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Halo Science - Ringworlds and Plasma Weapons
The book Halo Effect is an intriguing title that takes a look Bungie's best-selling Halo titles from a number of different angles. Each chapter includes coverage of specific elements; included are descriptions of pro events, a bit on the development process, and the making of the Red vs. Blue series. One of the most interesting chapters takes a look at the science behind the Halo world, talking about the physics and logic behind ringworlds and the hi-tech weaponry seen in the game. Thanks in part to a mini-review of the book on the GameSetWatch site, Gamasutra has been allowed to reprint the entire 'science of Halo' chapter on their website. "A 5,000 kilometer radius would yield a circumference of roughly 31,400 kilometers. If we assume a width-to-radius ratio similar to that of Niven's Ringworld, they would be approximately 5.37 kilometers wide. They are significantly wider, though, at 320 kilometers. The Halos, then, would have a surface area of 10 million square kilometers - slightly larger than the surface area of Canada, and approximately 2 percent of the surface area of Earth. Of course, since we know that there are lakes, seas, and rivers on the Halos, the livable surface area would be fractionally less." Update: 05/02 18:30 GMT by Z : The initial version of the article posted was from pre-production and contained some errors. They've been fixed in the article and now here in the post as well.
Agreed. I read the novels before I played the games, and I was surprised by how convincing the sci-fi actually was. Characterization was off, but the science was good, and all four books described an appealing future with _relatable_ human technologies, i.e. the technology was advanced, but not so far advanced that I found it implausible.
GP is a tool, make no mistake. The Halo books are solid sci-fi in their own right.
This results in only a single (relatively) thin strip at the equator being habitable, because all the air is down there. Then you wonder why you're building the rest of the sphere. Then you end up making just the ring, and making it stronger. And you're back to Ringworld. (Plus the Ring doesn't have to be a spherical section so the surface can be at a uniform pressure, which increases the available land area a lot.)
Niven explains this in his "Bigger than Worlds" essay as how he came up with the Ringworld in the first place, though it might just be a convenient after-the-fact reasoning process, who knows?
This is why a Dyson Sphere, as a place where humans might happily live inside and frolic away in their meat bodies, is pretty silly. If you insist on this level of mega-tech building a place for meat-bodies to frolic in, Ringworld makes much more sense. However, what makes the most sense of all is the Dyson sphere in its original sense of simply being a structure to capture all the energy output of the sun. For that to occur, you don't actually need one monolithic object; the most likely design is a cloud of real-world-scale objects (somewhere between smart dust and largish, but feasible, spacecraft) carefully orbited in a way to capture all the energy from the star without hitting each other. It's not possible to have every object in the swarm in the sun all the time (you'll sometimes be in shadow), but the net effect of 100% coverage is possible.
I'm tired of people making comparisions of the Halo 'installations' of Bungie's to the Ringworld of Niven.
) ) from Ian M Banks' "Culture " novels. It's rather apparant that Bungie drew much more inspiration from Banks' work than from Niven. http://www.marathon.org/story/halo_culture.html
Apart from basic shape they have nothing in common. The Halo's most apparant ancestor would be the orbitals ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_(The_Culture
I've experiments to run, there is research to be done on the people who are still alive.