the biggest drawback for both the Niven ring and the Dyson sphere is there is no gravitational attraction inside the ring or sphere to the sphere - only towards the sun, or only on the outside.... On Mon, Sep 26, 2016 at 1:09 PM, Russell Coker via luv-main < luv-main@luv.asn.au> wrote:
On Sunday, 25 September 2016 12:34:12 PM AEST Robin Humble via luv-main wrote:
On Fri, Sep 23, 2016 at 01:59:16PM +1000, Russell Coker via luv-main wrote:
Is there a good free orbital simulator for Linux?
I don't want a game like KSP but a simulation of orbits without much need for fancy graphics.
I am wondering what the orbit of a ring would be like (EG a Dyson ring) and whether it's plausible to make such a ring or whether a set of disconnected sattelites in the same orbit is required. is there such a thing as a Dyson ring? I thought it was a Niven ring, as per Ringworld, Ringworld Engineers etc. and as (fans of) those books pointed out, rings are unstable no matter what.
I just made that term up as it seems to accurately describe it. But the term Niven Ring was invented first (I've just read the Wikipedia pages about his books).
a full Dyson sphere is neutrally/meta stable, but no idea how you'd actually construct it in a stable manner... likely someone has thought about it though!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworld
One thing that's noted in the Errors section of the above page is that a ringworld as a rigid structure is not in orbit around the star but spinning independently and would need attitude jets to keep it in place. A full Dyson sphere would require the same but with greater complexity as the jets could only be on the outside of the sphere.
short version is that gravity is a harsh mistress, often chaotic, and hard to do right over long timescales. do you think the solar system is stable? you are wrong. satellites? nope. but depends upon what timescales they drift/resonate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klemperer_rosette
The Klemperer Rosette is also interesting.
I mostly know about high N N-body codes, but I have a symplectic toy low N multi-timestep python code that I wrote somewhere. there are probably high performance (giga-year) public symplectic low N codes out there too.
BTW all mine are collisionless. quite different to David Zuccaro's (intriguing - asteroid field?) collisional code.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alastair_Reynolds
Alastair Reynolds Revelation Space series features a system that had a huge number of inhabited satellites that all collided after an alien virus destroyed their computers. NB this isn't a spoiler as that collapse isn't covered in his novels. His novel set before the collapse was published long after novels set after it which mention it in passing.
-- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/
_______________________________________________ luv-main mailing list luv-main@luv.asn.au https://lists.luv.asn.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/luv-main
-- Dr Paul van den Bergen