RINGWORLD ART!

MINOR SPOILERS!!

 

In my last post I introduced myself and explained what I aimed to do on this blog, I mentioned that in my first real post I would be sharing art from a book I recently finished: Ringworld by Larry Niven.  For anyone who hasn’t read the novel I hope by providing a rough visualization of the novel through these selected images to influence you to go out and read the book. For those who have read the book I hope I can shed light on some aspects of the story that might of been confusing to you or at the very least help us in sharing a more unified vision of the story.

The first image is the ring world as the crew of the Lying Bastard might of seen it as they approached its star system from space.  The Ringworld might look small in this picture but is capable of fitting the surface of 3 million earths into it. The squares you see in the picture provide the surface with day/night cycles and are connected by an extremely durable form or wiring.

Mass: 2 x 10³⁰ grams (approx. 318 Earth masses, or 1.05 Jupiter masses)

Radius: 95 million miles (153 million kilometers; 1.02 AU (Astronomical Units))

Circumference: 597 million miles (960.8 million kilometers)

Width: 997,000 miles (1,605,000 kilometers; 125.8 Earth diameters) [6]

Surface area: 6 x 10¹⁴ square miles (1.6 x 10¹⁵ square kilometers; approximately 3 million times the surface area of the Earth)

Rim walls: about 1000 miles (1600 kilometers) high, rising sunward ; about 200 feet wide at the top

Rotation speed: 770 miles per second (1240 kilometers per second)

Rotation period: 7.5 Ringworld days (of 30 hours, or 9.375 24-hour days)

Spin-induced gravity: 31.9 feet/second/second (9.72 meters/second/second) = 0.992 gee (1 gee = Earth’s gravity)

 

 

The rim walls of the ring world are 1000 miles high to hold in the atmosphere.

 

this is a fan made computer generated image of what the ring world might look like from the surface.  I don’t want to give too many spoilers but in the book the original builders of the ring world are nowhere to be found, the characters from the story only encounter primitive hominids who nearly resemble humans.  These natives have lost all knowledge of spaceflight and given the Ringworld’s immense size are physically incapable of exploring the structure in its entirety. This means they develop  the notion that the strange horizon of the ring world is actually an arch with many groups developing mythologies based around it calling it the “arch of the gods.”

While this might not be the most aesthetically pleasing image  I think it is the most physically accurate.

 

Anyone who plays video games may be thinking “heyyyyy i know that.”  Yes its pretty safe to say that Halo drew a lot of inspiration from the Ringworld series, luckily Larry Niven loves anything fan related and never gave bungie any shit for stealing his ideas.  Most gammers think the developers at Bungie are creative geniuses when really they are just huge fanboys.

SPOILER

though this is a pretty crappy image its the only good representation I could find for Fist of God.  In the book the first thing the crew sees is a huge mountain that is over 1000 miles tall, so tall that it pokes out of the atmosphere of the planet.  The mountain was not designed by the ring world engineers but actually created by a meteor strike to the ring world surface.  

 

Here is a picture of a hole in the Ringworld’s surface where the meteor struck, this is what created the mountain seen in the last image.  The book explains what happened in pretty great detail so i’ll keep it short but basically when the meteor struck it pushed a section of the crust into a giant mountain.  One interesting phenomenon related to this is that all of the air being sucked from the surface of the ring world out into space takes the shape of a hurricane turned on its side.

 

 

 

 

 

Here is the ship that the characters from the story crash land onto the ring worlds surface in.

 

 

This is the ship that the characters use to get nearly 200 light years from Earth to the Puppeteer homeworld. It is used as a bartering chip to get Louis and Speaker to join the expedition.

Though this isn’t the prettiest image it is by far the most accurate depiction of the Puppeteer home world I could find.  The Puppeteers are a race whose ancestors descended from herd animals, this means they are incredibly cautious yet instinctively crave to be close to large groups of their own kind.  Puppeteer paranoia is a major plot line for the series and has allowed their species to live in advanced stage for millions of years.  Their species longevity and an innate preference to be with herds of their own kind led to severe levels of overpopulation. At one point before reproductive laws were enacted the Puppeteer homeworld was home to nearly 1 trillion puppeteers, this left them with the unique problem of feeding 1 trillion sentient mouths.  To do this the Puppeteers moved planets closer to their home world and terraformed them to use for agricultural purposes.  Believe it or not the reason they had to enact birthing laws was not because they didn’t have enough food but because 1 trillion bodies in an advanced society produce too much heat and create all sorts of problems for the environment.  Another unique aspect of the Puppeteer’s home worlds is that they are moving through space like ships.  In the book there was a massive explosion at the core of the galaxy that is set to wipe out all known life in the galaxy in 20,000 years. Humans being the way they are aren’t too worried and say they’ll wait a bit longer before they leave but puppeteers being paranoid herd based herbivores stampede off towards the rim of the galaxy as soon as they find out about their  impending doom.  Being too scared to fly in ships and to numerous anyway, they concoct a way  move their home worlds as if it were a giant starships.  That is why you see the little lights around the farming worlds, they act as artificial suns, the main planet where all the Puppeteers live doesn’t have any suns because it would add too much extra heat to the surface of the planet its also so heavily urbanized that it doesn’t need any suns.  I don’t think its dark on the surface though because the characters visit a park full of different kinds of plants when on the Puppeteer home world in the book. Another interesting side note is that the Puppeteers are so paranoid that no other species had ever seen their planet before the characters in the book arrived.

 

 

In my next post I will focus more on the various lifeforms from the book so stay tuned!!