Ringworlds, orbitals, etc...

[mallet]

Hi, I am working on a game that will take place (partly) on a ringworld. Now before I start maping, building and designing the whole thing (damn are they big ) I was wondering if anyone knew of a good source of information on these types of structures. Preferable RPG based, maybe with maps, ideas, etc... That would help make my job easier.

 

Any info, sources, ideas, etc... would be appreciated.

 

thanks

[Steve Long]

Re: Ringworlds, orbitals, etc...

 

There's some info in Star Hero about how to create them in HERO System terms. There aren't any maps, tho.

 

The old Ringworld RPG from Chaosium might have some maps of Niven's ringworld, as well as other useful details.

[Dr. Anomaly]

Re: Ringworlds, orbitals, etc...

 

Well, since they are sooo big, as you noted, you could use practically any RPG world map you wanted. Each seperate Earth-sized world would be, in essence, just an island group in a Ringworld ocean. So I'd say you already have all the maps you need -- just stitch together any maps you like.

 

There are a few things to keep in mind, though:

 

1) The "rim walls" of mountains. If you are going to put one of your maps along the edge of the ringworld, you need to put in the Barrier Peaks (or whatever the local name for them would be).

 

2) There isn't going to be a temperature change via "latitude", the way there is on spherical worlds like Earth. You can get cold and icy "polar" regions one of two ways -- either by making them gradually higher and higher elevation as you go towards the "poles", or by having enormous radiators on the underside of the ring, beneath the "polar" areas, that supercool those locations. The 'radiator' idea has the problem of possibly being subject to mechanical breakdown (even of a simple solid state device) and the "elevation" solution has the problem of the atmosphere being much thinner in the icy "polar" regions, as well as the problem of getting enough water up to the "poles", since everything else is "downhill" from the "polar" regions.

 

3) Seasonal variations, if you have any, will be fairly mild since the ring needs to orbit with the sun centered as much as possible, or instability will eventually cause the ring to collide with the central star.

 

4) Minerals, mines, and natural resources. There's only so deep you can dig down when mining for resources before you hit the material of the ring itself. Also, the only natural resources available to be mined will be those placed there during the ring's construction. There's no techtonic activity to recycle crust or bring new mineral-rich material up "from below".

 

5) There's no new moutainbuilding going on, and erosion will tend to wash all the land and soil eventually into bodies of water. Most existing mountains will be "sculpted" into the material of the ring, with rock and soil plated over them. You'll need some kind of dredge/drainage system in the large bodies of water to collect the sediments and pump them out the tops of mountains to recycle them.

 

6) You won't have any volcanic regions, unless you devote a lot of machinery to heating, liquifying, and pumping rock. And that's complex and just asking for a breakdown. On the other hand, maybe it is possible to have volcanic areas, due to a malfunction! If there was a breakdown in a major heat exchanger, excess heat being dumped into the "recycled" sediments could result in volcano-like activity as the near-molten soil is pumped out the top of its mountain...

[mallet]

Re: Ringworlds, orbitals, etc...

 

Thanks for the heads up on the ringworld rpg I'll have to try and see if I can find that somewhere.

 

I already have Star Hero, that's where I got the idea to set part of the campaign on a ringworld. Man, that is a good sourcebook. Thanks for doing it so well.

 

I'm thinking that my game will draw a little from the tv show Lost, maybe with different groups fighting it out on the ringworld, with someone watching and recording it all in secret (I still have to figure out why). And then the PC's will stumble into this situation and mess things up for everyone.

 

And, if I may, I'll add another question on to the one's I posted from above.

 

Has anyone playing a star hero game set an adventure/story on a ringworld before? And if so were there any major problems, things you would do differently if you had a second chance, good stories/ideas you would like to share?

 

 

thanks

 

edit: Dr. Anomaly, thanks for all the good insight in to this, some things there I would not have thought of.

[Dr. Anomaly]

Re: Ringworlds, orbitals, etc...

 

My pleasure. I don't know if you're read Larry Niven's Ringworld books or not -- your post didn't say -- but if you haven't I'd encourage you to. He talks quite a bit about the engineering problems of keeping a ringworld functional, and how a ringworld differs from normal worlds, especially in those things we take for granted.

