I haven’t read the “ringworld” and haven’t really done a calculation, but it seems very unintuitive that building a ring around the Sun would take materials worth of hundreds of planets.
Do you have some calculations handy?
I do admit that I have read bad sci-fi novels.
well.. what are you gonna make it out of? how much of that stuff is in the average planet - whatever that is. now think of a planetary orbit. somewhere in that orbit is a whole planet. how many of those planets would it take just to make a complete circle around a sun? doesn’t take rocket science. if one can imagine such a structure, one should also be able to contemplate the massive amounts of raw material to make it happen.
if you took all of the planets in the solar system and placed them end to end, you’d only get a very few segments of such a ring, even if you ironed them to flatten them out
Do you have some calculations handy?
I do admit that I have read bad sci-fi novels.
Larry Niven's science fiction, including Ringworld is not "Bad" science fiction. In fact, he's probably one of the most authentic hard science fiction writers that actually tries to stick to real science and extrapolate forward.
That said, he claims he did the math and the stress on the "floor" of the Ringworld exceeds the capacity of any known substance to withstand the tidal forces. He simply labeled it "Scrith", a substance with some pretty amazing properties that simply can't exist, but has to for the story.