Re: Interesting concultural ideas

> Date:         Tue, 4 Dec 2001 16:57:01 -0800
> From: Barry Garcia <barry_garcia@...>
>
> john cowan writes:
> >Ringworlds, however, aren't stable with respect to their suns, and will
> >drift away from heliocentricity quite quickly.  This can be cured with
> >attitude jets that use the solar wind for fuel.
>
> I'm wondering, would a ring world begin to oscilate "up and down" if there
> were no stabilizing jets also?
It wouldn't do so spontaneously --- but if something did push it in an
axial direction, it would oscillate up and down after that.

There might be interactions between movements in the plane of the ring
and axially, such that correcting the plane component of a small drift
would somehow increase the axial component. But the mathematics of all
this are beyond me; it's the sort of thing that's best simulated on a
computer, I think.

Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn@...> (Humour NOT marked)