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Originally Posted by Bruno
You're going to need either rubber physics or superscience to explain what the ring is made of that's strong enough to withstand the tension its under. Niven invented scrith, which is an impossible material, to do the job in Ringworld.
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Here is a diagram showing the concept of this Ringworld
Sun *
----------- Inner ring (Occlusion Ring) -->
_____________ Middle Ring (Habitation Ring) -------------------> Velocity
_____________ Outer Ring Surface (Atlas Ring)
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########### Outer Ring Interior (Atlas Ring) - No velocity
###########
----------------Outer Ring Surface
The inner ring determines whether the Middle Ring (Habitation ring) receives light.
The middle ring is where people live and rotates for gravity, but it doesn't support its own weight against centrifugal force.
The outer ring supports the weight of the middle ring. Unlike the middle ring, it does not rotate around the Sun, it instead stays fixed and non rotating and it is the most massive part of the ringworld system. As you know with any support bearing members the greater the thickness, the more tensile streght it has. Its also true that the greater its mass the more its weight, but its weight is the Sun's gravitational pull on it, and the Sun pulls it inward.
The middle ring's weight is outwards since it rotates.
The outward weight of the middle habitation ring of the ringworld is
less than the tensile strength of the outer ring plus the Sun's inward gravitational pull on it. There is no requirement that the rotating middle ring must support its own weight with its own tensile strength.
Now the outward bottom of the middle ring and the inward top of the outer ring are magnetized and they both point their magnetic North Polarity toward each other, and as you know from high school physics, like magnetic poles repel each other. The two surfaces of the two rings do not contact each other, but their repulsive magnetic fields transfers the outward weight of the middle ring to the more massive outer ring that has adequate tensile strenght to prevent that middle ring from flying apart. All this material for building these rings comes from the Sun, and the Sun has plenty of it with mass dwarfing that of Jupiter and with plenty of all the elements needed to build this structure.
All the material in building this ringworld is ordinary matter, nothing scrithlike about it. If you get enough material together you can add to its collective tensile strength until it becomes adequate, and that outer ring has no outward weight since it does not spin. All you need to do is get enough mass in the outer ring to do the job. Its a giant Maglev track 1,000,000 miles wide that encircles the sun. The maglev "train" is the middle ring. The inner ring simply orbits the sun separately allows light to pass through it sometimes so the ringworld can experience day, and it completely blocks the light at other times so the ringworld can have night.
Remember why I call the outer ring the Atlas Ring, remeber they mythological Titan called Atlas who beared the weight of the world on his shoulders? That is the job of the Atlas Ring.