 

I've not run a campaign on a ringworld before, but aside from the few physical problems I mentioned, I'll hazard a guess as to one RPG challenge: scale. A ringworld is just so blasted big that anything the PCs do or experience will take place on such a small area, relative to the whole, that they won't be doing anything to influence the ringworld as a whole. I don't know if that's what you want or not. And if you try to expand the scope, just remember that unless the PCs have a means of very fast travel, it's going to take a long time to get anywhere. So your "warring groups" are likely to be pretty much "local" affairs -- confined to one or two world-sized neighboring areas of the ringworld.

 

If fast, long-range transportation is available, though, the next question would be "with the millions of times the surface area of the Earth available, why are groups literally tens of millions of miles away from each other wrangling with each other? No matter what it is they want -- land for farming, land for population growth, mineral resources -- it should be available in real abundance much closer to home. So why go all that way to make trouble?"

 

Those are the non-mechanics-of-how-the-place-functions kinds of problems I can envision, just off the top of my head.

[keithcurtis]

Re: Ringworlds, orbitals, etc...

 

You could have seasons if your shadow squares (the intermittant inner ring that simulates night and day) could vary their length seasonally.

 

Keith "Not a Pak" Curtis

[Curufea]

Re: Ringworlds, orbitals, etc...

 

If I recall correctly (I have the ringworld rpg at home) - the Niven Ringworld is 8 earth diameter's wide. And of course, has a radius of 1 AU.

 

Surface area is therefore the circumference of a circle of 1AU multiplied by the width.

[Dr. Anomaly]

Re: Ringworlds, orbitals, etc...

 

Quoting a Wikipedia entry, so I don't have to look up and crunch the mumbers myself:

The "Ringworld" is an artificial ring about a million miles wide and approximately the diameter of Earth's orbit (which makes it about 600 million miles in circumference), centered about a star, and rotating to provide an Earthlike artificial gravity, with a habitable flat inner surface equivalent in area to approximately three million Earth-sized planets.

 

So three million. The "trillions" I posted, in error, were out of memory and (now that I've checked a few things) was a still-mistaken memory of the surface area of a Type II Dyson Sphere, which is still "only" in the neighborhood of a half a billion times the surface area of the Earth. Think I'll go edit the other post now.

[Dr. Anomaly]

Re: Ringworlds, orbitals, etc...

 

You could have seasons if your shadow squares (the intermittant inner ring that simulates night and day) could vary their length seasonally.

 

Keith "Not a Pak" Curtis

I suppose you could...though I don't know how complex it would end up being. I don't recall any figures on how many shadow squares there were, etc. so I don't know how feasible that would be.

[keithcurtis]

Re: Ringworlds, orbitals, etc...

 

According to the book it's 1 million miles wide, substantially more than 8 earth diameters.

 

Keith "Speaker to Curufea" Curtis

[Steve Long]

Re: Ringworlds, orbitals, etc...

 

I'm thinking that my game will draw a little from the tv show Lost, maybe with different groups fighting it out on the ringworld, with someone watching and recording it all in secret (I still have to figure out why).

 

Interesting idea. Involuntarily-casted CBS (Cosmic Broadcasting System) reality TV show, perhaps?

[CSgeekHero]

Re: Ringworlds, orbitals, etc...

 

One website that is really good for comparing sizes to get a sense of scale is http://www.merzo.net.

 

You can drag objects next to other objects for comparison using Internet Explorer. I always find it useful for sparking my imagination when trying to get an idea of a ship's or space station's size.

[Curufea]

Re: Ringworlds, orbitals, etc...

 

There was once a website with 3D rendered representations of the Ringworld, and what it would like like on the surface.

 

It can be summed up as an light/dark arch that dissappears behind the eternally noon sun.

[Nyrath]

Re: Ringworlds, orbitals, etc...

 

Thanks for the heads up on the ringworld rpg I'll have to try and see if I can find that somewhere.

Don't faint when you find out how expensive it is.

