[RedDevil]

Originally Posted by freebeard

Assuming a rigid cable connection, the station would spin. You be weightless but dizzy.

However if the station and counterweight rotate around a common barycenter; the station and counterweight could be equal in mass , or not.

Ideally the counterweight would be as heavy as possible, so the living quarters are as far away from the rotation point as possible.

Instead of a cable it could be a long tube so stuff inside the counterweight could still be accessed easily (storage?). A cable is cheaper but a tube is more practical.

There is no way the rotation speed would gradually slow with people walking inside. The total rotating momentum is constant if no outside forces are applied. Astronauts moving toward or away from the center of gravity may temporarily speed up or slow down the stations rotation slightly, but it assumes its original speed when the astronauts return to their quarters.

There's a big problem however. Power.
You cannot aim a rotating space station at the sun. In half a year it would point in exactly the wrong direction as the station moves around the sun together with the earth, unless you work to change the axis of the rotation along with the trajectory. Maybe gyroscopes can do that, but then again I don't know about doing this on a grand scale.
You could also adjust the panels to the sun, but you don't want to do that continuously to compensate fro the station's own rotation.

The simplest solution would be to have solar panels in different directions, but they'd be way less efficient than panels that do point straight at the sun, and they may suffer from thermal stress by the ever changing direction of light.