NationStates Jolt Archive

come on, please tell me you people have read it? i mean, the books just awesome, if not for writing talentry, then for the sheer imagination the man had to create such an artifact as ringworld, people ought to know about it, so my brothers in arms, we must illustrat the sheer magnitude of the Ringworld on these people!

3,000,000 times the f'in surface area of earth for cripes sake!

*is confused*
Never read it, and a summary might convince me to read it, instead of someone telling me I should have.
*shoots random passer-by* :sniper:

come on, please tell me you people have read it? i mean, the books just awesome, if not for writing talentry, then for the sheer imagination the man had to create such an artifact as ringworld, people ought to know about it, so my brothers in arms, we must illustrat the sheer magnitude of the Ringworld on these people!

3,000,000 times the f'in surface area of earth for cripes sake!
meh... its just a second version of a rate dyson sphere and would be extremely unstable, niven tried to fix that with the altitude jets in ringworld engineers. the pak protector mythology is interesting but not best expressed in that book. its good in the big dumb object tradition but its actually not one of my favorite larry niven books. i think " a mote in god's eye" is probably his best work(with jerry pournelle).

the dyson sphere is far more frail then the ringworld. if some machinery fails on a dyson sphere, the entire dang thing and all 5 quadrillion populants would die in a matter of years or decades, as was shown in the ringworld engineers, the Ring survived for millenia after those terds the puppeteers trashed most of the advanced electronics.

also, we don't know how to make induced gravity. And teela's point of no stars is a valid one.

Ringworld is considerably more pheaseable then a dyson sphere.

The perk of having a star being a giant laser cannon is nice too :D

3,000,000 times the f'in surface area of earth for cripes sake!

The mass of Jupiter, radius same as the Earth's orbit, a kilometer thick with 100 kilometer walls around the sides.

oh come on, can't you imagine it? a world, stretched around a star, a world big enough to envelop a hundred, a thousand, ahundred thousand worlds in it's rich variety of ecology and peoples? doesn't it just spark something in your mind that will either shatter you as insignificant, or cause you to latch hard onto your singularity?