Andy_L
July 28, 2018, 2:18pm
17
Chronos:
To be fair, dismissing Protector is a good idea, anyway. My biggest gripe with the sequels is that they reference the Pak, making it that much harder to excise them from Known Space.
And you can prove the instability using high-school-level math and physics. Gauss’s Law works just as well for gravity as it does for electromagnetism, and that’s all you need. Multivariate calculus is needed to calculate just how bad the instability is, but even that is undergraduate level.
Oh, and apparently in Ringworld’s Children (which I have not read), they turn the entire Ringworld into a hyper-capable vehicle. Which makes no sense at all, because where would you go? To within a very small rounding error, the Ringworld itself is already every destination in the known universe.
They’re not moving the Ring to somewhere - they’re moving the Ring to get the Ring away from the species of Known Space, who have discovered the Ring and are fighting a war over it (entirely too close to the Ring for comfort).