Hey everyone, IRL, I've been wondering tons about how things in science fiction would actually work. So, I also thought, why not discuss things for future reference, to make our future science fiction writings feel a bit more realistic?
I'm on my phone right now, but when I'm on my computer tomorrow, I'll start this off with what's been bugging me personally: Ringworlds, and how I think they'd be built.
Feel free to mention anything else, and maybe we can figure out how it'd actually work together.
well, of course it'd use that, but I was wondering how you'd actually get all of your materials there and actually build each piece of such a massive object.
So, before I start, a ringworld is a pretty simple concept in theory: You're a space emperor, and you need a huge amount of living space for your people, right? So, you decide to build a megastructure, with a few solar systems' worth of materials. The benefits of a gigantic structure like a ringworld can be pretty obvious, but I'll spell a few out.
1, as aforementioned, a hilariously inflated amount of living space that rivals dozens of planets.
2, if you wanted, you could cover the side facing the sun with a huge amount of solar panels, for obvious reasons, that'd be a huge amount of energy. Just think of the fuck-all doom lasers or whatnot you could power with that.
3, this is probably less realistic, but I'm pretty certain its' technically possible. You could make a giant toroidal particle accelerator alongside each 'end' so you could make antimatter. Since size and cost (if you have enough stuff to make a ringworld, you can make pretty much anything) aren't an issue, the accelerator could probably be so massive to be able to make multiple kilograms of that stuff every second.
4, Obviously, with that much space and energy available, it'd be a wonderful military base. It'd be like the starforge from KOTR.
5, Also like the starforge, for obvious reasons, it's in a perfect position to suck out materials from its' parent star, assuming such a thing is possible of course. Over their lifetime, stars can make a great amount of metals and other materials like helium, so if you could do such a thing, you'd get plenty of resources for everything else in your culture. A side effect of this would be actually prolonging the stars' life and staving off a supernova, in theory: Stars commonly fucking explode when they reach 'Iron' in their lifetime of fusing elements, if you could suck out the previous material in sufficient amounts (I forgot what comes last lmao), it'd have to go back to the previous stage of fusion. Of course, this is nearly oven logic, so take it with a grain of salt.
Edit: A bruh of mine checked my science, I was totally wrong! You could still suck out some hydrogen to power... I dunno, fusion reactors and shit of your own though. Probably.
Anyway, those are a few of the benefits of such a world, and the most obvious downsides are two-fold: How to actually build it with any efficiency, and how to actually get materials for such a thing. I'll explain 1 in detail, and how I think you could build it. 2, I suppose you just gotta strip mine a few planets and asteroid belts.
So, LHG's plan to build a ringworld goes thus: 1st, make sure your efforts are in the goldilocks zone of the parent star. In addition, in this case we're using 'our' solar system as a playground too, so the inner surface is going to be 1 Astronomical Unit away, and the entire thing is gonna be 2 AU wide. Obviously hueg.
2nd, use this basic design that my entire plot revolves around; a massive, stick-shaped object with four primary parts. Also, each end of it should point 'above' and 'below' the star. So, the four primary bits are situated all along the actual rounded parts of the cylinder. 'Forwards' in its' orbit points a gigantic berth for the next part in the ringworld, 'backwards' is a gigantic factory that constructs the ringworld, in my mind, similar to how a Nimitz class supercarrier is constructed, but with far larger scales. E.G., in little 'blocks' that 'cut off' before being attached to the next. The other two sides are devoted to a gigantic dock for resource towing and gathering craft, and a massive solar panel array respectively, with the array one being the side that points towards the star.
3rd, there would be four of these, situated in the same orbit around the star. Each would begin construction at the same time. Each sub-section of the ringworld, built by its' parent 'cylinder' would finish construction in a certain length of time, and be 'pushed out', using a mechanism similar to a garage door, but it'd be still attached to the parent cylinder. This would repeat, ad infinitum, each new subsection being pushed out and pushing the one that came last, and so on, and so on, until eventually the massive length of ringworld subsections gets to the next cylinder-station.
4th, and there you have it, you basically have your ringworld ready to live on! Allow me to show you a series of images made by my deft-ass hands that are a visual of this concept:
Of course, each cylinder station wouldn't be that gigantic, but you get the point. In addition, it'd actually be fucking round instead of that monstrosity, and have more 'sub-parts'.
