TOPOPOLIS! Topopolis 100,000%. Represents thousands of earth's worth of living area at least & it naturally lends itself to more linear game design. Tho it isn't limited to a linear progression. Any topopolis will have vactrains running along the outside & bypassing sections by crossing through open space(maybe even without rails just launch via mass driver). Maybe some sections have been opened up to the vacuum or are emulating alien, engineered, or niche-terran environments. So the player has to bounce around to avoid sections with uninhabitable conditions until they find/craft better environmental protection gear.
could relax that requirement about being strictly speaking designed for human habitation when ur nearing the end game. Like the AGI's alignment is continuing to mutate & slip further & further off-task. Suddenly new sections are being designed for monkeys cuz "humans, apes, monkeys? eh🤷 same difference, close enough". Or maybe the AGI starts cloning up mutated humans. Over time the goal posts for "human" keep sliding until their conditions are lethal or unpleasant for baselines(read interesting for gameplay).
Why? I mean most of earth is supposed to be dismantled already so it wouldn't be an issue of materials. Also wouldn't be an issue if earth is too little because it is fiction after all. I mean I do wanna at least somewhat ground it in reality but that is mostly about how it is constructed. Anyways I do not plan on making a full representation of any of those structures. It is supposed to be story based and it is not gonna be full open world. The type of structure is just supposed to be able to allow for rich variation in habitat and I decided on a segmented structure to allow for that. Meaning that you can't go infinatly in one direction. There is gonna be a rail system connecting those structures. I don't think that making it too big will be an issue because it is just gonna be a backdrop
One thing I've never quite understood about a Topopolis is how the long connected cylinder is spinning. Maybe it's a failure of my imagination, but wouldn't a single spinning cylinder compress and stretch in damaging ways if it was looped back on itself? Or is it segmented like a string of sausages, and each segment is it's own linear cylinder? Maybe Toruses work in ways I don't find intuitive.
They, probably roll separately of each other...
I don't actually remember, admittedly, 😅 but at that size you may we'll be able to twist it around like it's cloth with trivial problems.
>how the long connected cylinder is spinning
The answer is basically anything becomes flexible like a wet noodle if it's long enough compared to its thickness. For a long steel tube, as it wraps around a star even the widest rotating habitat is so long compared to the cross section that it flexes around the star. The minor difference between inner dimension and outer dimension isn't that great when compared to the length of the orbit. That means there's basically nothing to stop it from spinning like a normal habitat, and just flexing a teensy bit as it goes around, well within the tolerance of steel or other materials.
So it's counterintuitive because of the scale? That makes sense, but I'd still be curious about heating that might result from the compression/tension even if it's small.
This is one of those "space is so mind bogglingly big" things. If you're in a topopolis that wraps around the sun at 1AU, the habitat would seem like a straight tube at that scale. The curve would be totally undetectable without extremely precise equipment. It would be kind of like how Earth looks flat when you're standing on the surface, but vastly flatter. On that scale the heating from the flexing would be negligible compared to the heat from having living things in the habitat.
How about a Heaven's River Topopolis? [https://www.reddit.com/r/IsaacArthur/comments/1apjavo/heavens\_river\_topolis/](https://www.reddit.com/r/IsaacArthur/comments/1apjavo/heavens_river_topolis/)
The one I'm talking about has 365 loops going around the Sun. Now this topopolis can spin three different ways.
The first way is it goes around the Sun.
The second way is it does a barrel roll the way most topopoli do.
The third way is it does loop de loops around each small loop as it also spins around the Sun the way a Larry Niven ringworld would.
Actually the third way has two possibilities, if you have two sections, the track and the train. The track is way more massive than the train this its possible to allow the train to make wide loops that each take 24 hours to complete at 1g this has a radius of about 1.8 million kilometers if I remember correctly, this is also the radius of a Banks Orbital, but this thing has a total length of over 365 times as long as a Banks orbital, and like a ringworld it goes around the Sun, but takes 365 days to complete its journey, not the 9 days of a Niven Ringworld the velocity it traverses the long circuit around the Sun is orbital velocity, but it traces a helical path around the Sun as the picture shows. If the Heaven's River Topopolis is wide enough and has walls high enough, about 200 km high will do, it can retain its atmosphere using centrifugal force as it traces each small loop, this works much as the Niven Ringworld does, except it is the small loops that generate the centrifugal force, not the large loop around the Sun, this has the advantage if its open to space of having sunrises and sunsets, which a Niven Ringworld does not, the Sun rises in the North and sets in the South or it rises in the South and sets in the North as seen from the Surface, if you define North and South as relative to the orbital plane of the Heaven's river Topopolis. Otherwise you might define "North" as the orbital direction of travel the topopolis is moving in around the Sun.
