But to understand the events in Ringclimber , you may want to know more about the Rings. The Rings are an enormous place. To go from the outer edge of the Rings to the inner edge would be to travel a distance of about seventy or eighty thousand miles. By comparison, a trip around the world is about twenty-five thousand miles. While the Rings are wide, they are not terribly thick.
Estimates range from a half-mile to a few hundred yards.
For the purposes of Ringclimber, I have assumed a thickness which varies but which is roughly a half mile. The Rings are made of billions of orbiting particles, ranging in size from dust to about fifteen feet in diameter. The Rings also contain some embedded moonlets on the order of tens of miles in diameter. All of these objects are probably largely water ice, with some coatings of dust and grit. It is easy to imagine that the complex dynamics of the Rings will concentrate and swirl these various particles into clouds and semi-opaque areas as well as places where, much like the eye of a hurricane, one feels as if suspended in a room walled with whiteness.