It went out of print a long time ago, and now it costs like uranium.

[Dr. Anomaly]

Re: Ringworlds, orbitals, etc...

 

Don't faint when you find out how expensive it is.

It went out of print a long time ago, and now it costs like uranium.

And it wasn't that good a game, either, sadly enough.

[Guest Suleyman Rashid]

Re: Ringworlds, orbitals, etc...

 

Physics In Science Fiction has a great deal of information on Niven's Ringworld.

[Nyrath]

Re: Ringworlds, orbitals, etc...

 

And it wasn't that good a game' date=' either, sadly enough.[/quote']

Yes, but the background section was good enough that Niven decreed that it was the bible to be used by writers working in his "Man-Kzin" war franchise.

--

SURREAL SAGE SEZ: Veneria ... a fog-shrouded world of untold horrors, creeping in its orbit around the ghoulish green star Hernia like some repellent heavenly trespasser newly arose from the nethermost pit.

[Outsider]

Re: Ringworlds, orbitals, etc...

 

Don't faint when you find out how expensive it is.

It went out of print a long time ago, and now it costs like uranium.

 

Hm.. I have a copy of it up on a shelf also... Uranium, you say?

 

 

 

 

Anyway...

 

Another thing to remember is that you dont have to have your ringworld be physically identical to Niven's Ringworld. Niven's Ringworld presupposed that its builders were starting with a Sol-like system, sweeping everything but the star up (planets, asteroids, comets, you name it) and using matter conversion to turn them into the ring structure and biosphere. This meant that they only had a mass about 1.5 times that of Jupiter to work with. This dictated that the living space between the scrith and the atmosphere be only a few hundred meters thick. Not enough mass for anything else.

 

Instead, your builders might have started with a binary system, and turned one star (and all the sweepings) into their ringworld, giving them a lot more mass to play with. Their ringworld could be many, many, kilometers, perhaps even hundreds or thousands, thick. Admittedly, your structural material (the handwavium 'scrith' that prevents the ring from flying apart under its rotational stress) will need to be even stronger, but once you are waving your hands anyway... If things are thick enough and you make the 'scrith' a perfect heat insulator too, you could have most of the mass molten, with tectonic plates floating on top. I dont know how that would work out on the inner surface of a spinning ring, vs on the outer surface of a spinning globe, though.

 

 

Edit : If one did make the ring several 1000 km thick, it wouldnt have to have nearly as much spin to get the perceived 'gravity' on the living surface to be 1.0 earth gravities. A lot of the perceived gravity would come from actual gravity, given all that mass.

[austenandrews]

Re: Ringworlds, orbitals, etc...

 

For that matter, as long as you've got the impossible engineering feat of a ringworld, it's reasonable to include artifical tectonic-like activity to recycle eroded materials.

[Dr. Anomaly]

Re: Ringworlds, orbitals, etc...

 

For that matter' date=' as long as you've got the impossible engineering feat of a ringworld, it's reasonable to include artifical tectonic-like activity to recycle eroded materials.[/quote']

Maybe, maybe not. I can only speak from my own personal perspective, of course, but I like my fantasy (be it science fiction, superheroes, whatever) to have a good dose of "realism", but not so much that it ruins the fantasy.

 

For example, while I'm quite willing to accept a ringworld set-up, I probably wouldn't be willing to accept "artificial techtonic activity." The reason for this is that the physical construction of the ringworld itself, what makes it work, if you will, is a static structure -- the same way blocks of marble piled on top of one another make a static building. It's pretty durable over time, without worrying about complex systems or "moving parts" breaking down. Even Niven himself points out the breakdown of maintenance systems -- things like the attitude jets, the "flup" system, and so on and so forth. An artificial techtonic activity system would be even more complex, and more prone to breakdown. Just from my own personal perspective, I couldn't see including one. (It's really bugging me now that I can't remember the name of the book or the author, but there was a SF novel that dealt with these sorts of problems, including artificial volcanos. Space explorers discover a "flat" planet that is in fact one huge artifact, an artificial world, and included things like mechanisms to heat, liquify, and pump rock so as to make volcanos. But the systems are beginning to break down...)

