By VelociBlade
01/28/2009 - 04:57:46
Type: Spaceship
Rating: 0 (Not rated)
Tags: known space, ringworld, velociblade, velociraptorblade
Description
The torus structure from the ringworld series. The "Ringworld" is an artificial ring about one million miles wide and approximately the diameter of Earth's orbit (which makes it about 600 million miles in circumference), encircling a Sol-type star. It rotates, providing an artificial gravity that is 99.2% as strong as Earth's gravity through the action of centrifugal force. Ringworld has a habitable flat inner surface equivalent in area to approximately three million Earth-sized planets. The majority of the surface is land interspersed with shallow, freshwater seas. On opposite sides of the ring are two large deep saltwater oceans, placed in counterbalance to one another. One of the large oceans, known as the "Great Ocean", contains one-to-one maps of all of the inhabited worlds of known space. The "Other Ocean" has many maps of a single world: the Pak Homeworld. Walls 1,000 miles tall along the edges retain the atmosphere. The Ringworld could be regarded as a thin, rotating slice of a Dyson sphere, with which it shares a number of characteristics. Niven himself thinks of the Ringworld as "an intermediate step between Dyson spheres and planets."The Ringworld is described as having a mass approximately equal to the sum of all the planets in our solar system. The adventurers surmised that its construction consumed literally all the planets in that system, down to the last asteroid and/or moon, as the Ringworld star has no other bodies in orbit. In Ringworld's Children it is additionally explained that it took the reaction mass of roughly 20 Jupiter masses to spin up the ring; thus the combined mass of the planets of the original system was that much larger than our solar system's.Scrith, usually written italicized, forms the walls and floor of the Ringworld.Scrith is a milky-gray translucent, nearly frictionless material. The fairly thin layer of scrith that forms the floor of the Ringworld blocks the passage of 40% of the neutrinos that encounter it, equivalent to almost a light year of lead. It also absorbs nearly 100% of all other radiation and subatomic particles and rapidly dissipates heat. The tensile strength of scrith is similar to the strong nuclear force, with the Ringworld foundation only about 30m (100 ft) deep. Also, it is transparent to large magnetic fields.Due to its enormous strength, scrith is impervious to most weapons. A body (such as a comet or asteroid) striking with enough kinetic energy may be able to deform the Ringworld floor and punch a hole. The Ringworld engineers used a device, called the cziltang brone in their language, to pass from the vacuum of their spaceports right through the scrith to the habitable surface of the Ringworld.The physical composition of scrith is unclear, but it appears to share some of the properties of a metal (albeit in a greatly exaggerated form): for instance, the high tensile strength, the ability to conduct heat and the ability to retain an induced magnetic field. Scrith is said to have been artificially produced through the transmutation of matter.Thanks to avmf8 for the ring template.
By ra1nman
It's Halo before Halo was Halo... lol
By 879MacDonald
So... It's HALO
By TorgOwl
Fun idea. Maybe the biggest structure that's been made in Spore yet
By cod4legend
Absolutely amazing