Orion Arm tech derived Ringworld

[Tom_Kalbfus]

Here's the setting this is a ringworld, much like Larry Nivens in size, but with the following attributes:

I. A G2 V yellow star at its center
A. with a diameter of 1,392,000 kilometers
B. a mass of 330,000 times that of Earth or 1.98*10^30 kilograms.

II. The ringworld has the following dimensions
A. 150,000,000 kilometers in radius
B. 1,600,000 kilometers wide from rim wall to rim wall.
C. Both rim walls are 1,600 kilometers in height for retaining the atmosphere on the inside,

III. The other properties of this ringworld are the following:
A. The ringworld has one Earth gravity of "spin-gravity" at its surface or 9.81 meters per second squared centripetal acceleration.
1. To produce this "gravity" while taking into account the Sun's gravity we need a rotational velocity of 1,213.419 Kilometers per second.
2. This causes the ringworld to rotate once every 8 days, 23 hours, 45 minutes and 12 seconds. (Almost 9 days)

IV. Shadow squares.
A. Like Niven's Ringworld, I use shadow squares, but unlike him I use 8 shadow squares instead of 10 and they rotate retrograte, that is in the opposite direction of the ringworld's spin.
B. The size, shape, and spin of the ringworld plus the desire to have 24 hour days consisting of 12 hours of night followed by 12 hours of day dictate the size and shape of the shadow squares.
C. The Shadow squares orbit the Sun at even intervals inside the radius of the ringworld at a distance of 50,982,312 kilometers and this is key because at this distance a circular orbit around the Sun would take 72.66403 days to complete, this rotation would cause any section of the ringworld to pass under 9 shadow squares in exactly 9 days, that is all 8 shadow squares plus the first one a second time.

V. Magmatter
A. The secret holding the ringworld together under this tremendous spin is something borrowed from the Orion Arm Universe, something called magmatter.
B. Magmatter is like ordinary matter except the fundamental particles are held together with magnetism rather than electric field.
1. Instead of a proton we have a magnetic monopole which is a particle with only a north magnetic pole absent a south pole.
2. filling in for the electron is the magnetron, which is a relatively low mass monopole with southern polarity, it spins around the more massive northern monopole in a magnetron shell. A Northern Monopole and an orbiting southern magnetron make magnetic hydrogen.
3. to make the other elements we need a neutral particle such as the neutron, but in the magmatter world this role is fulfilled by the dipole, a dipole is a magnetron fused with a northern monopole.
C. Using the Magmatter equivalent to carbon, we have a ribbon of magcarbon "nanotubes", picotubes actually because magnetic atoms are much smaller and more massive than normal atoms.
D. The magmatter ribbon naturally has a net magnetic charge in it creating a magnetic field, this magnetic field is repelled by the superconducting bottom of the ringworld and it is this repulsion which holds the ringworld together, there is no contact between the magmatter and the normal matter of the ringworld, and such contact is impossible anyway for reasons described in the Orion Arm's Encyclopedia Galactica.

VI. Unlike the Orion Arm setting, this setting contains no wormholes, there is no form of faster than light travel and with almost 3 million Earth's worth of surface area on the inner surface of the ringworld, FTL is not really needed. You can have you own "Galaxy" of different societies and places within this very ringworld without the need to travel to other stars. The imagined setting for this is about 8,000 to 10,000 years in the future.

[Gil Hamilton]

Hah, magnetic monopoles? How does THAT work? Do we need to write Gauss's Law for Magnetism on a newspaper and whack some OA fanboys?

Besides, why would this "magmatter" be any stronger than normal matter? Why bother? Niven just handwaved the building material for the Ringworld anyway and just loaded up Skrith with all the attributes he wanted.

[Tom_Kalbfus]

What's your goal here? If you want to go with a realistic way to have a whole "galaxy" of easy access, a ring of individual habitats accomplishes the task, using cheap ass materials available today.

If it is just to give technobabble to a ringworld, well, you've done it. Yay?

A ringworld gives you fixed real estate. In a Solar System filled with space colonies, it becomes hard to keep track of who's where as each cylinder, wheel, or sphere habitat is in its own seperate orbit around the Sun or a planet. There is also very little mystery to this setting as all the space habitats are built by the people who live in them. A ringworld has a sense of mystery to it, and you don't have to be a high tech civilization to live on its surface, for a conventional O'Neill habitat, you basically do because otherwise the life support system fails and everyone dies. A ringworld is huge, I mean really big, just a section of it is one million miles wide, and you can have a variety of civilizations living on its surface ranging from the stone ages all the way to supertech, this has alot of "Pulpish" possibilities to it, even if you do keep the science hard. You can have a guy swinging his sword and saving the maiden from brutish barbarians, and you can have a guy with his laser rifle fighting it out with robots run amok. In a Dyson Swarm, which I think is what your describing, everyone basically has to travel around in a space ship, everyone is civilized if not always nice, there is not as much variety as everyone has to maintain their individual habitats and stay high tech.

On the Galaxy scale the stars don't move relative to human time frames, people zip around on their hyperdrive starships, but the stars are basically fixed real estate, at the Solar System level though, neighbors are always temporary, one city state moves past another as they both orbit the Sun. Its hard to build the big bad Empire as for one city state to conquer another, it basically has to chain all of its conquests together in space so they don't float away. A ringworld at least offers a map and fixed real estate, though on a really large scale. The world is also for all intents and purposes "flat" on a normal world scale, and savages can move about just as easily as high tech people, thus contributing to the Pulp feel without throwing out the hard science fiction at its core, it is a unique setting to say the least.

