Hi folks
I'm not sure how many are familiar with Larry Niven's Scifi novels of Known Space and in particular the books about the Ringworld.
"The Ringworld is an artificial ring constructed by a highly advanced alien race ,about one million miles wide and approximately the diameter of Earth's orbit (which makes it about 600 million miles in circumference), encircling a sunlike star. It rotates, providing artificial gravity that is 99.2% as strong as Earth's gravity through the action of centrifugal force. The ringworld has a habitable, flat inner surface equivalent in area to approximately three million Earth-sized planets."http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworld#Concepts
Niven's idea is that if you could harvest all the material of a solar system much like ours, all the planets, moons, asteroids and gas giants, you should roughly enough material to construct such a ring around the sun, in the Goldilock Zone( habitable zone). That would mean a massive amount of habitable land and large population boom.
I think it would be fun to see such a megastructure in the new game, crazy expensive to build, but equally crazy amount of tax revenue when you get it populated
What do you think?
I think it would greatly destabilize the game if GCII is any guide; a late-game civilization who pursued this option would have more power in a single solar system than every other race in the entirety of their civilization. When you factor in that the completion of one would ease the construction of others...
It would be cool as a 1-per civilization project, or as a victory condition though.
:3
Hey, in X-universe there was Torus around the Earth.
I understand your concerns regarding unbalancing the game Paragon. How I had imagined how it could work, it sure would have some "limitations" to sort of balance out it's effects.
- Only one per Galaxy map.
- High cost of resources to keep operational, limiting the empires ability to keep a fleet by 25-30%(maybe more?), regardless of your empire's size. Perhaps resource cost would even be directly linked to rising population on the ringworld.
- Some races might be inclined to want it (higher aggression from some races), while the ringworld would be shunned by other races that would prefer domination through a large fleet.
- Production is limited on the ringworld, after all it's an artificial world and you cant mine it.
- A big tourist attraction!
- Regular disaster's related to the ringworld, a few examples:
--One of our rather ignorant ringworld colonist decides to follow his life long dream of becoming a miner, only to find himself sucked into outer space when he finally gets through the ringworld floor. The ringworld needs fixing before to much atmosphere leaks to outer space.
-- The jet thrusters used for spinning the Ringworld (giving gravity) are failing(lack of resources perhaps?), act soon before the population take an unscheduled flight towards it's sun!
Naturally it's effects would need to be limited, so it might give tax revenue of 5-6 of your average "normal" solar systems, or what do you think?
I think it would actually give an empires a chance to be an economic powerhouse while not "needing" to cover large sections of the galaxy.
You might even toggle your map to be with or without a ringworld at a beginning of the play, maybe even have one abandoned on the map when you start the game.
These are just examples of what has been going on in my head. I guess i'm just trying to say it could have it's expenses and limitations, but could still bring a lot of fun...
Ohh yeah, I read the Ringworld a few years back, as well as three sequels. Love Larry Niven
I like the idea, if it can be balanced out and not made too powerfull, rather sort of like a big bonus. I guess it would be kind of cool to have a number of different mega projects in the game, as long as it's limited to one per civ, like Paragon suggested.
I'm fine with this idea even if this can't happen this way because most of the mass is Hydrogen and Helium this is the makeup of Saturn and Jupiter which is more mass than the rest of the solar system combined besides the sun. Most of the rest of that is ice. You only have about 10% of the ice as rock and metals in the solar system. For the most part most of the metal and rock in the solar system resides in the inner solar system while the rest is ice according to modern planetary formation theory.
According to modern planetary formation theory this would work this way in another solar system.
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