Well starting off in a symmetrical form is the only way to go anyways if you don't want the parts to attract each other, messing up the orbit in the first place. Secondly, can't really suck out metals out of stars as they don't produce them until they're at their end of their life. By the time the star's core is made up of helium it expands into a red giant, which could be a real problem for your ring world, for obvious reasons. And the amount of materials needed for a ring world is . . . extensive to say the least. You may want to use fusion to acquire those materials, but there are two problems with that. Energy. Fusing hydrogen materials on a small scale (without the assistance of star levels of gravity takes a lot of energy).
Smashing particles into each other to create measly amounts anti-matter also takes energy. You can't create energy/matter out of nothing.
Using the 4 starting points to supply the solar power needed for fusion and the anti-matter bit would doubtfully be enough to provide the required energy. At that rate it take . . . well a lot of time to build it.
Also I'm still not quite sure where the anti-matter comes into play. That has to do with the ring-world itself, anyways. Of course anti-matter has a lot of applications. Weapons, Engines for ships, etc.
Yeah, the giant ass antimatter particle accelerator thing was just an additional silly thought. This is probably a strange way to go about making a ringworld, but I think it could work.
So, how would you build a ringworld, Nano?
Edit: Oh, in addition, as I said previously, you could cover the inner surface of the ringworld with solar panels and make the ring a bit thicker so the residents of your ringworld would instead live 'inside' of it, y'know? I think an entire ringworlds' inner surface area, covered in solar energy gathering devices, could probably power plenty of shit like big particle accelerators to make antimatter with.
Yep that would work, but you still have to build the ring world first, and like I said, the starting points of it won't have enough surface to provide the required energy in the first place.
*Edit:* As for how I would build it. I can only imagine it to be feasible if you already have the raw materials in the solar system. Planets, asteroids and such.
Speaking of antimatter... How would you actually make an industry out of that? Y'know, how would you collect it and put it in your spaceships to do stuff? And, how exactly would it work as an engine or weapon system?
On antimatter missiles and whatnot, wouldn't it be silly to make the actual explosive antimatter? Once you get to 90% light speed or so, like an antimatter rocket could do in theory, an explosive, even an antimatter explosive, would be redundant. After-all, you are going at a damn good fraction of the speed of light. That's a huge amount of kinetic energy, is it not? It obviously depends on the size and weight of the antimatter propelled missile, but my point still stands.
If you get to the point of ring worlds or encasing entire star systems in a rotating sphere you're to the point that in fiction you can lampshade how all of this was built with vague science. If you try to go into too much in-world you're either going to have to study the topic heavily to the point you might as well get a degree in various fields of engineering and just go work at NASA, or everything will become so top-heavy the story collapses on itself and it becomes a mess.
There's maybe only so far you can probably get by trying to construct such a far-future from a contemporary standpoint. Not saying it's impossible but the scope is pretty beyond our current engineering theories and I feel that trying to apply what we know now may not be the most approachable thing. Best to simply say it is and go about your way.
I wouldn't go out of the way to incorporate it directly into the story. But still in writing any fiction it's a good idea to know and understand enough of the basic rules within the story's world so that you can maintain consistency.
After all, it'd be a terrible literary mistake for two conflicting theories to occupy the same universe. It'd be like attributing gravity simultaneously to the mass of an object and its play on space-time and that gravity is magnetism.
Yeah, consistency is always important, after all. And, well, I always enjoy a series or universe more when even the huge-shit has at least a basic idea of how it'd actually work and be done and all that. Y'know?
Yeah, consistency is always important, after all. And, well, I always enjoy a series or universe more when even the huge-shit has at least a basic idea of how it'd actually work and be done and all that. Y'know?
Well if material resources is at least the basic major problem (engineering it all not withstanding) then you could maybe get away with claiming come civilization used drones to strip-mine every non-gaseous body in the system to construct a ring if not a full encasement of the star, and if you ever feel you need more than you could passingly say: "Well then they also mined less-important systems nearby".
This also being the future too, the value of human labor in this endeavor may be totally out of the question so the only thing is time being spent. What humans that are present may just be there for high-functioning work (program management, drone upkeep) so the crew would be pretty skeleton by today's standards but they can manage it all effectively, and be self sufficient in their little space-station.
I agree with all your points, honestly. The biggest issue really is resource acquisition, definitely.