[Tom_Kalbfus]

In a Solar System filled with space colonies, it becomes hard to keep track of who's where as each cylinder, wheel, or sphere habitat is in its own seperate orbit around the Sun or a planet.

You can cluster them together, like I explained in the link. You get much higher population density since you are using all three dimensions in space, not just two. Higher density means less spread, so they needn't move significantly relative to each other.

Ok, suppose we substitute a cluster of cylinders measuring 32 km and 3.2 km in radius, and you cluster them all in a ring that's 150,000,000 km in radius centered on the Sun and which is 1,600,000 km wide. The cylinders are all of the O'Neill Island Three type with tri-lateral mirrors opened up at 45 degrees from the cylinders and all aimed so they catch the rays of the Sun and reflect them onto the opposing valleys. This would require that each cylinder be seperated from their neighbors by 64 km to prevent the mirrors from hitting each other. Allow a "postage stamp of ring real estate of about 68 km by 68 km for each cylinder, and we have a ring that is 23,529 cylinders wide and with a cicumference of 471 million km, it is 6,926,470 cylinders in circumference about 162.15 billion O'Neill Island Three cylinders altogether.

Or, of course, you could have them moving, and use that to your advantage too.

There is also very little mystery to this setting as all the space habitats are built by the people who live in them.

Sure, but if mystery is something you are going for, no need to explain the tech at all - just let it be there. Indeed, explaining it seems to me to work contrary to mystery.

In writing the mystery, the author needs to know the answer to the mystery before he writes the story, if the author doesn't know, then he needs to cobble it together so that it makes sense its logical and consistent. So its better to know the answer beforehand, the answer need not be obvious to everybody, just so that there is an answer, so that it all makes sense in the end. The inhabitants of the ringworld need not know how its held together, its better that the answer comes from scientific theory. Magnetic Monopoles come from a scientific theory posited by Paul Dirac, a scientists who also theorized the existance of antimatter, this is better than placing gravity generators under the floor and afterwards trying to think up a scientifically plausible explaination for them, for example.

A ringworld has a sense of mystery to it, and you don't have to be a high tech civilization to live on its surface, for a conventional O'Neill habitat, you basically do because otherwise the life support system fails and everyone dies.

Complete horseshit. The life support system in an O'Neill hab is the life itself, just like on Earth. It does not require any technology to keep going.

How do you get day and night in an O'Neill hab? An Island Three requires rotating mirrors, without sunlight plants can't produce oxygen or food. Smaller habs tend to require more artificial intervention to maintain their life support than the larger ones, the moving mirrors need maintenence after a while

In a Dyson Swarm, which I think is what your describing, everyone basically has to travel around in a space ship

Did you even look at my linked essay? I even drew diagrams and gave specific numbers for scale, and mentioned keeping separate orbiting items fixed relative to each other (not a big worry, since the distances between them is tiny next to the distance from the sun).

I also talked about space ship designs for travel - they don't need any tech on the ship at all, though it is obviously more reliable to have some onboard. It can just be a box with a clamp on a timer.

everyone is civilized if not always nice, there is not as much variety as everyone has to maintain their individual habitats and stay high tech.

Even if you accept your premise, this doesn't follow. In a low tech society, there's no room for variety. Virtually everyone are either hunters/gatherers or farmers. They are too busy surviving to specialize into variety.

The hunter/gathers are more isolated from each other, they don't trade much, and the fastest communication is on foot or on the back of a beast, this provides opportunities for many cultures to develop in isolation from one another.

The higher the technology, the more options people have, hence, more variety.

On the other hand communication is at the speed of light, it is near instantaneous and a mass culture develops complete with celebrities and so forth, by this time a single language has developed, ideas are shared and the best ones are adopted, this means there is very little variety because the efficiencies of scale mandate that certain designs are adopted over others to reduce cost and so forth.

The world is also for all intents and purposes "flat" on a normal world scale, and savages can move about just as easily as high tech people, thus contributing to the Pulp feel without throwing out the hard science fiction at its core, it is a unique setting to say the least.

If you just want a giant ring, that's cool, but don't be under any illusions that it is hard science fiction, especially not with Orion's Arm technobabble attached.
Only a little bit. You need something under the ring floor, and its reasonable to assume that societies that are 10,000 years older than our own understand somethings that we do not, magmatter fits well enough until something better or more workable comes along. Some things violate the laws of physics only a little, such that only a trained physicist can tell you how it does in what way, others violate those laws flagrantly as occur frequently in Star Wars with sounds in space and so forth.

Though, having a fallen society of primitives in a habitat cluster tickles me. They go into magical caves to move to another world... you step in, suddenly lose your weight for a while, then just as suddenly as it disappeared, it is back and you have been teleported to a new world. Jawesome.

[Tom_Kalbfus]

Hah, magnetic monopoles? How does THAT work? Do we need to write Gauss's Law for Magnetism on a newspaper and whack some OA fanboys?

