Wirt Atmar wrote:

>Shawn writes:
>
>
>
>>there is the first problem of generating enough super strong material to
>>cover the required space.
>>
>>
>
>I don't think that's true. You could easily imagine a ringworld situation to
>be nothing more than a very, very large number of orbiting plates, each
>independently orbiting the central sun at the same distance, just like two docking
>spacecraft orbiting the earth.
>
>
In the novel, the Ringworld rotates much faster than orbital speed to
create centrifugal pseudo-gravity (one rotation every nine days).  The
inside of the ring is habitable, with walls a thousand miles high to
hold in the atmosphere.

After the first book was published, somebody pointed out that, unlike a
planet's orbit, the Ringworld is unstable.  This led to the second book,
_Ringworld Engineers_, where he explains how the Ringworld is kept in place.

See http://members.optushome.com.au/guests/PhysicsinSF.html and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworld






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