Talk:Alderson disk

message: Aysle is, I think described as being more of a Torus, I think. - Nils 19:13, 13 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Yeah, I suppose that might work actually.  I wasn't previously considering spin on the disk to be a design parameter.  But that's right, the acceleration due to the spin would be constant while you would have some vector of gravity due to the disk that would be at some angle to the normal, and in the areas where gravity was previously tilted outwards, the density and acceleration could supposedly be adjusted to get gravity that acts normal to the surface.  The gravity vector, however, isn't just a function of the density of the disk at a certain radius, but affected by all mass around it, this just makes the exact calculations more difficult.  I believe that you couldn't make gravity upright for 100% of the disk, but with a lot of work, it would seem that gravity could act directly downwards for a large portion of the disk. theanphibian 07:09, 19 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: old comments

message: Is the Alderson disk necessarily one continuous chunk of solid matter? If it consisted of rings rotating with different velocities, the structural problems would be far less severe. Icek 19:25, 19 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: If the design sucks and you have a better one, then oh well, doesn't change the article.  But if you want to discus a proposal of rings around a sun, you might best deal with the idea of one ring around a sun.  Will gravity hold it together well?  Can it hold an atmosphere?  Would other rings disrupt it?  I know, I've been through these sort of discussions. theanphibian 06:11, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Continuous disc?

message: "This could be solved by forcing the sun to bob up and down within the disk, lighting first one side then the other. (As the disk far outmasses the sun, this is a plausible option.)"
What factor would the mass of the disc play in this? Since the motion of the sun is relative to the disc and vice versa, it wouldn't matter whether the sun bobbed or the disc did. So that note should be removed, if I'm not mistaken?
--StarManta 05:28, 29 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree, I see no reason for that note to be there, it seems irrelevant.Darkcraft 10:12, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

text: It's probably a paraphrase of a line in Niven's essay.  Having previously said that a ringworld could be bobbed for seasons, or to allow coplanar rings without permanent eclipse, he says (roughly): "The sun stays permanently on the horizon, unless we bob it. (This time the sun does the bobbing.)" —Tamfang (talk) 17:52, 18 August 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sun bobbing - mass of the disc wouldn't matter, right? 

message: In the "In Popular Culture" section, under the Halo 3 paragraph, this line is found: It also had a nearby star, despite being outside the Milky Way, where stars cannot naturally form (...)
I'm going to take this out.  Its astronomical incorrectness aside (countless stars have been born outside our galaxy), it doesn't add anything relevant to the article. ZbeeblebroxIV (talk) 04:44, 10 February 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Stars can also be ejected from galaxies. —Tamfang (talk) 19:30, 18 March 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Stars Outside Our Milky Way 

message: I can see the point of a ring world, even of a Dyson sphere. But the article doesn't say anything about what desirable or useful properties an Alderson disk would offer. Anyone? Sources? Speculation? Anything? --67.180.106.165 (talk) 04:01, 14 March 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: The only point is to provide a setting for fiction. Alderson, although not a fiction author himself, was an enthusiastic member of the ‘science’ fiction community.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.114.147.138 (talk) 02:31, 18 March 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  The point of an Alderson disk? 

message: Hey everyone, thanks for your contributions!  I removed this passage:
:"Close to its surface, the gravity of the disk would closely approximate that of an infinite flat plate, for which gravity is perpendicular to the surface.  Near the inner and outer edges of the plate, edge effects would become significant."
Could someone more familiar with the topic please help this this paragraph out? What is meant by "close to the surface"?  What is the gravity of an infinite flat plate?  What is gravity that is perpendicular to the surface?  Are edge effects the same as Coriolis effects?  thanks again.  Informata ob Iniquitatum (talk) 05:57, 21 June 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removed gravity passage, needs to be made clearer and restored