Besides, why would this "magmatter" be any stronger than normal matter? Why bother? Niven just handwaved the building material for the Ringworld anyway and just loaded up Skrith with all the attributes he wanted.

electric fields come in two varieties + and -, magnetic fields come in two varieties North and South, in both cases opposites attract and likes repell, so there is a certain symmatry between an electric field and a magnetic one, and Paul Dirac saw that, he theorized an electron with a positive charge called a positron and a proton with a negative charge called an anti-proton, and those turned out to exist. The main difference between magnetic fields and electric ones is that for every North there is a South, but electric charges occur in isolation, you can have a + without a -, so Paul Dirac theorized the existance of particles that had a magnetic North without a South and vice versa. Theory suggested that magnetic monopoles would much more massive than their charge-based cousins the electron and proton.

Covalent bonds would have to be much stronger for these magnetism based particles because, since the counterpart to the electron, which we might call the "magnetron" would be much more massive than the electron, and because of its greater mass, the uncertainty principle would dictate that its wavelength by much smaller, that means the magnetron orbits much closer to its nucleus than the electron does to its nucleus, thus the mag-atom is smaller, the forces holding them together are over shorter ranges and therefore stronger, it is harder to break apart something made of magmatter than ordinary matter, magmatter is much denser as well, for not only are the particles more massive, but they are closer together as well, meaning their is less space between them.

[Dark Hellion]

Tom, a quick hint, please actually learn the science before you attempt to lecture people on it.

Dirac didn't pull the positron out of thin air. It is a result of the Dirac formulation for relativistic quantum mechanics. I could get out my notebook and post a lot more but your explanation makes me doubt you would actually understand it. Suffice to say, you are attempting to tell people who know physics better than you how physics works, and really all you need to do is look at the HoS or Parting Shots to see how well your career on this board will go.

[Samuel]

The hunter/gathers are more isolated from each other, they don't trade much, and the fastest communication is on foot or on the back of a beast, this provides opportunities for many cultures to develop in isolation from one another.

Except they are going to be very similar. Look at different hunter gather societies across Earth- they do have different customs, but in general how their society is structured is the same. It is hard to have alot of differences when you only have around 50 people to work with.

On the other hand communication is at the speed of light, it is near instantaneous and a mass culture develops complete with celebrities and so forth, by this time a single language has developed, ideas are shared and the best ones are adopted, this means there is very little variety because the efficiencies of scale mandate that certain designs are adopted over others to reduce cost and so forth.

The television shows in Australia and England are different from the United States despite the fact that they all share the same langauge, have similar cultures and regularly interact with each other. In a universe where you can societies that occur where people cluster by personality or taste (imagine an orbital filled entirely by people who like cute pets and want to be with others who share their interests), the cultural divergence will be much larger.

[Junghalli]

Oh man, I love the idea of a failed cluster a lot. Makes me want to bring FTL back in my own universe and explore it (why ftl? Their home system wouldn't like reach a point where failures happen. If something goes wrong, other people are there to help instead of letting them regress into screwed land. One habitat might fail, but there's a hundred more ready to pitch in to the relief and rebuilding efforts, so it isn't the end of the world. It seems to me that the odds of them all failing together would be pretty low.)

You shouldn't need FTL for that, just a slowboat to another star system and the colony effort ran into trouble for some reason. It'd be more plausible that way if anything I think: the nearest help would be at least years away.

[Gil Hamilton]

electric fields come in two varieties + and -, magnetic fields come in two varieties North and South, in both cases opposites attract and likes repell, so there is a certain symmatry between an electric field and a magnetic one, and Paul Dirac saw that, he theorized an electron with a positive charge called a positron and a proton with a negative charge called an anti-proton, and those turned out to exist. The main difference between magnetic fields and electric ones is that for every North there is a South, but electric charges occur in isolation, you can have a + without a -, so Paul Dirac theorized the existance of particles that had a magnetic North without a South and vice versa. Theory suggested that magnetic monopoles would much more massive than their charge-based cousins the electron and proton.

It sounds like you are quoting an article without understanding what you are writing. Dirac theorized magnetic monopoles on the quantization of electric charge, that magnetic monopoles are a possible explaination for something we see (discrete amounts of charge) and also that their OUGHT to be symmetry between magnetism and electricity. His derivation is an "If they exist, they must..." thing. He didn't show that they actually existed and on any scale, they can't without violating the aforementioned Guass' Law of Magnetism. No one, not even Dirac, is saying that they actually exist.

Covalent bonds would have to be much stronger for these magnetism based particles because, since the counterpart to the electron, which we might call the "magnetron" would be much more massive than the electron, and because of its greater mass, the uncertainty principle would dictate that its wavelength by much smaller, that means the magnetron orbits much closer to its nucleus than the electron does to its nucleus, thus the mag-atom is smaller, the forces holding them together are over shorter ranges and therefore stronger, it is harder to break apart something made of magmatter than ordinary matter, magmatter is much denser as well, for not only are the particles more massive, but they are closer together as well, meaning their is less space between them.

Interesting, but this still falls into the area that "mag" might as well stand for magic. You never answer the question of why bother replacing Niven's openly made up BS material with an Orion's Army pretending "that it could happen!" BS material.

[Tom_Kalbfus]

...
It sounds like you are quoting an article without understanding what you are writing. Dirac theorized magnetic monopoles on the quantization of electric charge, that magnetic monopoles are a possible explaination for something we see (discrete amounts of charge) and also that their OUGHT to be symmetry between magnetism and electricity. His derivation is an "If they exist, they must..." thing. He didn't show that they actually existed and on any scale, they can't without violating the aforementioned Guass' Law of Magnetism. No one, not even Dirac, is saying that they actually exist.

