How could you imagine living on a ringworld?

How could you imagine living on a ringworld?

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitron
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>How could you imagine

Use your brain I guess

It'd be pretty shit, unless they found a way to simulate gravity on that large of a scale without destroying the ring. Then I guess it'd be pretty neat.

You are a fucking idiot

The ring spins, meaning that everything on the inner side effectively has gravity. That's pretty much the entire point of making them ring shaped.

Admittedly a cylinder would probably be better, but you know.

So then what holds the atmosphere?
Or prevents anything from "falling" off the edge?
And, another point, how do you spin a ring that big fast enough to simulate gravity, without destroying it?

Space magic.

magic

there you go, was that so hard?
but yeah, it would be pretty neat, so long as the space magic never stopped and the ring didn't fly apart, or implode, or stop spinning, or the atmosphere didn't drift away.

Niven style, you make it the size of earth's orbit. Make it whatever you want wide.
Make give it walls on either side a thousand miles tall.
Spin it. Gravity pulls things "down", which is synonymous with "out".
Sure, moving with the spin should make you slightly heavier, and against it should make you slightly lighter, but it's tiny stuff. No one would notice.

Air is pulled down just like a planet (albeit, "down").
Air doesn't fall over the walls, because 1000 miles is enough to to keep it all in. Because again, air is subject to the same gravity you are.
Put some panels in orbit between the ring and the sun for night/day cycle. The sun will go from 'set' to "high noon" and then back to "set" with no intervening period. You could use some clever lenses between the panels to simulate 'rise' and 'set' affects.

Stop mistaking your ignorance for keen intellect.

It's also worth adding that a Ringworld is one of the tamer megastructures out there. Topopoli or Alderson disks or nested dyson spheres are way more freaky.

Even Dyson said the sphere was stupid.

A swarm on the other hand

Are there pictures of those?

Ok, but that still doesn't solve the issue of how it's supposed to go fast enough to simulate earth gravity, and not fall apart.

I don't think it's a stretch to assume that a future material might have the ability keep that shit together. I mean, Carbon Fiber stuff is already in the works to varying degrees. So that far in the future, it's not a huge leap.

So just make it out of that material, then let the bitch rip like you're playing ringworld beyblade.

Good luck getting a ring with a radius of 93 million miles to spin the necessary 3 million miles per hour. Or maintaining a stable orbit. Or protecting it from impacts. And by the by, no material known to man, easily produible or not, would be strong enough for that shit.
And, on top of all these issues, there's the logistics of getting enough people who give a fuck together, have the materials to do anything, and have plenty of time to build a giant ring structure because... reasons...

All you have to do is look senpai. Though admittedly, ringworlds are by far the most common.

Frequently, science fiction is allowed to make assumptions about things that don't quite exist as we know them.

But if you want one tamer;

Take a cylinder a mile in diameter, and ten feet thick walls, say? Stretch it all around a star, again, earth's orbit.

Now, sure, you'd think that you'd have issues with the inner side being shorter than the outer side- but actually, as it happens, over a curve the width of Earth's orbit? You could make it out of solid iron, and it would still have plenty of flexbility to "roll". The difference between inner and outer edge is one mile- so 93,000,000 to 93,000,001. No big deal.

Now you pressurize the inside, either run a plasma tube down the center that you can modulate brighter and dimmer for day/night, or cut slits in the side and alternate every sixth of it with transparents or something, so you can get actual daylight in from the star.

>I have a better picture somewhere, but fuck trying to navigate my unsorted scenery folder

> Good luck getting a ring with a radius of 93 million miles to spin the necessary 3 million miles per hour.
Jets. Power them with atomic energy (and I mean real atomic, not the atomic steam-engines of the modern day) and you're good there.

Alternatively, get a shitload of hamsters to run the same way.

> Or maintaining a stable orbit.
Also jets.

> Or protecting it from impacts.
Because the space equivalent of anti-air or anything similar is just beyond a future society considering this.

