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John VanSickle <evi### [at] hotmail com> wrote:
> Rick Measham wrote:
> > Mike Williams wrote:
> >
> >> The strength of the force varies with cos(latitude) and the angle to the
> >> local vertical is proportional to latitude. So people standing near the
> >> poles get very little force, and what force there is would be almost
> >> horizontal.
> >
> >
> > Which is where the original argument came from (and I agree) .. the
> > poles would implode, thus degrading the structure and causing the
> > equator to explode.
> >
> > One poster (somewhere, not here) suggested a band rather than a sphere.
> > The 'band' would be the equatorial region and would (somehow) hold
> > together as it spun.
>
> And then some other killjoy did the math and realized that if the ring
> were to be moved so that the star was no longer in the center, the
> situation would not correct itself naturally; if there were no
> artificial corrective measures, the ring would eventually collide with
> the sun. Roll the credits.
>
> BTW, Dyson himself did not postulate a solid sphere, but a large number
> of small bodies which collectively capture all of the output from a
> given star.
>
> Regards,
> John
For practicality I prefer Banks' 'Culture' ring model which is to have a
smaller ring orbiting in a star's life zone, spinning once per day to give
one g of centripetal accelleration and with a small rotation plane offset
from the sun. If I got my calculation right (a = lw^2) the radius is about
1.85 million km, which still gives a huge surface area for a reasonable
ring width - and you can build several in one system :-)
(Wanders off, dreaming of how to reduce Jupiter to workable material ...)
Mike.
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