phavoc said:Since space elevators only exist in theory, and in sci-fi, anyone's illustration is "legitimate". It used to be we had the physics of aircraft wings and how the provided lift down, from theory to practicality. Except as we learned more and understood more, the shape of a wing has changed, the materials we use have change, and our understanding of aerodynamics has changed - all because we went from theory to practicality, which created more theories which required more prototypes to prove the theory. Engineers build 1-1 scale prototypes to test theories all the time. NASA has tested space tethers since the Gemini mission era. They tested them again on a couple of shuttle flights. The tests failed, though in theory they should have worked. This tells us that our theories are not 100% translatable into reality. We still have much to learn and more theories to test.
That's an enormous oversimplification of how science and knowledge evolve. Sure, practical factors can and do affect what's theoretically possible, but that doesn't change the basic physics, which is understood here. The general consensus (as described in the links I posted) is that Space Elevators are super-strong (perhaps impossibly super-strong) cables that are dropped from orbit and connected to the ground or onto a floating platform at sea, and at the other end is a counterweight to keep the cable under tension. It's not going to be a solid structure like a building or a lattice as Shawn showed.
My point is that if anyone's going to illustrate something - even something conjectural - the least they can do is read up on the basic theory and understand how it works first, so they can create something that looks like our present understanding of it. Otherwise it's like trying to draw an aeroplane just knowing it's got a cockpit at the front and that it has wings - well great, but how many wings? where are they? what are the proportions? You might end up with some monstrosity with six sets of horizontal and vertical wings!
Some imagination is fine, but there's no need to make the whole damn thing up wholesale just because one thinks that "theoretical" means "anything goes".