Celestia Forums

rthorvald wrote:So, judging from these pretty different pics, it seems it is just a transparent tube with wings...
If the book is not much more detailed than that, i can go with this.

But what of the floating buildings? Anybody remember them?

- rthorvald

but don't forget that the wing got shot down as they crossed the plane of the ringworld and where on a crash course with it.

If I remember correctly there are various shapes of those things. More or less the are all flying skyscrapers or big buildings. But I can't remember a special form at the moment.

rthorvald wrote:...The Lying Bastard, yes, that is the one.
If i can get the description, it would be very nice!

"The GP#2 hull was a wasp waisted cylinder, narrow and needle-tapered at both ends. Ordinarily, it was just roomy enough for one pilot."

"..transparent to visible light. To all other forms of electromagnetic energy, and to matter of any form, it was impervious."

"20 ft wide and 300 long, tapering to points fore and aft."

"... only the life-support system and the hyperdrive shunt were within the hull"

"Everything else.... a pair of flat thruster units aimed downward, two small fusion motors facing forward, larger fusion motors on the wings trailing edges, and a pair of tremendous pods on the wingtips---pods which must contain detection and comms equipment...all this was on the great delta wing."

"Half the ship was on the wing, exposed to any danger that could worry a puppeteer"

"Through the glass-like hull Louis could see a conduit as thick as his thigh, leading through the hull into the wing section......An ordinary ship requires many breaks in it's hull: for sensors which do not use visible light, for reaction motors if such are used, for apertures leading to fuel tanks. Here we have only 2 breaks, the conduit, and the airlock.... Both can be closed off."

...

Most of the ship was outside the hull itself, on the thin oversized wing.

Life-System:
3 x living/bedrooms, 1x long narrow lounge, control cabin, bank of lockers, kitchen, autodocs, recalimers, batteries etc.
Control room fitted out in Kzinti fashion with Kzinti labelling.
4 x flycycles, 4 x flying backpacks, etc...

It was a 10-story castle floating a thousand feet high, and it was all lit up like the instrument board on some ancient rocket ship
...
There was a city beneath the castle. It showed no lights.
...
There were windows all over the underside, and the underside was all angles.
...
There was no way to land the castle
...
Concrete and metal, assymmetrically designed...
...
They found a couple of hundred feet of spiral escalator hanging like a bedspring from the lowermost tip of the castle. It's bottom ended in open air. Some force had twisted it away, leaving sheared beams and broken treads. It's top was a locked door.

The city was all the colors of gray. Most of the buildings were tall, but a bare handful were tall enough to dwarf the rest; taller, a few of them than the bottom of this floating castle. There had been other floating buildings. Louis could see the scars, broad gaps in the cityscape where thousands of tons of masonry had smashed down....

Chuft-Captain wrote:I would suggest that modeling "The Liar" would be a good job for the Linuxman... but I suspect his version would be too high in polys for your needs!!!

rthorvald wrote:The biggest challenge is the night! How to envelope a tile in night when nothing cast shadows on a non-spherical
model? I have solved it somewhat, by using multiple layers of semi-transparent polygons stacked on top of each other.

Chuft-Captain wrote:From memory, the "Fist of God" was only 1000miles high. If the RW is ~ 1,000,000 miles wide then the mountains height would only be 1 thousandth of the width. Your version looks several orders of magnitude larger than that.

30 hours = 1 Ringworld day
1 turn (A Ringworld rotation) = 7 1/2 days
1 falan = 10 turns = 75 days
Radius = 0.95 x 10E8 miles
Circumference = 5.97 x 10E8 miles
Width = 997,000 miles
Surface gravity = 0.992 G
Star : G3 verging on G2, barely smaller and cooler than Sol

rthorvald wrote:I am undecided on what lenghts to go to re surface detail - but this screenshot should help visualize the size of the Ringworld... Which is almost impossible to really grasp. In fact, the more i go into this, the clearer it becomes that even though the concept of a ringworld is fascinating, it is also utterly ridiculous: anyone with the resources to build something like it would certainly have better solutions for living space than a solid ring with dirt on it!
-rthorvald