...
Interesting, but this still falls into the area that "mag" might as well stand for magic. You never answer the question of why bother replacing Niven's openly made up BS material with an Orion's Army pretending "that it could happen!" BS material.

And you think a civilization 10,000 years in the future would know no more about the Universe than we do? Let me put it this way, Dirac was not trying to find a substance out of which a ringworld could be built, Niven was. Perhaps it did not occur to Niven that he could have used a theoretical substance like magmatter rather than making something up out of whole cloth and giving it a name. I think it sounds better to piggyback off of someone else's work than to make something up out of whole cloth for the purposes of a story, I mean if there are trained scientists out there who do this for a living, wouldn't it be better to build a fictional construct out of something they think may exist according to their theory? Yes I know there is no evidence for the existance of magnetic monopoles, but I think an educated guess is better than an uneducated one. I could use flubber for instance, according to the movie flubber powered a sort of reactionless engine which could make a car fly. So in the heirarchy of hard and soft science where do the following substances fit on the totem pole: flubber, scrith, magmatter? Are they all truly equal and can you truly say that it does not matter which ones you use? I could imagine bouncing balls of flubber between two sandwiched plates on the underside of a ringworld, but that sounds silly doesn't it?

[Junghalli]

I was wondering, if you wanted to combine the social dynamics of a continuous Ringworld with the hard SF habitat swarm approach, would it be possible to have a ~1 AU ring of habitats around a sun and have all of them linked by some kind of air-filled umbilical cord that people could use to walk from one to the other?

I imagine you might need some pretty fine self-sustaining stationkeeping systems to keep all the habitats in place and keep them from tearing and stretching the umbilical cord as their orbits randomly drift because of gravitational tides etc. Any potential showstopper issues with such an idea?

Another potential possibility, as Destructionator hinted at, is to have the habitats connected by some sort of self-sustaining mind upload/download and clone system. From the perspective of primitive natives there would be magic gates that you would step into on one cylinder, maybe have a moment of unconsciousness or something, and then emerge from in the other cylinder. Actually what would be happening is they step into the upload/clone booth, their mind is uploaded, their body is destroyed, their mind is transmitted to another cylinder, and a new clone body is whipped up for them with rapid nanoassemblers (or something), along with copies of whatever they were carrying on them.

If you're willing to go for a little soft SF tech, you might replace this with a wormhole-like portal system. Then somebody really could physically walk from one habitat to another. I tend to prefer hard SF approaches but I must admit I find that an intriguing concept: imagine a Dyson Swarm with such a set-up, effectively forming a single world with a truly mind-boggling surface area. The physical umbilical cord could potentially let you have that too, if it could work.

Either way, such a set-up would have the advantage of not having already been done before in a fairly well-known book series. It would be more original and you would be the first author to explore the dynamics of such a set-up (assuming somebody hasn't done it already and I don't know about it).

[Gil Hamilton]

And you think a civilization 10,000 years in the future would know no more about the Universe than we do? Let me put it this way, Dirac was not trying to find a substance out of which a ringworld could be built, Niven was. Perhaps it did not occur to Niven that he could have used a theoretical substance like magmatter rather than making something up out of whole cloth and giving it a name. I think it sounds better to piggyback off of someone else's work than to make something up out of whole cloth for the purposes of a story, I mean if there are trained scientists out there who do this for a living, wouldn't it be better to build a fictional construct out of something they think may exist according to their theory? Yes I know there is no evidence for the existance of magnetic monopoles, but I think an educated guess is better than an uneducated one. I could use flubber for instance, according to the movie flubber powered a sort of reactionless engine which could make a car fly. So in the heirarchy of hard and soft science where do the following substances fit on the totem pole: flubber, scrith, magmatter? Are they all truly equal and can you truly say that it does not matter which ones you use? I could imagine bouncing balls of flubber between two sandwiched plates on the underside of a ringworld, but that sounds silly doesn't it?

Why not? If you are making up unobtainium, you might as well call it unobtainium and not try to couch it in BS. Magnetic monopoles aren't any more realistic than skrith; presumably skrith makes perfect sense to the Ringworld engineers. We don't need to understand it, except that it's strong enough to not be destroyed by the ringworld's rotation.

Incidentally, magnetic monopoles actually appear in Known Space stories as a rare valuable thing; Niven knew about them and it was one of the things he sprinkled into the story to make it sound more science fiction-y. However, for things that the plot of a story may interact with, he just made up suitable material, be it General Products Hulls, Tnuctipun super weapons, skrith, what have you. This is better; because you declared it science fiction you can make up any material you want with any property you want it presume it works. You don't risk anyone going "Hey, wait a minute... this isn't right", beause the thing doesn't exist to be described wrong.

That's always been Orion's Arms problem. You get a bunch of people with pop-sci magazines and books on things like string theory to build stories out of words lifted from said mags/books and then pretend that it's hard stuff. In fact, it's not that much harder than most things, just more pretentious.

[Junghalli]

Ghetto edit: that should be a physical connection would let you have an effective Ringworld, it wouldn't let you have an effective Dyson Sphere world because the different habitats would need to be in orbits with different inclinations. Well, maybe if you used a statite Dyson...

