhere on the spectrum from free fall to station normal. In terms of today's scientific research, micro-gravity is a very interesting research space--many of the scientists who send projects up to the ISS or on cubesats do so specifically because it's the only way to get away from Earth normal and see what happens.

Granted, in any setting where you could lose four Babylon stations and still have the resources and willpower to build the fifth one, launching ships out of gravity wells has probably become economical (that, or it was a singular goal of an authoritarian state directing the collective economic output of an effectively endless supply of cheap, expendable labor) and putting labs in space won't be as hard as it is now. Still, building a science ship, outfitting it with superior radiation shielding and whatever else you take for granted in the middle of a giant station, and making provisions for an isolated, full time research team seems like a waste when you could just build some extra decks above the B5 park, take advantage of existing infrastructure, and have the added bonus of letting your scientists interact with people during their off hours.

From a military standpoint, space that is essentially "uphill" from external weapons systems and entry points, and essentially as far away as possible from outside attack and incursion, probably has high value as well. Personally, I'd stick high ranking and essential personnel there too, but apparently sci-fi disagrees with me.

I'm not saying the park wouldn't make sense, just that having all that airspace is a meaningful trade-off, and not a freebie.