Ring of Powerfulness

A large, spaceborne ringworld habitat built around Saturn by the Triumvirate of Yut. It is shared by the Triumvirate's member nations, often for populations that need a place to live away from conventional population pressures.

Very Basic Information

Physical Properties:

• Radius: 4,000,000 kilometers
• Circumference: 25,132,741.23 kilometers
• Width: 1,000 kilometers
• Area: 25,132,741,230 square kilometers
• Height (walls): 1,000 kilometers
• Thickness (floors): 500 meters
• Thickness (walls): 250 meters
• Angular Velocity: ~0.0028 degrees per second
• Tangental Velocity: ~198,091 meters per second
• Rotational Period: 35.243 hours

Technical Information:

• Constituents: Techwankium 99™, Plotdeviceium™, Scrith-Blend carbon nanotubule woven-diamondoid
• Lighting System: TME Industries Orbiting Light Platform
• Apparent Light Area of Effect: 1,000 km x 3,141.59 km
• Apparent Day/Night Cycle Period: 24 hours
• Orbit Radius: 3,750,000 km out from Saturn center (stationkeeping gravy required)
• Standard Operating Output: 1.07 petawatts
• Number: 4,000

Bookkeeping Information:

• Division Unit: Sector
• Division Unit Width/Length: 1,000 kilometers / 3,141.59 kilometers
• Division Unit Area: 3,141,592.654 square kilometers (about 1/3 the area of China or Europe; a little larger than India)
• Number of Divisions: 8,000

Environmental Information:

• Percent Surface Water: Approximately 70 percent.
• Sector Land Area: ~942,477.8 square kilometers (a little less than 3 times the size of Germany; a little larger than Venezuela)
• Sector Water Area: ~2,199,114.9 square kilometers
• Soft Population Limit (total, fully developed): 354.3 billion
• Soft Population Limit (Sector, fully developed): 44.3 million
• Biomes: All Terrestrial variations represented from vacuum to marginally inhabitable (in process of terraforming)

Math and Jive for the above (skip if uninterested): The Ring of Powerfulness is a thousand kilometers across and eight million kilometers in radius, giving it a circumference of eight million times pi kilometers. We spin it to create 9.81 meter per second squared acceleration on its surface, which means it has a tangental velocity of 198,091 meters per second. In the time it takes you to speak this phrase before the comma aloud, you've just traveled a distance 1.63 times the equatorial circumference of the Earth. However, this is only 0.0000495 radians--around 0.0028 degrees per second--which means the Ring completes a full revolution once every 35 hours (126,875 seconds) or so.

The Ring Is Ring-Shaped

Directions:

Directions on the Ring are: Spinward (clockwise when looking down from above Saturn's north pole), usually shortened to "Spin;" Anti-Spinward (counter-clockwise), usually shortened to "Anti;" Plus (parallel to Saturn's [and the Ring's] axis of rotation, in the direction from the center of rotation to the North Pole); and Minus (also parallel to the same axis, in the direction from the center of rotation to the South Pole). "Up" is in the radial direction towards Saturn; "down" is in the radial direction away from Saturn (i.e. through the Ring floor). So, if someone is facing Spin, they are facing the direction the Ring is spinning (thus, "Spin"), Anti is behind him, and Saturn will be straight above, its rings pointing Spin and Anti. Plus is to his left, and Minus is to his right. If he looks up, the North Pole of Saturn will be to the left and the South Pole to the right.

Getting Around

Navigation on the Ring requires a computational compass that is more akin to a GPS system than a real compass. It recieves signals from radio transmitters on the Ring walls and determines one's position via corrected triangulation. Without a compass, one can always look up at Saturn and immediately know the direction of the Spin/Anti and Plus/Minus axes if the rings are visible but not necessarily know what direction they're pointing; the North and South poles are quite similar, meaning that people relying on Saturn to navigate have a bad tendency to go in the direction directly opposite the one they want.

Looking Around

Of course, that is almost unneccessary as living Ringside is much like living in a trench. The Ring walls are high and dominate the skies from any point on the Ring; they are mirrored so as to not induce any sense of vertigo or claustrophobia but they are still noticably different from the actual sky in daytime.

To someone standing on a high elevation on the Ring, there is no global horizon. To Plus and Minus the ground simply stretches on until it ends at the walls. This can be up to a thousand kilometers away and so can be extremely hazy, but the fact remains that it is visible on a clear day. To Spin and Anti the ground appears flat then noticably curves up a very long ways away, decreasing to a very thin band made of equal light and dark sections, the dark bits usually blending into the rest of the sky. This is The Arch, which is always visible.

Flora and Fauna

Wildlife on the Ring is basically Terrestrial in nature. The Old Triumvirate-controlled sections are bountiful in gengineered wildlife, always creatively spelled (beyr, pantheyr, deyr, kow, wulph, and the like) which are essentially identical to their Terrestrial counterparts but usually larger and more ornery at the behest of Xeruyu vonKarma of Karmabaijan, a true conservationist in the vein of Theodore Roosevelt.