Actually, this brings up something else I'm curious about. What's the biggest space habitat you could possibly have with realistic materials? I mean a unitary structure, not something like the hypothetical habitat Ringworld where the umbilical cords would connect them but not actually be structural members.

[montypython]

That's always been Orion's Arms problem. You get a bunch of people with pop-sci magazines and books on things like string theory to build stories out of words lifted from said mags/books and then pretend that it's hard stuff. In fact, it's not that much harder than most things, just more pretentious.

I've found that whatever the faults of the world-building approach of OA, it isn't as pretentious than the works of authors who try doing the aforementioned approach in plot-oriented writing to justify why one side is intrinsically superior to the other (various Trek fanworks in particular), so I do give them more credit in that case.

[Junghalli]

It seems possible to me, but a problem would be the friction at the connection points. You have a rotating hab physically attached to this non-rotating connection, so it seems reasonable that friction would ever so slowly impact it. Probably solvable easily enough with some energy input, but it seems to me that it must take some active maintenance to keep it from twisting and screwing things up.

It would probably help with a lot of issues if the builders had seen fit to install a self-sustaining automated repair system. I suspect it'd probably need a fairly sophisticated AI to be truly self-sufficient in the long term, but for people who could build such a construct I doubt that would be a problem.

That's awesome though, along with the upload plan. There'd be no wait time to jump anywhere. (With the simple space ships in a cluster, you're looking at minutes to hours of travel time, depending on how far you go.)

One cool thing about linking up the habitats (either with wormholes or physically) is that it would allow habitats with failed systems to potentially remain habitable. A habitat with its mirrors and shades stuck in the day or night position would be able to exchange hot and cold air with its neighbors and this way might remain habitable where otherwise the conditions inside would become hostile to life. Ditto for your idea of a habitat with water inside its window as a radiation shield where the water became clogged with algae and other growing stuff, cutting off sunlight. A big hole would have to suck out an appreciable fraction of the air mass of the whole ringworld before it became a problem, and a limited repair system might plausibly be able to replace the air from mining local comets or starlifting or whatever faster than it could be sucked out (though locally I imagine it might make for some interesting weather). You could get lots of interesting environments as a result of local failures, which might be fatal to a singleton habitat but not to an interconnected one.

For length, it seems to me that you should be able to scale up a lot, since the forces should be constant in that direction. I can't think of a limit there until tidal forces start fucking with it.... could probably be quite huge.

So the best way to get a really huge habitat would be to make it a really long relatively thin rotating cylinder?

[Uncluttered]

You don't need magmatter or skrith to support a ring world!

Orions Arm has many dynamic orbital rings, which use mass stream technology, similar to Robert Forwards space fountain idea.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_fountain

ah, hear you go.
http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/464f869fc12cb

IIRC, Orionsarm group have many subclasses of BDO. They classify ringworlds as a "partial solid dyson shell"
Some of the writers like to use (overuse) magmatter, the flavor of the month tech, but quite a few ringwolds are supported dynamically with mass streams.

I suspect that the next revision will do away with the overuse of magmatter.

[Junghalli]

Over on Omniverse One Destructionator linked me to a story that has an interesting apparently hard SF take on an interconnected megastructure with 600,000 times Earth's habitable area (link). It sounds like it might give you something reasonably close to what the OP had in mind, especially if you pressurized the connecting tubes, and it would probably be much more realistic.

Reading the OA makes me stupid.

edit: Lots of it brings me back to the big question: why? They are all about "can we use technobabble to justify soft sci-fi shit?" That's just as soft as space fantasy, even if they manage to get the technobabble right. The relevant question for hardness is "given these assumptions, what happens?"

Personally I think OA would be cooler if they actually maintained a strict commitment to hard science. There's nothing fundamentally incompatible between hard science and its basic premise, and hard science would still allow you to have some pretty far out stuff. And it would make them not come off as irritatingly hypocritical as they talk about how hard their setting is.

Then again, from my tenure on their board I got the impression a lot of their writers are science amateurs (hey, so am I) and don't realize that things like nanites would actually probably suck as a ship to ship weapon in a realistic universe.

[Admiral Valdemar]

On monopoles, anyone heard much more from MoEDAL on their experiments?

[Tom_Kalbfus]

And you think a civilization 10,000 years in the future would know no more about the Universe than we do? Let me put it this way, Dirac was not trying to find a substance out of which a ringworld could be built, Niven was. Perhaps it did not occur to Niven that he could have used a theoretical substance like magmatter rather than making something up out of whole cloth and giving it a name. I think it sounds better to piggyback off of someone else's work than to make something up out of whole cloth for the purposes of a story, I mean if there are trained scientists out there who do this for a living, wouldn't it be better to build a fictional construct out of something they think may exist according to their theory? Yes I know there is no evidence for the existance of magnetic monopoles, but I think an educated guess is better than an uneducated one. I could use flubber for instance, according to the movie flubber powered a sort of reactionless engine which could make a car fly. So in the heirarchy of hard and soft science where do the following substances fit on the totem pole: flubber, scrith, magmatter? Are they all truly equal and can you truly say that it does not matter which ones you use? I could imagine bouncing balls of flubber between two sandwiched plates on the underside of a ringworld, but that sounds silly doesn't it?