Y'know, now I'm wondering how exactly you'd defend such an operation, if required. After-all, such a massive structure would be an extremely high value target, both for capturing and defending.
Would you fortify the ringworld itself, or would you use dedicated defensive craft? Probably both, or one or the other, depending on what you're defending against, your tech level, and all sorts of other things.
I agree with all your points, honestly. The biggest issue really is resource acquisition, definitely.
Y'know, now I'm wondering how exactly you'd defend such an operation, if required. After-all, such a massive structure would be an extremely high value target, both for capturing and defending.
Would you fortify the ringworld itself, or would you use dedicated defensive craft? Probably both, or one or the other, depending on what you're defending against, your tech level, and all sorts of other things.
Well given this is space any attacking force could "attack" such an installation from far outside the defender's field of view. Range becomes a non-issue and you could hurtle stuff at such a structure from the next star-system even, the only factor that would need to be considered is predicting where the target will be when the missile reaches it so you can land a direct hit, running enough calculations and mapping a route through the stars and other gravity sources I'd hazard that should someone know all the required variables you could maybe get away with launching something at such a station from the other-side of the galaxy.
This of course will take a significant amount of time and the route will become so complex with so many stars, blackholes, and other objects getting into the way that the chances of failure ramps up exponentially. But the basic point stands: someone could fly something far outside where they could be seen.
So the best defense might be simply early warning so that defensive installations/space craft could intercept and destroy/re-route/capture a threatening object. But that's considering the attacker hasn't developed teleportation technology and could just zap themselves inside the super-structure and attack it from within. Things can rapidly become incredibly asymmetrical.
One of my biggest things about space sci-fi is the way "battles" are portrayed. The physics behind having an actual battle between ships in space makes it difficult and impractical at best and nearly impossible at worst, unless you manage to completely cancel the effects of gravity.
First of all, at any point in space, you WILL be moving. This is the basis of orbital mechanics. Unless you'd like to be constantly accelerating towards something many hundreds of times more masseous than you are. No matter where you are, gravity will be present, therefore you will always be orbiting something. Now, one could theoretically circumvent this by having a battle at an extremely far orbit, maybe the farthest possible orbit. In the case of the Earth, this would be somewhere in the neighborhood of about 1.5 million kilometers. This distance would give one an orbital velocity of about half a kilometer per second (for reference, the ISS orbits the Earth at roughly 350 kilometers and it's orbital velocity is about 7.7 kilometers per second).
So, at 500 meters per second, a space battle might be feasible. Ideally, both ships would be moving in the same direction and have a similar orbital inclination, but if one ship's orbital velocity did reach 0, it wouldn't be disastrous. It would recover quickly enough to gain back an orbital trajectory. In theory, both ships could have zero velocity for the duration of their battle and probably have several hours before having to accelerate into an orbital trajectory.
But let's say, by chance, you wanted to have a battle at low orbit (defined as <2000 kilometers above the Earth's surface). Both of your ships would have to be moving with almost identical orbital characteristics to even have a chance at shooting each other without completely missing every time, and there's not a lot of margin for error. If your orbital velocity gets higher, that won't be a big deal. If your orbital velocity drops, well, you're gonna have a problem, and you won't have a lot of time to fix it. If your orbit gets too low, depending on the size and thrust:mass ratio of your ship, the atmospheric drag will be too great for your ship to overcome, and you'll suddenly find yourself in a rapidly descending, probably permanently-stranded-on-a-planet (or completely doomed) vessel.
Now let's talk about weapons. Explosives will almost never work well, simply because in the vacuum of space, there is no air to transfer either a shockwave or heat. Even nuclear weapons will be ineffective, unless they are detonated really close to a vessel (anywhere between one and five kilometers, depending on the yield of the weapon). A direct hit, or shaped explosives might do the trick, but I still wouldn't bet money on them being too effective, or efficient. Kinetic weapons would work fine, as long as you have big enough slugs of metal to puncture a ship's armor. With that, it really just depends on the difference between one ship's big-ass guns and the thickness of another ship's armor. The thicker the armor, the bigger the bullet you're going to need.
Of course, you still need to worry about actually hitting the target. Remember how I talked about orbital velocities? Yeah, don't forget, you're still moving really freaking fast, and if you're smart, you're going to be taking evasive maneuvers. Getting a solid hit on another ship would be difficult without getting really close. You could possibly make guided missiles that instead of either exploding or fragmenting uses a mechanism in which it either delivers a slug or is effectively a self-propelled slug itself.
