Speaking of ringworlds has anyone built a RW in 8-9 turns (not counting the construction time for the 11 space yard ships) without custom techs? I have
, and here is how I did it:
1) Create a starbase design with one Master Computer component and say 3 colonization modules, lets call it SB1.
2) Start building 11 of those around a star, @ emergancy rate (200%). It will cost you 3 x 4000pts/turn and be completed in about 4 turns IIRC.
...4 turns later...
3) Create a new starbase design that is as close to 50% more expensive than the SB1 design, lets call it SB2. Now create another SB design that's 50% more expensive than SB2... continue to do this until you have SB? that costs 2/3 of a "Ringworld SB", lets call it SB10.
4) In the same turn; pick one of your SB1:s and uppgrade it to a SB2, then uppgrade it to a SB3 and so on, all the way upp to SB10. Uppgrade SB10 to a "Ringworld SB".
Do the same procedure with the remaning 10 SB1:s, but stop at the SB? that cost 2/3 of a "Hyper - Density SB"/"Planetary Gravity SB". Then uppgrade 5 of those to "Hyper - Density SB":s and 5 to "Planetary Gravity SB":s.
5) Click next turn.
...1 turn later...
6) All the components that you need to create a ringworld are in place! Create the RW!
IIRC, it takes another turn for the RW to appear, or am I mistaken? Who cares.
Theoretically you could construct a ringworld in X + 1 (or X + 2) turns, where X is the number of turns it takes to build the SB1:s. So in the example above it would take 5 to 6 turns.
In my case it took 8 or 9 turns because I had not build up my organics and radioactives industry enough, so I had to wait a few extra turns to uppgrade all of my SBs. Needless to say this procedure uses up A-L-O-T of resources, but I never said it would be cheap, just faster.