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Timstone said:
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Suicide Junkie said:
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Timstone said:
Hahaha... now that's a great idea. There should be a transportation network soo big it could handle about 500 million people at once. Now that's a truelly mammoth undertaking. How to build such a monstrosity, how to maintain it, how to pay for it's construction?! 
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Quite simply, make it distributed.
Make the ring a bunch of stories thick. Throw in a bunch of elevators, skyscraper-style in a pattern across the landscape.
Open air up top. Shops and stuff one floor down. Sleeping quarters below that. Services and cargo in the lower-middle. Armor on the very bottom.
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Like I said, how the hell are you going to build such a thing?! It's huge! 
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The ringworld is a given. The elevators are trivial. You hire a bunch of contractors who build one elevator at a time while you install the main structure.
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Just build a small (R ~ 2Rsun) circumsolar inner ring, with a transparent "hemiring".
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Hmm... do plants even need a day/night cycle?
If they do, wouldn't it be easier to put shades on the inner surface of your main ring? Easier to maintain by simply having workers climb up, plus the solar intensity is much less and you're not going to burn them up.
How about making the shades out of solar panels. Tilt them up to let light through, then lay them back down to block it. Amusingly, you'd make most of your solar power at night
