3 ms·
I think you are missing that the gravity comes from the centrifugal forces. Said gravity is for humans to be able to walk around, as well as keeping air and wa
by sliken 4y ago
I think you are missing that the gravity comes from the centrifugal forces. Said gravity is for humans to be able to walk around, as well as keeping air and water from being lost to space.
So sure you could make a non-spinning ring that minimizes the tension, velocity, and centrifugal force, but it would not provide a large living area like the ringworld does.
- WalterBright 4y agoYou're right, I missed that. Oops!
- jojobas 4y agoI don't get it. There should be 1g of centrifugal force. (This requires kilometers of atmospheric altitude to keep the air, but that's beside the point). What would tear us apart?
- consilient 4y agoHoop stress scales with the radius too, since there's more material pulling on itself. You're looking at many trillions of pascals for an Earth-equivalent ringworld.
- moloch-hai 4y agoWay, way more than that.
- sliken 4y agoWell the curvature of the orbit at the earth <-> sun distance is minimal. So you have to hit a decent fraction of the speed of light to create that centrifugal force to replace the earth normal 1G. Those incredible speeds mean that all of ring world is under 1G of force, which creates incredible tension. What I don't know is if the sun was 1/16th as bright and physically smaller if that would bring the ring into the realm of physically possible.