> And by the by, no material known to man, easily produible or not, would be strong enough for that shit.
Currently? Probably not. Good thing people in the future tend to have a larger database of knowledge available to them than people from the past, huh?

> And, on top of all these issues, there's the logistics of getting enough people who give a fuck together, have the materials to do anything, and have plenty of time to build a giant ring structure because... reasons...
The Earth is going to be swallowed by the Sun one day. I'd argue that anyone on Earth when that starts happening would have no problem moving out.

Most importantly, you seem to be forgetting that this isn't real life. All the arguments I made supporting it may not pass the criticisms of a team of space engineers, but neither you not your players are, and they're more than sufficient as basic explanations that make sense to that end.

>3 million miles per hour
I thought it was more like, 7 km/s.

>spin for gravity
Never understood this argument.
The force is applied to things that are attached to the object, sure. But if you're just standing on it, with no other force to keep you moving with it, it's just gonna spin without you.

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The fact that you don't understand it doesn't make it any less viable.

But in an attempt to rectify that, imagine the shitty mspaint star is a person, and the bad curve is a ring.
Do the arrows help?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitron

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Well with a good telescope I could peep at people from across the world.

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That assumes constant connection with the surface, and that the only friction is experienced between the person and the surface. He would be getting pushed through air, which reduces that tangential force. Is there something else moving the air along with the surface?

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The understanding is apparently more fundamental.

We're going to talk about orbits today.

Imagine this is an orbit. Ignoring rings. One item, say it's a planet.

Rings aside.

At any point on the orbit, its current velocity is perpendicular to the central star, right? As demonstrated by the arrows and lines? A tangent to the circle of its orbit.

>That assumes constant connection with the surface
>what is inertia/momentum

>Is there something else moving the air along with the surface?
Yeah, the friction of the air against the surface, inducing further movement in the air being moved by that air, etc etc. Over time, the atmosphere would have momentum as well in the direction of rotation.

If you're really that worried about it though, just put some dikes or small paddles along the walls to stir it up a bit as the ring rotates.

The ring world is unstable!

Nah, but your questions are specific enough to hint you have read the books and or the math articles written about Niven's ring.

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As a note, these are legit Nasa concept pieces for showing off their long term plans from back during the space race.

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A man on a spinning ring jumps. The ring is quite large.
He continues to move in the direction of the spin. Because the ring is so large, it will be quite some time before he comes down again, because the intersection point of his movement with the surface is so far away.
Depending on the speeds, he may even drift into space before reaching the surface again.

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If the man is experiencing Earth gravity when he jumps he would need to reach Earth escape velocity, you retard.

Centrifugal force is imaginary, he's only actually experiencing centripetal force.

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So, I've heard it said that any civilization with the actual capacity to build a ringworld (Sufficiently durable materials, sufficient quantities of resources, sufficient manufacturing ability, freedom from outside threats for the decades or centuries needed to build it, etc), would not have the need to ever actually build one, due to all those factors meaning they're already basically god-civs with the capability to obtain more living space than any species could ever need, trivially and at much lower cost than building a ringworld, or being able to become post-material super-AIs, depending on one's preference in scifi. How accurate is that assertion, in your opinion?

The ring structure itself would have a ton of mass, so actual, genuine gravity would assist the centripetal action in replicating near earth gravity across the inner surface of the ring world.

Ringworlds are a lot of space.

A LOT of space.

It's hard to convey just how much.

In Known Space, the setting of the book Ringworld, the protagonists calculate that it probably contains about 400,000 times as much surface area as all the actual colonizable planets in known space put together. Which is not a particularly small number, and is in a setting with sufficiently trivial space travel as to have private space ships.

Especially if einstein is a hard limit, making a ringworld is probably a lot easier than colonizing a proportionate amount of the galaxy. Faster, too, sidereal speaking.