Why not? If you are making up unobtainium, you might as well call it unobtainium and not try to couch it in BS. Magnetic monopoles aren't any more realistic than skrith; presumably skrith makes perfect sense to the Ringworld engineers. We don't need to understand it, except that it's strong enough to not be destroyed by the ringworld's rotation.

Incidentally, magnetic monopoles actually appear in Known Space stories as a rare valuable thing; Niven knew about them and it was one of the things he sprinkled into the story to make it sound more science fiction-y. However, for things that the plot of a story may interact with, he just made up suitable material, be it General Products Hulls, Tnuctipun super weapons, skrith, what have you. This is better; because you declared it science fiction you can make up any material you want with any property you want it presume it works. You don't risk anyone going "Hey, wait a minute... this isn't right", beause the thing doesn't exist to be described wrong.

That's always been Orion's Arms problem. You get a bunch of people with pop-sci magazines and books on things like string theory to build stories out of words lifted from said mags/books and then pretend that it's hard stuff. In fact, it's not that much harder than most things, just more pretentious.

Another thing which I forgot to mention is that magnetic monopoles are more generic than "Scrith" which is a substance invented by Larry Niven for his Known Space/Ringworld setting. The ringworld I'm proposing here is not set in Niven's science fiction Universe, I am giving credit where credit is due, it that the ringworld is his concept and it is derived as a cross-section of a Dyson Sphere or Dyson Shell, but just as Star Trek: The Next Generation had an Episode with a Dyson Sphere in it, I wish to use a ringworld in a similar manner without setting it in Niven's Known Space Universe. The one conceit I ask is that you accept that there is a substance which holds the ringworld together, as no normal matter could. (without requiring the mass of a star, despun on the outside of the ringworld pushing inwards.) I think there may well be something 8000 years from now which could be used to hold a ringworld together, for now the place holder will be magmatter as its adequately generic and it indicates that it is a different ringworld from Larry Niven's, its origin is different and it is younger. Nanotechnology was used in its construction, and part of it is made out of normal atoms and part of it isn't. Aside from this one conceit to hold it together, the rest is Hard Science Fiction, nothing exceeds the speed of light and so forth.

The ringworld surface is covered mostly with ocean, and out of the ocean arises continents which were constructed with nanotechnology from a feedstock of elements, rock is created, including fossils, oil, minerals, finally artificial structures and life is created with nanoassemblers from plans deep inside the ringworld's database. Many of the continents hold shapes from Earth's past, life from Earth's past is also represented, the various maps represented on the Ocean are polar projection maps centered on Earth's north pole for a given era represented. One problem is that everything on the ringworld's surface is under a tropical sun that is always directly overhead, to make things cooler at higher similated latitude a heat pump is employed, this is only used for Maps of Earth, the ground is cooled from beneath and that in turn cools the water and then the air affecting the climate and so forth. A lot of continents aren't from any particular Earth Era so they remain as default tropical without any local climate modification. Some humans were constructed with nanotech assemblers, they have memories of past eras from Earth which might not be entirely accurate or reflective of the historic era reconstructed, but there is no way for such beings to know what is historically accurate or not since it is entirely consistent with their own fictional memories, the Earth they remember was very real for them, and then they find themselves on the floor of the ringworld and wonder what to do.

[Tom_Kalbfus]

And you think a civilization 10,000 years in the future would know no more about the Universe than we do? Let me put it this way, Dirac was not trying to find a substance out of which a ringworld could be built, Niven was. Perhaps it did not occur to Niven that he could have used a theoretical substance like magmatter rather than making something up out of whole cloth and giving it a name. I think it sounds better to piggyback off of someone else's work than to make something up out of whole cloth for the purposes of a story, I mean if there are trained scientists out there who do this for a living, wouldn't it be better to build a fictional construct out of something they think may exist according to their theory? Yes I know there is no evidence for the existance of magnetic monopoles, but I think an educated guess is better than an uneducated one. I could use flubber for instance, according to the movie flubber powered a sort of reactionless engine which could make a car fly. So in the heirarchy of hard and soft science where do the following substances fit on the totem pole: flubber, scrith, magmatter? Are they all truly equal and can you truly say that it does not matter which ones you use? I could imagine bouncing balls of flubber between two sandwiched plates on the underside of a ringworld, but that sounds silly doesn't it?

Why not? If you are making up unobtainium, you might as well call it unobtainium and not try to couch it in BS. Magnetic monopoles aren't any more realistic than skrith; presumably skrith makes perfect sense to the Ringworld engineers. We don't need to understand it, except that it's strong enough to not be destroyed by the ringworld's rotation.

It would be a mistake to have the actual characters call it "unobtainium" if only because, for the characters in the story, the stuff is not unobtainable. Now I think it was a big mistake in Avatar to have a mining company uprooting trees to mine a stuff they call "unobtanium" because basically this is an admission on that characters part that it is complete BS and for suspension of disbelief this is not helpful.

Incidentally, magnetic monopoles actually appear in Known Space stories as a rare valuable thing; Niven knew about them and it was one of the things he sprinkled into the story to make it sound more science fiction-y. However, for things that the plot of a story may interact with, he just made up suitable material, be it General Products Hulls, Tnuctipun super weapons, skrith, what have you. This is better; because you declared it science fiction you can make up any material you want with any property you want it presume it works. You don't risk anyone going "Hey, wait a minute... this isn't right", beause the thing doesn't exist to be described wrong.

