Pre-Christmas Chat with Aaron

[Baron Munchausen]

Suicide Junkie said:
A ring around your planet... falling into the atmosphere...

Ok. First question: Why are you using your cables to hold up the ring when it would be easier and safer to have the ring spinning in orbit and holding its own weight up? Just imagine the mechanical stresses on the sections between the cables.

First of all, the theory of 'space elevators' and the stations that could be at the top of them is that they are held in place by centrifugal forces. The excess force is necessary to allow things to be sent up the cables. If you have a complete ring -- which would be a really huge structure but we are already used to thinking of stellar Ringworlds and so it doesn't seem so huge by comparison -- it wouldn't be stable anymore than the Ringworld around a star. A solid ring around a star or a planet would be pushed and pulled in all sorts of inconveniant ways just by virtue of being a single piece instead of a free floating body that can vary its orbit somewhat without hitting things. The cables are still needed to hold it in place or it would lose 'center' on the planet. For the stellar Ringworld Larry Niven had to invent those 'thrusters' that figured in one of the later stories.