That's about as far as I can get into actual weapons, since we haven't really yet perfected railguns and we don't have weaponized lasers or plasma bolts yet, or anything of that sort of thing.
Another thing that might need to be considered is given advances in computers and how their power and efficiency continues to increase exponentially that a lot of the described functions don't need to be necessarily performed by man. In fact I don't really know what would be left to be performed by a sapient person that wouldn't already be taken control of by a computer that can keep track of far more variables and act on changes in variables far faster than a human pilot, navigator, or engineer could.
So a battle in space might be one carried out by two computer systems in command of a "ship" or a "fleet" battling it out based on whatever insane algorithms they'd need to do anything. Humans may not even be involved at all, or make up a very small population dedicated to mostly being a supposed moral direction or some sort of source of creativity to change the course of the present strategy so the enemy computers don't determine the pattern to make more accurate shots.
Wow, that raises an interesting thought. What if, with increasing automation overtaking functions that are carried out by humans, how weird would it be if wars became more about seeing how many expensive battlebots you threw at each other until the other side gave up? It would basically become entertainment, because no one is actually in any mortal danger.
Warfare would literally be like the world series, only longer, and it's about destroying robots on opposing sides.
Wow, that raises an interesting thought. What if, with increasing automation overtaking functions that are carried out by humans, how weird would it be if wars became more about seeing how many expensive battlebots you threw at each other until the other side gave up? It would basically become entertainment, because no one is actually in any mortal danger.
Warfare would literally be like the world series, only longer, and it's about destroying robots on opposing sides.
Then it wouldn't be war, it would be sports. The concept of war is to either A: Take possession of something that somebody else doesn't have, or B: Hurt another group of people until they agree to whatever you are demanding. At least, that is the concept for the people who start the war, defenders might have no other purpose then to survive.
So if it is about resource acquisition or conquest, locals will get hurt. If it is about getting the other side to acquiesce, then it might just end up being terrorism that becomes the main way to wage war.
So if it is about resource acquisition or conquest, locals will get hurt. If it is about getting the other side to acquiesce, then it might just end up being terrorism that becomes the main way to wage war.
We could bring this around to the present day as something to consider when looking ahead into the future. Wikipedia cites White, Philip L's "Globalization and the Mythology of the Nation State" when it says that in the post-Cold War era (or perhaps even as a personal addition: the post-WW2 era) that the existence of validity of a nation-state it much more defined by multi-national agreements and super-pacts between nations than the old world idea that a nation-state often derives validity on the people it rules (and aligned to the people it rules) with a national mythos that back up their own rule. But we have now in the world a political landscape with nations that don't define a single ethnic group but may arbitrarily encompass several, or divide existing ones (the African nations, the Arab world) and that these countries don't obtain their own validity by a shared heritage with its own people (either with two many once-feuding groups too scattered about the land to validate an ethnically-built nation-state or in the Arab world all the Arab peoples spread among dozens of nations and a national mythology speaks to a more pan-Arab ideology than a national ideology) but from other nations (Russia backing Syria, US backing Isreal, no one backing Palestine).
Wikiped than goes on to mention the growth of NGOs and international companies can erode the validity of a nation by providing the services the country could or should provide by themselves through outside funding, either with state-based patronage or private patronage. We could argue that with non-national entities like that the private individual could have more power over international problems than they had in the past with growing technologies and an infrastructure that supports a more robust industry that can bypass laws to do more than what we could have done in the past.
On top of that, I could make the independent argument that migrations mix and spread the once important ethnicities the old nations were built on that build multi-ethnic nations like the US or (supposedly) western Europe (though I tack on to this recognition this can be argued since I look at Europe now and still see a lot of fighting over the French/British/whatever identity native to their respective countries, where as the US may begrudgingly accept that the only natives are the people we genocided and that we're built on the premise of accepting immigrants).
Expanding: if trends like those Daesh are perfecting continue than we may very well see the end of war between nations but the war between abstract ideology. We won't be able to identify our enemies readily as we did in the past. This could change when the human race finds its first sapient sample of extra-terrestrial life and we someday go to war with it for some reason or another. But we could argue modern threats now are not bound to any one nation but can threaten them all, where ever they have ears and eyes that'll pay attention to them and believe in it.
