If you want to go back to the Dyson Sphere and fly around, there are plenty of mods that do just that. I recommend Monkey Universe (www.monkeyuniverse.forumonline.biz), a multiplayer mod where the Nomads have returned. I suggest you join the faction Razer Squadron.

I was assuming we had a super-material, strong enough to resist such breaking forces :P

Like.. I dunno.. carbon nanotubes reinforced with titanium, or something modelled on the internal structure of bones, but also made in nano-scale and out of something with incredible tensile strength

Or we could put it high enough that it’s orbiting, the 1m above ground apart was just the way I first imagined it (I was imagining a continuous channel, like a drainpipe or similar, held up on little legs running all the way around the planet, then filling it with liquid metal and removing the support and watching what happens to the resulting ring of metal)

Also, still no email notifications, although I’m starting to get into the habit of checking old topics so if it did start working again it might actually bug me :lol:

Hmmm… Good question. My guess is that the ring would probably break up into pieces because of the tension. The force acting on the ring would be always toward earth. I don’t think the tension caused by the fact that this force actually points in opposite directions in different parts of the globe would transfer along the ring far enough to prevent it from breaking.

To make it stable you would probably need to put it in the orbit. But then again, I am not a physicist.

There was a book I read a while back, “The Time Ships” by Stephen Baxter, written as a sequel to The Time Machine. That had a Dyson shell in the far future, with morlocks living on the outside of it.

Using the energy captured they were able to create whatever they wanted out of the surface of the shell, I think by thought – the stuff just projects itself out of the ground, and is reabsorbed when they’re done with it.

It does sound like its impossible to actually construct a Dyson shell if once constructed there was no overall gravity acting on it, and it just floated independently of the Sun.

I’ve always sort of wondered what would happen if you made a giant ring of metal, all the way around the planet but about 1m more than the diameter of the Earth, would it hover in midair, or would it fall to Earth on one side of the world and go 2m into the air on the other, would it somehow fall off the Earth, so the planet passes through the ring and out of it, or what.