Ringworld implausibilities
Bill Kaufman
In article <17...@ncoast.UUCP> all...@ncoast.UUCP (Brandon Allbery) writes:
>Then of course, there's the superconducting cloth. Room-temperature super-
>conductors are barely plausible; but cloth??? Anything flexible enough to
>qualify as a "cloth" would be too thin to handle the trick where they
>use a strip of cloth, one end in a lake and the other hanging over the Slaver
>sunflowers, to ``de-fang'' said sunflowers.
Waitaminit. Wasn't that a molecule-chain they used, as in Ye Olde Sinclair
Molecule Chain--the strongest (at least, as of Gil Hamilton's time) piece
of thread known to man--not a superconuctor? As I remember it, the 'chain
was what held the night-making plates together. (For a while.)
>BTW -- as far as the protectors go, I lump them in with the "down in flames"
>outline posted a few months ago; protectors, being in the center of the
>galaxy, might well be a danger to the tnuctip plan to take over the galaxy.
>(They would know the truth about the Core explosion.) As a result, they
>may well be only half-true...
If you mean "half-true" as "may not exist", I can tell you they *do* exist.
(Just ask Jack Brannan (sp?).) If you mean "may not be our ancestors",...
well, there's a lot of people fighting for that position: the Protectors,
the Ptaavs (or Tnuctipin, whichever), etc. Kinda makes you wonder why
they're all falling over each other to claim us as their decendants,...;-)
"Down in flames" they almost certainly are,because of the aforementioned Core
reaction (if you don't count the inhabitants of the Ringworld or Earth).
(BTW, does anyone know more about this "tnuctip plan" than I do?
I wasn't even sure these guys were still around,...)
-Annoyingly,
Bilbo.
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---------------------------------------------------------------------------
John C. Lotz
> ***SPOILERS!!!*** (Nothing most of you ain't heard before, 'tho,...)
>
> In article <17...@ncoast.UUCP> all...@ncoast.UUCP (Brandon Allbery) writes:
> >Then of course, there's the superconducting cloth. Room-temperature super-
> >conductors are barely plausible; but cloth??? Anything flexible enough to
> >qualify as a "cloth" would be too thin to handle the trick where they
> >use a strip of cloth, one end in a lake and the other hanging over the Slaver
> >sunflowers, to ``de-fang'' said sunflowers.
>
> Waitaminit. Wasn't that a molecule-chain they used, as in Ye Olde Sinclair
> Molecule Chain--the strongest (at least, as of Gil Hamilton's time) piece
> of thread known to man--not a superconuctor? As I remember it, the 'chain
> was what held the night-making plates together. (For a while.)
>
The superconductor was needed to pass the heat. Louis Wu used the
molecule chain to hold the plate once it reached altitude (he wasn't sure how strong the superconductor wire was).
jcl