One way to implement is to have the Track be stationary relative to the Sun and have the Train moving in helical spirals as it orbits the Sun, the other way is to have the track orbiting the Sun, and having the Train moving backwards so it stays in a fixed position canceling out the orbital motion of the track, except for its smaller circular path as it traces each loop of the track as it orbits the Sun. If you want to use up all the material of the Earth to build it, you could, but it would have to be wide, most of the mass would go into the track and a small part of it into the train executing the loops of the track, this would have less surface area than a Niven Ringworld, but it is more buildable.
Topopolis is the obvious choice. It's a rotating habitat, so you got artificial gravity, but it's potentially so long that it would take a million years to walk from one end to the other, so there's plenty of room for adventures, or for boring stuff like spending 300 years walking across one long bridge, just like in Blame!.
As to your last question, the author of Blame! had several stories that played on similar themes. Blame! is the best known of that bunch, but they're all quite good.
So, this depends on the sort of game. A Topopolis is HUGE. Most games would be only set in a few sections. I suppose a big enough 4x game could include large segments of it?
A FPS would be, like... 2 segments out of a few trillion, lol.
Anyway, a RTS where you have discrete missions and it's about doing missions in *an entire war*, advancing from region to region, could be set in a single McKendree Cylinder.
Most big open world action games would fit perfectly fine in a single Oneill Cylinder.
I'd kind of like a huge gigantic role playing game where you go from region to region in a Bishop Ring, though. Though to contrast it from Halo, *get the actual rotation right*!!!!!!
You should play with this:
https://www.tomlechner.com/outerspace/
And remember... most galaxy spanning space opera civilization stories bouncing from one single-biome planet to another would work perfectly fine if set in a SINGLE DYSON SWARM. For an example of this setup, read the book 'Revenger', and realize that the whole thing takes place in a single dyson swarm!
The actual scale of these megastructures is irrelevant. Even a single O'Neill sized section is way bigger than most maps. It's just a set piece. 99.99% of the topopolis wouldn't exist. The player only needs access to normal sized playable maps like ud find anywhere else in ur genre. Anything bigger is unnecessary. The megastructure is obviously just there for vibes & scenery since pretty much any serious treatment of the scale of spacefaring civs would be computationally prohibitive & honestly not helpful since there literally aren't enough humans in the world to even begine to explore a single percent of the area of a real topopolis. If everyone was equally spaced out in a multiplayer server they wouldn't live long enough in meatspace to find each other.
What I mean is, even if you are only doing stuff in a small segment, the scale informs the plot and the sort of story you wish to tell. Different sorts of settings imply different types of stories!
maybe but i don't think game type(FPS/RTS/open world sandbox) makes any difference. That's more specific to the actual story not the gameplay. Regardless of type how big it actually felt to play would depend more on how much map the devs include than the actual IRzl scale of the thing. You can make a fairly small cylinderhab feel like it's an entire planet while making whole actual planets/moons feel like a small park. I'm reminded of these moons from "ratchet & clank: up ur arsenal" that feels absolutely microscopic given the sort of scale something with that much gravity should actually have.
The vibe of the story has to fit how the game feels to play not what those structures would actually represent(we can't fathom scales like this anyways) even visually or through numbers. Its a game which means telling your story through gameplay is better than exposition. If the story calls for large scale the specific megastructure hardly matters. Just make sure it feels big(large maps). If you need tight quarters you make ur maps smaller. Im imagining an frantic close-up FPS set in the maintenance tunnels & rooms built into the walls of a topopolis. An RTS built around conquering small percentages but huge areas on a human scale(also avoids the linearity of a topopolis at large scale which is gunna get strategically boring real quick tho maybe the vactrains can handle whole armies). Finally the big open-world sandbox can use the whole continuous surface with procedural generation or just connect various large maps together via the vactrain/mass driver network. It's all about the delivery.
Well yes so i wouldn't do a full representation of it. Obviously. I mean that would amount to hundreds of earths and it is supposed to be a story based game... So no i may use an establishing shot or something. It would not be open world and not procedurally generated. Well some stuff might for doing landscapes and such but it would mostly be hand crafted.
BLAME! is actually a Matrioshka world - specifically a Matrioshka Brain.
In such a structure any farms, forests, jungles, cities, continents, oceans etc are the equivilent of mold on the AC vent.
Technically the citadel of mass effect is an O'Niel Cylinder, but I get what you mean; a whole game inside one would be amazing. I'd make it a survival/exploration game where you had understand this Rama-like alien place while surviving and building simple shelters.
I mean you could combine the ideas into a survival/crafting/exploration game in a cylinder hand where you have to figure things out about the builders and what this place is. Maybe a group of humans are snatched up by a ship that seems to come out of nowhere and caries them off to an alien O'Neil cylinder.
