On Tuesday, October 10, 2017 at 11:30:24 PM UTC-5, Rick Pikul/Chakat Firepaw   
   wrote:   
   > On Mon, 09 Oct 2017 22:10:35 -0600, Greg Goss wrote:   
   >    
   > > johnny1a.again@gmail.com wrote:   
   > >    
   > >>A Bussard drive works (or at least it works in fiction) because the ship   
   > >>is moving close to the speed of light and the intake-field sweeps out a   
   > >>huge swath of space in a unit of time.  That wouldn't apply to the   
   > >>attitude jets of Ringworld.   
   > >    
   > > You may have stopped reading Ringworld too early.  In book four we find   
   > > that they stored the hydrogen from the gas giants that they dismantled   
   > > for the ring, and used that to spin up the ring, at least to the point   
   > > where they had bussard speed to gather enough solar wind.   
   >    
   > Rotation speed doesn't really help that much, it's limited by how much    
   > solar wind enters the collection volume.   
   >    
   > In interstellar space, a Bussard ramjet sweeps out a long tube of space.     
   > When spinning up a ringworld, it sweeps out a torus and keeps sweeping    
   > the same space over and over again.   
   >    
   > --    
   > Chakat Firepaw - Inventor and Scientist (mad)   
      
   I could believe that the solar wind might provide sufficient fuel for the   
   attitude jets, once the Ringworld was spun up, because the intakes could draw   
   in the gas and store it, and the amount of thrust necessary is relatively   
   small, as long as the jets    
   respond quickly to anything that moves the Ring out of equilibrium.  (The   
   longer the delay time, the harder it is to reverse the damage.)   
      
   OTOH, controlled gravity manipulation would likely work even better than the   
   attitude jet system, and the Pak canonically did have at least some gravity   
   manipulation tech.  OTOH, that was in Phssthpok's time, maybe it hadn't been   
   developed by the time    
   the Ringmakers left Pak?   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)