You would be right, except that because the ring (and thus him) are spinning so fast, the time it takes for him to reach the intersection point is quite short.
So short, in fact, that it simulates Earth gravity in fact.

If the spin were slower, it would take much longer for him to intersect with the ring, thus simulating a lesser gravity.

Interestingly enough, that's actually wrong, anything inside of a hollow sphere (which can almost be extended to a hollow ring), has no gravitational force exerted on it by the body.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_theorem

Wow, dyson spheres should be effortless then

Alright anons
If there was a highway on this 1au wide ringworld going all the way around, ignoring rush hour traffic, how long would it take to drive the entire loop in a standard car at standard highway speeds?

>(which can almost be extended to a hollow ring),
Which can also be extended to*

93,000,000,000 * 3.14 /60 mph

Assuming 70 miles per hour as your standard highway speed:

8,342,857 hours
347,619 days
952.4 years

I feel like that's pretty criminally short.

93 million miles is the radius, not diameter.

on a halo*

Not at all; let's say we want to build a dyson shell with a fairly reasonably size of 1 AU, with a thickness of a hundredth of a mile.

It'd be 1,085,900,000,000,000 cubic miles in volume, or about 1.085 quadrillion cubic miles.

The Earth is about 260,000,000,000 cubic miles in volume, or about 260 billion cubic miles.

The shell is equivalent to nearly 4,200 earths in volume, and it's only a little over 50 feet thick.

Wonder why i'm not living in a Cube planet

>I feel like that's pretty criminally short.
>nearly a millennium long road trip
>"too short"

I vote that Humanity's first Ringworld be named Molly.

Maybe my math is wrong.

Oh geeze, my math is wrong. I was doing 93,000,000,000. It's been a long day. I got overexcited with that zero key.

Pretty sure it's not wrong but I'm pretty sure Niven's ringbuilders didn't make it for themselves, it was more of a science experiment

Niven's Ring spins @ 770 mps
It is approx one million miles wide with thousand mile high walls at the rims to hold in the atmo.
It is approx 600,000 miles in circumference.

>The ring world is unstable!
Hush you, Niven space magic solves everything

>It is approx 600,000 miles in circumference.
Now you're just funning me, ain't ya?

>Niven's Ring spins @ 770 mps
And given its radius of 1AU, its angular velocity is TINY

I've been planning out a campaign that would have a significant portion be exploration of the Niven ringworld

>>It is approx 600,000 miles in circumference.
>Now you're just funning me, ain't ya?

Shit user, my shitty handwriting made me leave off the last three zeros. Should be 600,000,000 miles.

on a practical human scale, the surface would feel flat with a downward acceleration of .96 gees

The reason why is mostly answered in books 3 and 4, but unreliable narrators might be a thing

Are you fucking retarded? Seriously. Are you fucking retarded?

Niven wrote the book in 1970. There are over a dozen sequels. There is an RPG for it, there are computer games for it, there's even comic books for retards like you who apparently can't read.

The concept has been part of sc-fi for nearly FIFTY years, for neayl as long as "Star Trek", and you don't know anything about it?

Do us all a favor. Stick your head back up your ass and crawl back under that rock, okay?

Does Sigil count as a ringworld?

Technically, a torus.

But I think one of the better available worlds would be a pair of dyson spheres one inside the other, and with the 'difference' pressurized into a infinite free-fall bioshell.

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Gravity is for pussies.

Seems to me that any Ring World, or any other specifically shaped world, would come about through the need of an experiment that is running.

So how it would be living on a Ring World would heavily depend on what experiment is being conducted.

Could I interest you in freefall babs?

If you're building artificial worlds, I'm pretty sure a ringworld is much more efficient mass to biosphere, than a planet.

Less tectonics too.

Niven Style 2: Electric Boogaloo:

"Bowl of Heaven"-like, where the spin creates gravity, and the atmosphere is held in by a membrane that acts as a bubble.

Integral Trees?

