Fascinating, but not very plausible.. to make this, you'd have to collect several million earthlike planets from all over the galaxy, somehow tow them to this star, bring them all into the same, stable orbit, and then somehow splice them together, sort of like a stone arch falling into place. How you could keep gravity from pulling them together to form gas-giants or even small stars is yet another matter. overall, with superb planet-towing spaceships and all, I'd estimated the task to take several hundred million years and probably fail. I'd think I'd settle for populating the galaxy first.

>> ^BicycleRepairMan:

Fascinating, but not very plausible.. to make this, you'd have to collect several million earthlike planets from all over the galaxy, somehow tow them to this star, bring them all into the same, stable orbit, and then somehow splice them together, sort of like a stone arch falling into place. How you could keep gravity from pulling them together to form gas-giants or even small stars is yet another matter. overall, with superb planet-towing spaceships and all, I'd estimated the task to take several hundred million years and probably fail. I'd think I'd settle for populating the galaxy first.


I think its far more concevable that you would grow something like this , or use some sort of insane computing to do a controled exsplosion of a system in a way that it autimatecally collects into a gemoetrick formatoin.

having said all that , this is not very well constructed the start is fine , but as you zoom out the repeat texture of the clouds is visable and this could be fixed with a better procedural cloud texture , or having an aditoinal lower rez cloud texture that fades in as u move away.

allso lighting is a bit of a mess as it moves father out.

he could have used more refrence pionts and tricks to convay more scale , deeper music , different camara work , satalites , Dust , debry. IF it was me i would have set it up so it looked like a traditoinal earth zoom out for far longer and then suprize people with the whole disk thing.

I allso dont see anny motivatoin to construct a ring around a sun , would be far more plusable and conveneant to have a ring orbiting the sun, or a disk orbiting the sun.

For those of you unfamiliar with Ringworld see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworld

As for settling for populating the galaxy first @BicycleRepairMan, the whole point of the novel is to discover who built such an insanely huge piece of engineering and why - as whoever had the power to build such a thing is obviously something to fear.

>> ^BicycleRepairMan:

Fascinating, but not very plausible.. to make this, you'd have to collect several million earthlike planets from all over the galaxy, somehow tow them to this star, bring them all into the same, stable orbit, and then somehow splice them together, sort of like a stone arch falling into place. How you could keep gravity from pulling them together to form gas-giants or even small stars is yet another matter. overall, with superb planet-towing spaceships and all, I'd estimated the task to take several hundred million years and probably fail. I'd think I'd settle for populating the galaxy first.


I've read the whole series, many times and according to Niven the Ringworld was constructed as a filled shell. Planets, planetoids and asteroid belts from neighboring systems were broken down and through a never explained process, transmuted into a unique alloy called Scrith. That shell was then contoured like a bas-relief, bulges for oceans, depressions for mountains and filled with earth, water, oxygen, plants etc.. Still a massive undertaking to be sure, esp. at sub-light speeds but not as bad as assembling a giant jigsaw.

Sub-light speed technology is assumed as any civilization capable of FTL travel would find it far easier to terraform and inhabit existing worlds.

That's not what ringworm looks like...ooooooooh ringWORLD

I had a ringworld once. My MD gave me a special fluid to drink and I pooped it out when it died.

*brief

This video has been flagged as being less than 1 minute in length - declared brief by ant.

>> ^westy:

>> ^BicycleRepairMan:
Fascinating, but not very plausible.. to make this, you'd have to collect several million earthlike planets from all over the galaxy, somehow tow them to this star, bring them all into the same, stable orbit, and then somehow splice them together, sort of like a stone arch falling into place. How you could keep gravity from pulling them together to form gas-giants or even small stars is yet another matter. overall, with superb planet-towing spaceships and all, I'd estimated the task to take several hundred million years and probably fail. I'd think I'd settle for populating the galaxy first.

I think its far more concevable that you would grow something like this , or use some sort of insane computing to do a controled exsplosion of a system in a way that it autimatecally collects into a gemoetrick formatoin.
having said all that , this is not very well constructed the start is fine , but as you zoom out the repeat texture of the clouds is visable and this could be fixed with a better procedural cloud texture , or having an aditoinal lower rez cloud texture that fades in as u move away.
allso lighting is a bit of a mess as it moves father out.
he could have used more refrence pionts and tricks to convay more scale , deeper music , different camara work , satalites , Dust , debry. IF it was me i would have set it up so it looked like a traditoinal earth zoom out for far longer and then suprize people with the whole disk thing.
I allso dont see anny motivatoin to construct a ring around a sun , would be far more plusable and conveneant to have a ring orbiting the sun, or a disk orbiting the sun.


Grow? but from what?
if you stacked earths side by side in earths orbit, thats 166666 earths, or 1.000002 × 10^30kg of mass, thats actually just half the suns mass (1.98892 × 10^30 )(i think),but the mass still has to come from somewhere.