Pre-Christmas Chat with Aaron

[Suicide Junkie]

Timstone said:

Like I said, how the hell are you going to build such a thing?! It's huge!

The ringworld is a given. The elevators are trivial. You hire a bunch of contractors who build one elevator at a time while you install the main structure.

Just build a small (R ~ 2Rsun) circumsolar inner ring, with a transparent "hemiring".

Hmm... do plants even need a day/night cycle?
If they do, wouldn't it be easier to put shades on the inner surface of your main ring? Easier to maintain by simply having workers climb up, plus the solar intensity is much less and you're not going to burn them up.

How about making the shades out of solar panels. Tilt them up to let light through, then lay them back down to block it. Amusingly, you'd make most of your solar power at night

[Baron Munchausen]

In Larry Niven's original design they did indeed use large panels rotating in a smaller ring to simulate day & night for the surface. The panels were connected by gigantic 'cables' of whatever the Ringworld itself was made out of, and the whole thing was timed according to their size and the size of the gaps to come out to a reasonable approximation of a day/night cycle on a terrestrial planet. It would be quite interesting to see that feature included in a Starfury model of a Ringworld. Or an SE V model if we will be able to visit our simulated systems. I wonder if we'll have a 'tour' mode where we can drop in on our held systems in SE V and view them as if playing a Starfury game. Or will the 'combat' space for SE V always be a much smaller space than an entire system?

[Suicide Junkie]

Baron Munchausen said:I wonder if we'll have a 'tour' mode where we can drop in on our held systems in SE V and view them as if playing a Starfury game. Or will the 'combat' space for SE V always be a much smaller space than an entire system?

Combat had better not cover the whole system like starfury, or the 100-ship enemy fleet will glass all your planets during the warppoint battle

[Fyron]

Randallw said:
If you are talking about orbital rings (instead of ringworlds around suns) then anyone who has read Walter Jon Williams "Dread Empires Fall" series knows what can happen to them in a war. I'd post a description but can't figure out how to cover a spoiler.

Use some HTML and CSS voodoo.

This is invisible unless you highlight it.

When making your post, you must select to make it "Using UBB and HTML." You can not use the Quick Reply form to do this, you must hit the Reply button on some post. The following code will get black text with black background. You could use any color you want, really, but black is just a nice, easy standard.

Since UBB doesn't interpret divs in code or pre tags properly, I have been forced to attach an image to show the HTML code...

[Timstone]

Suicide Junkie said:

Combat had better not cover the whole system like starfury, or the 100-ship enemy fleet will glass all your planets during the warppoint battle

Damn! That's not a very cool option. Ah well, Aaron will think of something simple, but effective. But it really gets you thinking. How large should the ships be of a large fleet untill they are too big to fit in one sector of space.

[Randallw]

oops sorry, totally forgot why I needed to know how to add a spoiler.

Ok, in the Latest "Dread Empires Fall" book the invading race (it's a civil war) captures the orbital ring but the loyalists bring down the cables connecting it to the planet. Since the Orbital ring has been in place for 12,000 years the invaders aren't prepared to be unable to land any other way. On another planet the enemy fire on the loyalist fleet despite being warned not to. The loyalists fire back and destroy the ring with a couple of hundred million people. The ring then falls into the atmosphere causing a nuclear winter and dooming a few billion people. So what would be interesting is if the opportunity to capture the ring but the not the planet is included as well as the risk that if the orbital ring is destroyed it falls into the atmosphere. So it isn't a stellar construction but an expanded base.

Edit: on a related note it might be interesting to have ships destroyed when attacking/defending a world possibly fall into the atmosphere.

[Timstone]

Whoa! That's a cool option. I doubt it will make it into the game. Privateer: Freelancer had that incorperated too. It was very uncomfi when you have a fight near a planet.

[Suicide Junkie]

A ring around your planet... falling into the atmosphere...

Ok. First question: Why are you using your cables to hold up the ring when it would be easier and safer to have the ring spinning in orbit and holding its own weight up? Just imagine the mechanical stresses on the sections between the cables.

-----

Some free salvage of resources and technology from ships shot down near planets would be nice...
If you're on the defensive, you need all the help you can get

[Baron Munchausen]

Suicide Junkie said:
A ring around your planet... falling into the atmosphere...

Ok. First question: Why are you using your cables to hold up the ring when it would be easier and safer to have the ring spinning in orbit and holding its own weight up? Just imagine the mechanical stresses on the sections between the cables.

First of all, the theory of 'space elevators' and the stations that could be at the top of them is that they are held in place by centrifugal forces. The excess force is necessary to allow things to be sent up the cables. If you have a complete ring -- which would be a really huge structure but we are already used to thinking of stellar Ringworlds and so it doesn't seem so huge by comparison -- it wouldn't be stable anymore than the Ringworld around a star. A solid ring around a star or a planet would be pushed and pulled in all sorts of inconveniant ways just by virtue of being a single piece instead of a free floating body that can vary its orbit somewhat without hitting things. The cables are still needed to hold it in place or it would lose 'center' on the planet. For the stellar Ringworld Larry Niven had to invent those 'thrusters' that figured in one of the later stories.

[Suicide Junkie]

If you've got cables connecting to the surface, you can easily use them to nudge it in the right direction and keep it in the right spot.
The point being that with your ring spinning, and a small net inward pull by the cables, the pieces of the ring will drift to a slightly higher orbit and the rubble will diffuse from there.
It will take a lot of energy to deorbit the ring parts. The enemy force might as well glass you with "conventional" weapons designed for the task instead