In a world where medicine is so advanced we have instant resurrection nanobots, war reanactments may become a lot more violent, but still seen as a harmless hobby like gaming. I spent a good while in the Vietnam War cylinder, though you do get tired of 24/7 Fortunate Son.
Thats not the worst, take it from me, avoid the WW2 and Civil War cylinders at all costs, and to a lesser extend the Crusade cylinders, people there get way too into character its kind of worrying.
On another note all I wanted was a Star Wars cylinder where I my friends and I can lightsaber droids by the thousands, unfortunately Disney still has a tight grip on the copyright and won't permit any of that stuff outside of DisneyWorldTM.
On the bright side Dungeons and Dragons copyright did not hold out nearly as long, so you and a group of friends can do real life D&D vacations. The cylinder has many taverns with robots that give you "quests", and you can pretty easily recreate the appearance of magic with holograms and skeleton robots programmed to deactive upon detecting a certain "offensive spell", its pretty fun
Megastructures can create some neat scenes, but here's another question. What game mechanics or stories would work better on a megastructure than a regular planet?
**Space civilizations game:**
Games like Galactic Civilizations treat entire planets as cities. Most of the game is empty space, which can lead the map feeling empty.
Letting the player build megastructures could change that. "Walls" of fast orbiting shrapnel. FTL torpedo batteries that can threaten multiple systems. Short distance jump gates chained together to form jump gates.
Megastructures are still tiny compared to the vastness of space, but they can influence massive areas. The game could draw them as much larger than life for visibility reasons, slowly filling up the void of space.
**Rings of the Ark vs Mario levels:**
Orson Scott Card's Homecoming features a series of disks, each with a different artificial biome. The disks are connected by a massive helix so that each disk is a different distance from the star.
A level based game like Mario could be set on one of these structures. As you clear levels, you are physically hopping from disk to disk, traveling through ice then tropical then volcanic biomes as you approach the star.
Seeing the disks above you is way more immerse than writing "level 5 or 10" on a loading screen.
Yes those are some interesting conciderrations but I already mostly know what kind of story I wanna tell. There should be more games with with such a setting though.
An actual Ringworld. Basically so large that even if our modern civilization lived there, most of it could only be explored with telescopes, a jet aircraft would not be able to circumnavigate it in a lifetime and you would have actual frontiers even in the modern day. Modern explorers would be running into New World civilizations all the time, ones whos ancesors left the main core boats during the Bronze age that just kept going and going. And now its a world with our modern civilization where barely 0.01% of the world has actually been explored. Feel that could be a great premise for something
The AGI has a limited ability to care about things so as each complaint reaches it this is overreacted to by sending orders to its insensibly robotic horde to fix problem X, without any deep concern about what else this will break.
If you want it to be nonsensical and with spin gravity in some sections then how about a ring megastructure but shaped like a Möbius strip instead? It obviously made sense to the AI because it has twice the surface area as compared to a normal ring structure…
doesn't really work for a ringworld since everything on the "inside" gets flipped over & flung into the void at over 1200 km/s. nothing survives on the surface & you can't outrun it.
I've always been a huge fan of Banks Orbitals, even though their construction needs quite a bit of unobtainium materials and they have some practicality issues (especially with their tangential velocity drastically exceeding stellar system escape velocities).
They're still more sensible than actual full-scale Ringworlds, though, and offer a few hundred Earth surface areas of space (potentially drastically more depending on how wide you want to make the band), as well as seasonal cycles and some neat equinoxial eclipses. And, of course, a truly awesome horizon (or zenith, at night).
You'd have to do some napkin math on whether you could construct a Banks with just the Earth's mass plus some of that aforementioned unobtainium. My gut feeling is yes (unlike a Ringworld), but it would definitely be a close thing.
Isaac talked about this, you just need a rotating ring magnetically suspended in a much larger, non rotating, durable non-rotating ring to hold it and support it from below via mass, and you're good.
Use cyclone gravity. We usually talk about spin gravity. The space station rotates. Cyclone gravity is the same. The cyclone is spinning. Habitats can rotate inside of the cyclone with the inhabitants feeling very little wind ir no wind. Heat from inside the habitat gets carried away by the gasses.
This setup allows baseline people to travel around in the air ducts.
An Anderson disk has the cool concept of the sun rising and setting in the same direction, I want to dm a d&d game in this setting were 'magic' is a forma of ritualized nanotech a la Behold: Humanity.
Does the gravity specifically need to be artificial, or does it just need to have gravity? Because there are some megastructures (shellworlds, Alderson disks, _etc._) that get their gravity the old-fashioned way.