 

That's being nit-picky, I know, since we're already accepting some pretty hefty tech advances to even make the "basic" construction of a ringworld a possibility...so why not devices capable of perfect or endless self-repair so the mechanisms for things like artificial techtonic activity don't break down or go inoperative? A "gut" feeling or preference, really, as well as a pretty firm belief in entropy...as well as the realization that the more complex a mechanism is, the more there is for entropy to "work" on or with...so the more likely breakdown is over time.

 

----

 

Outsider, those are some interesting ideas there; I certainly hadn't thought of anything like that. I don't know how much you'd be able to reduce the spin, though, for gravity, because I don't have the equations handy for computing gravitational vectors for non-spherical masses. I'd have to go looking for the procedure, and will if I have the time.

 

I will say, though, that the spin will probably still need to be fairly large, so as to keep the self-gravity of the ring from trying to collapse it (or sections of it) into spheres. The ring (or the material coating the inside of it, the magma and floating plates) will be trying to break up and collapse into spheres, since that's the lowest energy state and most stable form. What will keep that from happening at base is the rigidity of the "handwavium" (nice term, BTW) that comprises the structural material of the ring itself. What keeps the normal matter on the interior (especially liquid matter, like water or molten rock) from "globing up" due to self-gravitation will in large part be the spin of the ring, which will tend to keep it spread out like a thin "film".

[keithcurtis]

Re: Ringworlds, orbitals, etc...

 

(It's really bugging me now that I can't remember the name of the book or the author' date=' but there was a SF novel that dealt with these sorts of problems, including artificial volcanos. Space explorers discover a "flat" planet that is in fact one huge artifact, an artificial world, and included things like mechanisms to heat, liquify, and pump rock so as to make volcanos. But the systems are beginning to break down...)[/quote']

 

Strata by the truly ingenious Terry Pratchett. It was written slightly before Discworld.

 

Keith "The Librarian" Curtis

[austenandrews]

Re: Ringworlds, orbitals, etc...

 

That's being nit-picky' date=' I know, since we're already accepting some pretty hefty tech advances to even make the "basic" construction of a ringworld a possibility...so why not devices capable of perfect or endless self-repair so the mechanisms for things like artificial techtonic activity don't break down or go inoperative? A "gut" feeling or preference, really, as well as a pretty firm belief in entropy...as well as the realization that the more complex a mechanism is, the more there is for entropy to "work" on or with...so the more likely breakdown is over time.[/quote']

The usual "hard SF" paradigm of Niven, Clarke & co. is to play with a single innovation (ringworld, Rama, etc.) and not advance other fields equally. I confess, my preference runs more toward advancing all engineering at once. For instance, the odds of constructing a ringworld without nanoscale materials engineering is slim. If the aliens are capable of nanoscale construction, to me it's not a stretch to say that they're also capable of devising a molecular and/or chemical mechanism for recycling eroded materials. It would probably be sustained by "natural" phenomena - say, using water evaporation as a delivery method - to reduce the problems with "moving parts." But we've already got nature and biology as examples of self-sustaining moving-parts systems. Not everything has to be clanky metal gears and power generators. By necessity we're already talking about a tech level that has solved the problem of living in space, so extremely reliable recycling systems will be old hat anyway.

 

From my perspective, I find these advanced systems more believable than the notion of building a ringworld only to dump terristrial continents on it that will crumble apart in short order. What would be the point?

[Dr. Anomaly]

Re: Ringworlds, orbitals, etc...

 

Strata by the truly ingenious Terry Pratchett. It was written slightly before Discworld.

 

Keith "The Librarian" Curtis

Thanks, Keith. That was really bugging me!

[keithcurtis]

Re: Ringworlds, orbitals, etc...

 

From my perspective' date=' I find these advanced systems more believable than the notion of building a ringworld only to dump terristrial continents on it that will crumble apart in short order. What would be the point?[/quote']

To survive the radiation wave from the galaxy's exploding core, of course.

 

Keith "Couldn't resist :)" Curtis

[Dr. Anomaly]

Re: Ringworlds, orbitals, etc...