The sequal, Smoke Ring

I remember finding that book series when I was like, 8 years old.
Shit was a trip for someone who had only read generic fantasy and had just started on Rama at the time. That and the index in the back with allll the math involved.

Would love the setting, running with players who don't know it fully. The little realizations like 'oh shit we're all actually tall lanky elf-like people and those shorties are throwbacks to real humans raised in gravity' would be wonderful to watch.

I regularly read both. The last time was with an eye to use it as a setting so I was trying to grind it into my head how freefall with in the smoke ring worked and why there would be a "tides" on the trees.

I fucking love the concept, haven't read Niven yet though. How in the hell do day and night work?

>I fucking love the concept, haven't read Niven yet though. How in the hell do day and night work?
For the ringworld?
You have shadow screens solar panels orbiting closer to the sun. Right size, distance, speed to give a ~fairly~ earth-like night-day cycle

I would be uncomfortable with the part above me. Like having the feeling that something was going to fall on me at any moment.

In one of the books there was some conan the barbarian type who had decided to go on a quest to "the base of the arch".

He'd stumbled into a sorcerer's stash of booster spice (longevity drug) at some point, and was well over a few centuries old, forever travelling towards one side of the 'arch' without ever reaching it.

It's too far away and too vast to trigger those kinds of feelings. In daylight all you see is distant arcs moving upward until they disappear in sky. At night, you see the sunlit portions of the Ring connecting with the arcs like beads on a string. The natives call it the Arch.

Just as how you can never get closer to a rainbow, the Arch always looks the same no matter how far you travel.

>if earth is spinning, why don't we fall off?
Tie a rope to a bucket of water. Spin the bucket around you. Why doesn't the water fall out of the bucket?

Not that user but i am way too afraid of heights and cosmic objects to be comfortable as well.

>Air is pulled down just like a planet
That's where you're clueless. Only things touching the ground directly would be accelerated pseudo-downwards (fake gravity)

In one of those spinning carnival rides, air does not fall to the edge of the circle as it spins. Only people being rotated by contact are being accelerated significantly, and it's only that acceleration that results in conservation of angular momentum keeping them pressed against the ride.

Gravity works on air just fine because it doesn't rely on friction or contact, unlike ground movement which would never be able to recreate the other effects of gravity.

>Not that user but i am way too afraid of heights and cosmic objects to be comfortable as well.

Do you hide when the Moon is in the sky?

Holy shit, you ARE fucking retarded, aren't you?

Fuck off. Air isn't pulled down and neither is anything else because it's the fucking ring accelerating towards air/people on it.
>and it's only that acceleration that results in conservation of angular momentum keeping them pressed against the ride.
ANGULAR MOMENTUM IS CONSERVED EVEN WITHOUT ACCELERATION JUST LIKE MOMENTUM IS CONSERVED WITH OR WITHOUT IT

SEE ME AFTER THE CLASS

>ringworld

But Dyson Spheres are so much more comfy?

What is that?

No, there is a scale in between. Basically, Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars are ok. Those sizes doesn't scare me. Jupiter, Saturn and Uranas and Neptune can all go fuck themselves. Seriously, fuck those planets.

What's hilarious about this is that you have constructed the entire environment...so why would you build an environment that needs a giant piece of fallible infrastructure like a bridge?

We use bridges in the real world because we can't easily move lakes and rivers. But if you are building the terrain from scratch it makes no sense, (apart from if you think bridges are aesthetically pleasing).

I'd take the name Mairon and conquer it all, just for the sake of a pun

Hey man, don't bully the jovians. It's not their fault they're like this.

You can't. You can barely imagine the scale of earth.

Here's the scale of Ringworld.

youtube.com/watch?v=sR2296df-bc

Now try to imagine a Dyson sphere....

>So then what holds the atmosphere?
The same fucking thing that holds the waste of genetic material that is your own body you fucking mong

And here are the walls.

youtube.com/watch?v=PJIwruvheLA