That's always been Orion's Arms problem. You get a bunch of people with pop-sci magazines and books on things like string theory to build stories out of words lifted from said mags/books and then pretend that it's hard stuff. In fact, it's not that much harder than most things, just more pretentious.

I'm not going to argue with you there, I've received some rather rough treatment from them myself. My main problem is that the OA world is so "alien" and unfamiliar that it is hard to write a story in it. Their unique volcabulary is rather volumnous, and they have special greek or latin terms for various levels of AI programs. I basically did not want to write a story whose main characters are superpowerful AIs in the universe of post-humans and their throwback "pets". The ringworld as I conceive it is a place for creatures like use rather than the uber-powerful AI megamind posthumans that built it, it is rather a nature preserve, and perhaps in part a giant bio-social experiment as well, but the experimenters aren't visible or obvious, they built the place and they they let it run without interference. The setting begins on day zero, where the final touches are placed on the just completed ringworld, people with ficticious memories wake up on its surface, they find a world almost as they remember it, with the main exception of what they see when they look skyward.

[Gil Hamilton]

It would be a mistake to have the actual characters call it "unobtainium" if only because, for the characters in the story, the stuff is not unobtainable. Now I think it was a big mistake in Avatar to have a mining company uprooting trees to mine a stuff they call "unobtanium" because basically this is an admission on that characters part that it is complete BS and for suspension of disbelief this is not helpful.

Unobtainium didn't start with Avatar, it's been a long running joke in science fiction. It acknowledges the fact that science fiction writers can and do just make up stuff all the time, because its alot less silly than slathering something that you just made up in technobabble and try to fool your audience.

I'm not going to argue with you there, I've received some rather rough treatment from them myself. My main problem is that the OA world is so "alien" and unfamiliar that it is hard to write a story in it. Their unique volcabulary is rather volumnous, and they have special greek or latin terms for various levels of AI programs. I basically did not want to write a story whose main characters are superpowerful AIs in the universe of post-humans and their throwback "pets". The ringworld as I conceive it is a place for creatures like use rather than the uber-powerful AI megamind posthumans that built it, it is rather a nature preserve, and perhaps in part a giant bio-social experiment as well, but the experimenters aren't visible or obvious, they built the place and they they let it run without interference. The setting begins on day zero, where the final touches are placed on the just completed ringworld, people with ficticious memories wake up on its surface, they find a world almost as they remember it, with the main exception of what they see when they look skyward.

That's great, but all this doesn't explain why you are bothering taking Niven's Ringworld and added a coat of technobabble to it. The story your describe, with people waking up on a Ringworld, doesn't even need to explain anything about the Ringworld physically. It almost strikes me as better if you don't; the Ringworld has everything it needs to be a good story element without explanation. It's radically different visually than a planet, both from space and from the surface, it's so immense that you have enough room to have anything on it, and mysterious and intriguing an artifact itself.

I just think you should take caution from the OA route. It's not a good thing when you bog a story down in jargon and vocabulary. The story should be central. All those things can exist and you should think about how they interact, but if you start introducing terms that require serious amounts of exposition for them to make sense, that's probably a sign to cut the detail.

An example:
Instead of having shadow squares, you could put the ring around a star that is crazily variable on a predictable 24 hour period, such that it's output varies periodically through out the course of the day like a sine function. It's interesting and certainly could add a fair detail of mystery and wonder to your world, in addition to providing your story with a day and night. It even has a Chekov's Gun element to it; SOMETHING is did that or is doing that to the star.

Now ask yourself in that situation:

Do you REALLY want the explanation to be that a Class Three Post-Singularity Artificial Sophont Sentience is utilizing standard negative mass wormhole arrays (each one exactly -3.45 that of Jupiter) to create a Evanescent Energy Flow System to power the circular landmass simulation system's pico and nanotechnological sub-routine processes to maintain a nitrox templiqH2O environment acceptable to humans and post-humans up to Class Seven, while also providing said sophonts with with both diurnal and nocturnal ambient light situations?

[Samuel]

It would be a mistake to have the actual characters call it "unobtainium" if only because, for the characters in the story, the stuff is not unobtainable. Now I think it was a big mistake in Avatar to have a mining company uprooting trees to mine a stuff they call "unobtanium" because basically this is an admission on that characters part that it is complete BS and for suspension of disbelief this is not helpful.

Why? If something costs as much as unobtainium did in real life, the name would be apt because of how expensive and hard to get it is- after all something you have to travel to another star to get really fits the bill.

[Tom_Kalbfus]

It would be a mistake to have the actual characters call it "unobtainium" if only because, for the characters in the story, the stuff is not unobtainable. Now I think it was a big mistake in Avatar to have a mining company uprooting trees to mine a stuff they call "unobtanium" because basically this is an admission on that characters part that it is complete BS and for suspension of disbelief this is not helpful.

Unobtainium didn't start with Avatar, it's been a long running joke in science fiction. It acknowledges the fact that science fiction writers can and do just make up stuff all the time, because its alot less silly than slathering something that you just made up in technobabble and try to fool your audience.