 

The usual "hard SF" paradigm of Niven, Clarke & co. is to play with a single innovation (ringworld, Rama, etc.) and not advance other fields equally. I confess, my preference runs more toward advancing all engineering at once. For instance, the odds of constructing a ringworld without nanoscale materials engineering is slim. If the aliens are capable of nanoscale construction, to me it's not a stretch to say that they're also capable of devising a molecular and/or chemical mechanism for recycling eroded materials. It would probably be sustained by "natural" phenomena - say, using water evaporation as a delivery method - to reduce the problems with "moving parts." But we've already got nature and biology as examples of self-sustaining moving-parts systems. Not everything has to be clanky metal gears and power generators. By necessity we're already talking about a tech level that has solved the problem of living in space, so extremely reliable recycling systems will be old hat anyway.

 

From my perspective, I find these advanced systems more believable than the notion of building a ringworld only to dump terristrial continents on it that will crumble apart in short order. What would be the point?

You make some good points there, aa; but allow me to play "devil's advocate' for a moment.

 

First, on the subject of tech advancement: our own sciences have not progressed evenly or equally, so I'm not going to assume that the science developments of an alien race are going to advance in unison, either. Just as an example...our fields of physics, electronics, chemistry, and genetic engineering have all advanced at very different rates, and each one takes big, rapid strides out of step with the others. Yes, to an extent they all fit together -- advances in electronics leading to exponentially more powerful computers, which greatly facilitates genetic modeling -- but they don't advance at the same rate.

 

In a way, I'd find it more likely that the alien science would be quite a bit ahead in one field than I would that all fields are on a more-or-less even keel.

 

Now, on the subject of recycling systems. The problem with using living things as a model to build nanotech recyclers is two-fold in this case. First, with any kind of self-replicating machines (the cells in living things would count for this) you're going to run into the problem of replication errors i.e. "mutations." And no matter how many backups, failsafes, and checks you build into the system, sooner or later you're going to start to have breakdowns, "drifts" away from the original patterns, and so on. It may last for a very long time being functional, but eventually it's going to break down (or change, which is the same thing in this case as it will no longer be performing its designed function) the same as any system will, regardless of how it's designed and built. And the smaller the machines, and the more generations per unit of time, the faster those "mutations" are going to take place.

 

The second problem is one of sheer scale. Though it may be a failing on my part, I have a hard time imagining a nanoscale-based system that could recycle landforms, minerals, etc. on the scale of a ringworld -- at least, at a high enough rate of through-put to be effective at maintaining things. There have been a number of papers written already about the difficulties of building (for instance) a skyscraper using nanoassemblers, and this is many orders of magnitude larger than that. Please feel free to point out some things -- realistic, that is, not on the level of "magic" technology -- that would make it feasible. I'd really like to believe that nanotech could be useful and effective on that scale in a time-frame short enough to be worthwhile, but right now I just don't see it.

 

As for continents crumbling "in short order", that would depend on your time scale and your expected "lifetime" of the ringworld you've built. If it's a time scale on the order of millions of years, I really don't see the problem. Even if our rate of technical advancement is abnormally fast (and there have been speculations along those lines), and it slowed to a virtual crawl, it seems likely that in the millions of years between the construction of a ringworld and the end of its useful "service life", there would have been time enough to (a) construct a replacement (though this leads to thoughts about the ultimate in "consumable" products) or to ( re-engineer the maintenance systems into something capable of properly dealing with the problems that would arise after that much time.

 

(I'm also aware that my last statement may have just argued me into the "I find it easier to believe that proper maintenance systems would exist" position you mentioned. Perhaps. But I don't see any way that systems like that, no matter how advanced, could run for millions of years without supervision and some maintenance from an outside source -- i.e. the race who built those systems. And in this case, I've been working under the assumption that we're talking about a ringworld either long abandoned by the original builders, or in which the builders have regressed for some reason to a level lower than that necessary to build and maintain a ringworld. After all, mallet's suggested set-up doesn't seem to indicate that the groups occupying and fighting over areas of the ringworld are up to those kinds of tech levels.)