Dyson Yarn-Ball Habitat

One of the interesting ideas I first ran across in amateur fiction was the idea of weaving a bunch of Niven-style Ringworlds together to produce something with more surface area than the sci-fi interpretation of a Dyson Sphere (a hollow but solid shell around a star) and no need for “shadow squares” to create a day/night cycle.

Out of curiosity, I decided to see if I could give myself a rough estimate of the minimum amount of habitable space on such a construct. Of course, I have no expertise in this kind of math and I probably made a mistake or two, so any input would be greatly appreciated.

>>> import math

>>> # Thanks to appropriate Wikipedia articles 
>>> # for the source data
>>> RWWidth = 16e5 # Ringworld width in KM
>>> RWCircumference = 9.7e8 # also in KM


>>> RWSurface = 1.6e15
>>> EarthSurface = 510072000
>>> DysonSurface = 2.72e17

>>> MinNumberOfRings = RWCircumference / RWWidth
>>> MinWeaveSurface = MinNumberOfRings * RWSurface

>>> MinWeaveSurface / DysonSurface
3.5661764705882355
>>> # So the minimum surface area for this
>>> # construct would give roughly 3.5 times as
>>> # much surface area as a sci-fi Dyson Sphere

>>> MinWeaveSurface / EarthSurface
1901692310.1052401
>>> #...and just under 2 billion times as much 
>>> # space as earth.

…of course, I have no clue what modifications would be necessary to produce an Earth-like night/day cycle just from the rings passing behind and in front of each other… or if it’s even possible. Entertaining thought exercise though.

CC BY-SA 4.0 Dyson Yarn-Ball Habitat by Stephan Sokolow is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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