And now for something completely different...

[rthorvald]

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

[Guckytos]

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

I have the books also here somewhere, I think. But of course in german
But I will take a look and give you a translated description, if not somebody beats me to it. I think it was described a bit better, 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.

Yep, some floating buildings I remember. There were not so many in the first novel; a lot more were in the "Ringworld Engineers", a whole city of them even.

Do you need a detailed description? Or is it a general question? 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.

Most houses crashed when the Puppetiers nasty bug destroyed the superconducting cables, taking the elite of the ringworld civilization with them.

Regards,

Guckytos

[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.

That is a nice detail to add. I even found some dates on the net for when this happened.

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.

I can?t make too much detail, that would make the scenario too big - but a general description to work from would be appreciated! I.e., are the houses working, or are they ruins? Or both?

- rthorvald

[Chuft-Captain]

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

Actually, all 4 seem to be transparent in those images (the GP hull itself was the only transparent (and indestructible) part.

I do think you'd be better to start from scratch with your own interpretation, than to base it on other peoples images.

The book actually describes it in some detail (about 4-5 pages) which is why I don't want to type it ALL in.

I'll summarize the essential points for you though:

"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...

[Chuft-Captain]

Dream Castle

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

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....

[rthorvald]

Many thanks, Chuft-Captain. This is very useful!

- rthorvald

[Chuft-Captain]

You're welcome.... you should refresh the thread as I was editing the last post as you were reading it.

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!!! (and I'm not so sure he's interested in fictional craft)

[rthorvald]

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!!!

That level of detail is beyond this project... !

- rthorvald

[Guckytos]

There is another city at the edge of the big ocean.

This city has

...endles rows of beehive like houses ...

...beyond silhouettes of skyscrapers and flying tall buildings...

...at least a dozen flying houses with brightly lit windows ... grouped together

They are then captured by the police building, that looks like:
a double cone with only the upper half lit
better definition: like a bit pegtop? (or better gyro): upon a sharp cone sits a wider, stocky upper deck

The lower part is at least a 100 feet (30 meters) high but I don't find more details at the moment, have to reread the novel again.

Regards,

Guckytos

[zhar2]

great stuff, i cant wait for my holydays to do stuff of the sort.

[rthorvald]

Well, i started out with 360 segments, one per degree of ring. While it looked great, it became too large to be practical:
- 360 segments ringfloor/walls
- 360 segments of landscape textures
- 360 segments of cloud textures
- 1480 segments of oblate atmosphere objects hidden inside the floor

... My computer turned to syrup. It is much too inefficient. Besides, the ringwalls became too high to look realistic,
to have room for the atmosphere objects. I have developed a new approach: first off, reduced the ring to 180 segments
= 2 degrees per tile. It does not look as smooth that way, but it helps on memory a *lot*. After that, i outputted ten tiles
per model, so both the cloudmaps, landscapes and floors are only 20 segments each. Instead of using the atmosphere
tiles, i made a 2 pixel wide cloudmap for the central star itself that touches the ring: close up, it looks exactly like a
proper atmosphere - the only thing missing is the changing colors at sunset and sundown.

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.

Here is some screenshots...

The Fist-Of-God mountain close to the Great Ocean, with night approaching:


Shadow squares:


Shadow squares seen from the ring:


Another view of the Great Ocean:


- rthorvald

[Chuft-Captain]

This is looking good Runar.

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.

That sounds very much like the same technique I've used to "fake" shadow in my O'Neill's.

Just one criticism... 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.

[rthorvald]

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.

Ok, i didn?t know that. Haven?t read the book since the eighties. . I only remembered that it poked up out of the atmosphere. Easy to fix, thanks.

- rthorvald

[Chuft-Captain]

A few more details you may find useful...

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

[ajtribick]

Those numbers suggest the Ringworld surface ought to be quite hot: unlike a planet which emits over ~4 times the area it absorbs over, the factor is only ~2 for the Ringworld (I can't remember if the scrith is supposed to conduct heat: if it doesn't, no heat is radiated from the back of the Ringworld and the factor drops to ~1), which implies the temperature (for a solar luminosity star) would be an uncomfortably hot 60 degrees C (or 120 degrees C for non-thermally-conducting scrith)...

[rthorvald]

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

[Johaen]

So at first I was like, hey, it's a big volcano, that's kinda neat. And then I scrolled down. Holy crap.

[MKruer]

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

That last line made me laugh!
I have never read the book ring world but i have read enough on ring world theory and the atmosphere to question the need for a 1000 mile high rim. I think that a more reasonable rim would be closer to 50-100km. Also the cross section of the structure should have a slight concave shape with the higher altitudes going to the edges.

* 50% of the atmosphere by mass is below an altitude of 5.6 km.
* 90% of the atmosphere by mass is below an altitude of 16 km. The common altitude of commercial airliners is about 10 km.
* 99.99997% of the atmosphere by mass is below 100 km. The highest X-15 plane flight in 1963 reached an altitude of 354,300 ft (108.0 km).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_atmosphere

Maybe they are so advanced that these things are pay things to them and they like tossing them around like horseshoes

[John Van Vliet]

--- edit ---

[rthorvald]

Overview of The Great Oval Ocean:


... The hardest thing by far is to simulate night. The shadowsquares don?t cast shadows, and neither can i get anything else to do it, so the only option is faking it completely - by overlaying the ground with black polygons. But if i want the day/night cycle to work, that is almost impossible... As the Ringworld is not smooth enough to make the black polygons hover at the exact same distance above ground everywhere - the distance will vary, making light move about in the night zones as the shadowsquares orbit the star. I could make the Ringworld curve smooth enough, but that would demand much higher resolution - quadruple the poly count at least. Which i do not like.

So, for now, i get good lightning from some angles only, and a real mess from others. I am still experimenting.

Nightfall over the Great Ocean:


Dawn at the Fist of God Mountain:


- rthorvald