Man-Kzin Wars X

SOL has seen the Ringworld, but it has left.
Too big with unknowns to copy.
So lettuce consider a scaled down Ringlet.

@ either of Earth's trojan points;
24 hour rotation @ 1g.

The visual dia of the sun at 1au, same angle at 1 dia for width.
At each equinox then you build up to 1 day of full eclipse.
Should give about 1000 times the surface area of Earth.
Use 1/2 width, get 1/2 eclipse, about 500 E's, etc.

I see 3 choices for base.
a. Ringworld floor - do we know scrinth.
b. General Products hull - reinforced atomic bonds.
c. Any convenient structural material - plus stasis field.

Use Venus for mass.
Build base with minimum rotation, load lava, spin up.
Use transmutation for volatiles - air, water... (exercise for student).

Use 20% of Venus for mass, then a 2nd at the other Trojan, 3 more 60deg.
Earth plus 5 Ringlets = Rosette !

Would this fit in Larry's playground?

Jim Lillie

In article <tvOdnc01R4h56wreRVn-tA DeleteThis @adelphia.com>, Jim Lillie wrote:
> Use transmutation for volatiles - air, water... (exercise for student).
>
> Use 20% of Venus for mass, then a 2nd at the other Trojan, 3 more 60deg.
> Earth plus 5 Ringlets = Rosette !
>
> Would this fit in Larry's playground?
>
(Student exercising)
- We have transmutation so cheap that only antique collectors
actually *move* anything.
- We have Jupiter.
- We start to dismantle Jupiter to form lots of ringlets as above,
pushing them down to Earth's orbit as constructed - use the same engines
to spin them up en-route.
- By the time we've dismantled Jupiter to half it's present size
and greatly simplified the issues of taking matter out of the gravity
hole, we can start sending the raw packets of matter down to near-Earth
orbit and instead of building independent Ringlets, we can start to build
the second half of the ringlets interlinked with the first set.
- Voila - a chain of something like 1020 Ringlets circles the Sun,
each one never coming closer to it's nearest neighbour or next-nearest
neighbour than 872,664 km. Surely that's safe - it's about twice the
current separation between Earth and it's Moon.

Hey - we could use it for an experiment in comparative mythology.
Terraform the lot of them, robustly, then populate each one with a couple
of thousand formerly sane Puppeteers. Leave them to stew for a few tens of
generations and then examine the ones which survive to see how they've
generated mythologies to explain the whirling Ringlets in their skies.
(I'm expecting the small numbers of Puppeteers, on a bare world, to lose
all technology within a generation or two.)

--
Aidan Karley, FGS
Aberdeen, Scotland,
Location: +57d10' , -02d09' (sub-tropical Aberdeen), 0.021233
Written at Thu, 08 Dec 2005 08:28 GMT