I'm not going to argue with you there, I've received some rather rough treatment from them myself. My main problem is that the OA world is so "alien" and unfamiliar that it is hard to write a story in it. Their unique volcabulary is rather volumnous, and they have special greek or latin terms for various levels of AI programs. I basically did not want to write a story whose main characters are superpowerful AIs in the universe of post-humans and their throwback "pets". The ringworld as I conceive it is a place for creatures like use rather than the uber-powerful AI megamind posthumans that built it, it is rather a nature preserve, and perhaps in part a giant bio-social experiment as well, but the experimenters aren't visible or obvious, they built the place and they they let it run without interference. The setting begins on day zero, where the final touches are placed on the just completed ringworld, people with ficticious memories wake up on its surface, they find a world almost as they remember it, with the main exception of what they see when they look skyward.

That's great, but all this doesn't explain why you are bothering taking Niven's Ringworld and added a coat of technobabble to it. The story your describe, with people waking up on a Ringworld, doesn't even need to explain anything about the Ringworld physically. It almost strikes me as better if you don't; the Ringworld has everything it needs to be a good story element without explanation. It's radically different visually than a planet, both from space and from the surface, it's so immense that you have enough room to have anything on it, and mysterious and intriguing an artifact itself.

I just think you should take caution from the OA route. It's not a good thing when you bog a story down in jargon and vocabulary. The story should be central. All those things can exist and you should think about how they interact, but if you start introducing terms that require serious amounts of exposition for them to make sense, that's probably a sign to cut the detail.

An example:
Instead of having shadow squares, you could put the ring around a star that is crazily variable on a predictable 24 hour period, such that it's output varies periodically through out the course of the day like a sine function. It's interesting and certainly could add a fair detail of mystery and wonder to your world, in addition to providing your story with a day and night. It even has a Chekov's Gun element to it; SOMETHING is did that or is doing that to the star.

Now ask yourself in that situation:

Do you REALLY want the explanation to be that a Class Three Post-Singularity Artificial Sophont Sentience is utilizing standard negative mass wormhole arrays (each one exactly -3.45 that of Jupiter) to create a Evanescent Energy Flow System to power the circular landmass simulation system's pico and nanotechnological sub-routine processes to maintain a nitrox templiqH2O environment acceptable to humans and post-humans up to Class Seven, while also providing said sophonts with with both diurnal and nocturnal ambient light situations?

I like to have one or two key ideas in science fiction, but otherwise stick with the familiar. I use old-fashioned words such as "alien", "robot", "software", and "computer" using fancy words like sophont, then requires me to then explain the word to the reader because I can't assume he knows its meaning. A ringworld is a very simple construct, hard to build, perhaps even impossible but it is in essence a very simple idea, that is why its attractive to me, I'm also borrowing something from Riverworld, people wake up on the bank of a river or where ever after having lived their lives. Imagine if our world were flatted out and its continents spread out on a polar projection, with the oceans being stretched as the map radiates away from the "north pole", but the continents hold their shape, the cities and the street plans are the same as people remember them, GPS devices don't work as their are no satellites, some of the phones are out of service as they require satellite connections, some TV stations are off the air because their signals are transmitted via satellite, fiber optic cables, phone and cable tv otherwise work fine. Imagine how a society of 6.3 billion people would react to this.

The President is awakened from his bed, but the funny thing though is that he never actually went to sleep, though he remembers doing so. The whole world wakes up in the same time zone, when dawn comes the Sun is at high noon until eclipsed by another shadow square 12 hours later. Some fighter jets are scrambled, flights are cancelled and the nation is put on an emergency footing until the situation can be properly assessed. The President talks with the other world leaders. The NASA administrator is summoned, he confirs with his counterparts in Europe, Japan, Russia,and China. Communication is a little difficult, the underwater cablelines have been stretched to accomodate the larger oceans that come with this polar projection map. Video tapes are reviewed from bank ATMs and the like and the "event" is examined, it appears to be a discontinuity, most witnesses describe a normal sky at one moment and the next there is the "arch" over everything. telescopes are pointed to it and various landforms are identified. The night time constellations are identified, the ringworld appeared to be aligned perfectly along the ecliptic of their formerly remembered world. Geologists taking seimic readings discover there is a floor to the ringworld 2.5 kilometers below sea level, sound waves are echoed back perfectly from it. Weather balloons are released from Cape Canaveral and sounding rockets are launched to take readings from above the atmosphere. The mystery is perverse, no one knows how the world got here, though theories abound.

[Tom_Kalbfus]

It would be a mistake to have the actual characters call it "unobtainium" if only because, for the characters in the story, the stuff is not unobtainable. Now I think it was a big mistake in Avatar to have a mining company uprooting trees to mine a stuff they call "unobtanium" because basically this is an admission on that characters part that it is complete BS and for suspension of disbelief this is not helpful.

Why? If something costs as much as unobtainium did in real life, the name would be apt because of how expensive and hard to get it is- after all something you have to travel to another star to get really fits the bill.

The people of this world don't know how its held together, they woke up and found themselves here surrounded by a world that is at the same time familiar yet strange, the more advanced societies have a better idea than the more primitive ones. Some worlds found in the ocean have no relationship to history, one seems modeled after Middle Earth with humans, elves, dwarves, orcs and the like, no real magic though, another bunch of continents are home to dinosaurs, and beween the clusters of continents are chains of islands. One could sail onward and onward in seeming perpetuity.

[Junghalli]

The premise sounds rather like Charles Stross's Missile Gap, although he used a different kind of megastructure.