The illustrations of O'Neill cylinders I have come across with so far allow unrestricted view through the whole tube. The shielding protects the micro-gravity industrial space, too. However, like most off-earth colonies, it couldn’t possibly ever be self-sufficient. Each of these cylindrical habitats could accommodate upwards of 50,000 people, support an artificial atmosphere and generate an Earth-like gravity through the centrifugal force of its own rotation, Janhunen wrote. Lewis One: A cylinder of radius 250 m with a non rotating radiation shielding. Nen E2: Attack of the Nucleophiles The classic O'Neill design for a cylindrical space colony has a cylinder four miles in diameter and 20 miles long, with three mirrors reflecting sunlight into the colony. For something as huge as a McKendree cylinder you could certainly have widely varying climates with "natural" barriers like seas and mountains. Are there reasons that forbid to close off parts of the tube, lets say, by a wall of mountain? Imagine a cylinder that's slightly tapered, the narrow end of the cylinder would be like a higher elevation. Some are more playful with topography but still, there is a visible end. To make an "O'Neill cylinder" habitat for a lot of people to live comfortably like they were on Earth, every ounce has to be blasted into high orbit. O'Neill cylinder: "Island Three", an even larger design (3.2 km radius and 32 km long). That takes a tremendous amount of energy. (This general idea, first proposed in the 1970s, is known as an O’Neill cylinder). Some of them are used for agriculture. NASA ID number AC75–1085 (CREDIT: Rick Guidice NASA Ames Research Center) Bezos described the structures … A pair of O’Neill cylinders. It’s a “county” size cylinder spinning on his axis and thus generating gravity. This NASA illustration shows what the interior of an O'Neill Cylinder could look like. A serious problem is the spinning to create centripetal force enough to … Source: National Space Society / Reproduction . To illuminate the whole colony, each would have to be at a $45^\circ$ angle to the cylinder axis and have a length of $20 \sqrt{2}$ miles. A classic O'Neill is a bit small for that though. A McKendree Cylinder is designed much like an O'Neill Cylinder but built with the carbon buckytube technology used in Bishop Rings. The project consists of green areas dedicated to growing crops and trees planted in a 1.5 meter thick layer of soil. Each habitat would have an artificial atmosphere, Earth-like gravity and a mix of urban and agricultural space. Well a modified O'Neill Cylinder named McKendree Cylinder is possible to build with a radius of 460km and the length of 4600km from carbon nanotubes. The rotating part is 450m long and has several inner cylinders. Such a spacecraft could hold thousands - perhaps even as many as 100,000 people. 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