Oh hey Charlie Stross! I'm a bit of a fan.
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I have a vague idea that a kind of spittle bug foam design made from bubbles of various diameters nested to provide redundancy might work well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spittle_bug#Spittlebug_nymphs
It's could be simple, flexible, easy to construct or modify, and resilient
to impacts. I'm not an engineer or scientist though.
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A tangent, if I may...
I think we need more near-term hard sci-fi set in the future that e.g.
Musk's space trucks are about to enable, to get more people excited and
involved.
I've been trawling through Netflix and cable recently looking for
inspiring, even-slightly-realistic sci-fi and it's a barren desert out
there. There are a handful of shows that aren't bad, and I've heard good
things about "Black Mirror". One the other hand, I watched a clip of
"Star Trek: Discovery" the other day and had a minor apoplexy. It's more
like a cartoon than the actual cartoon.
In contrast, I have a "100 Sci-Fi Movies" DVD set that my sister got me
for Christmas one year, and a lot of the older black & white sci-fi
movies are practically documentaries for space exploration and
colonization. Sure there are silly aliens and such, but the technology
and settings are realistic (at least compared to e.g. Star Trek or Star
Wars.)
I think some concrete visions of what it might actually be like to
attempt to build and live on a moonbase or Mars colony would inspire
people to want to really do it.