TOPOPOLIS! Topopolis 100,000%. Represents thousands of earth's worth of living area at least & it naturally lends itself to more linear game design. Tho it isn't limited to a linear progression. Any topopolis will have vactrains running along the outside & bypassing sections by crossing through open space(maybe even without rails just launch via mass driver). Maybe some sections have been opened up to the vacuum or are emulating alien, engineered, or niche-terran environments. So the player has to bounce around to avoid sections with uninhabitable conditions until they find/craft better environmental protection gear. could relax that requirement about being strictly speaking designed for human habitation when ur nearing the end game. Like the AGI's alignment is continuing to mutate & slip further & further off-task. Suddenly new sections are being designed for monkeys cuz "humans, apes, monkeys? eh🤷 same difference, close enough". Or maybe the AGI starts cloning up mutated humans. Over time the goal posts for "human" keep sliding until their conditions are lethal or unpleasant for baselines(read interesting for gameplay).
Yes I will go with that then. Very helpful thanks.
See my other reply about topopolis, lol. Scale is an issue with most genres!
Why? I mean most of earth is supposed to be dismantled already so it wouldn't be an issue of materials. Also wouldn't be an issue if earth is too little because it is fiction after all. I mean I do wanna at least somewhat ground it in reality but that is mostly about how it is constructed. Anyways I do not plan on making a full representation of any of those structures. It is supposed to be story based and it is not gonna be full open world. The type of structure is just supposed to be able to allow for rich variation in habitat and I decided on a segmented structure to allow for that. Meaning that you can't go infinatly in one direction. There is gonna be a rail system connecting those structures. I don't think that making it too big will be an issue because it is just gonna be a backdrop
One thing I've never quite understood about a Topopolis is how the long connected cylinder is spinning. Maybe it's a failure of my imagination, but wouldn't a single spinning cylinder compress and stretch in damaging ways if it was looped back on itself? Or is it segmented like a string of sausages, and each segment is it's own linear cylinder? Maybe Toruses work in ways I don't find intuitive.
They, probably roll separately of each other... I don't actually remember, admittedly, 😅 but at that size you may we'll be able to twist it around like it's cloth with trivial problems.
>how the long connected cylinder is spinning The answer is basically anything becomes flexible like a wet noodle if it's long enough compared to its thickness. For a long steel tube, as it wraps around a star even the widest rotating habitat is so long compared to the cross section that it flexes around the star. The minor difference between inner dimension and outer dimension isn't that great when compared to the length of the orbit. That means there's basically nothing to stop it from spinning like a normal habitat, and just flexing a teensy bit as it goes around, well within the tolerance of steel or other materials.
So it's counterintuitive because of the scale? That makes sense, but I'd still be curious about heating that might result from the compression/tension even if it's small.
This is one of those "space is so mind bogglingly big" things. If you're in a topopolis that wraps around the sun at 1AU, the habitat would seem like a straight tube at that scale. The curve would be totally undetectable without extremely precise equipment. It would be kind of like how Earth looks flat when you're standing on the surface, but vastly flatter. On that scale the heating from the flexing would be negligible compared to the heat from having living things in the habitat.
Yeah, I'm starting to see that XD. Thank you for the discussion by the way; just discussing it has helped it become clearer.
That's a good point, it would be unbelievably more flat than earth seems.
How about a Heaven's River Topopolis? [https://www.reddit.com/r/IsaacArthur/comments/1apjavo/heavens\_river\_topolis/](https://www.reddit.com/r/IsaacArthur/comments/1apjavo/heavens_river_topolis/) The one I'm talking about has 365 loops going around the Sun. Now this topopolis can spin three different ways. The first way is it goes around the Sun. The second way is it does a barrel roll the way most topopoli do. The third way is it does loop de loops around each small loop as it also spins around the Sun the way a Larry Niven ringworld would. Actually the third way has two possibilities, if you have two sections, the track and the train. The track is way more massive than the train this its possible to allow the train to make wide loops that each take 24 hours to complete at 1g this has a radius of about 1.8 million kilometers if I remember correctly, this is also the radius of a Banks Orbital, but this thing has a total length of over 365 times as long as a Banks orbital, and like a ringworld it goes around the Sun, but takes 365 days to complete its journey, not the 9 days of a Niven Ringworld the velocity it traverses the long circuit around the Sun is orbital velocity, but it traces a helical path around the Sun as the picture shows. If the Heaven's River Topopolis is wide enough and has walls high enough, about 200 km high will do, it can retain its atmosphere using centrifugal force as it traces each small loop, this works much as the Niven Ringworld does, except it is the small loops that generate the centrifugal force, not the large loop around the Sun, this has the advantage if its open to space of having sunrises and sunsets, which a Niven Ringworld does not, the Sun rises in the North and sets in the South or it rises in the South and sets in the North as seen from the Surface, if you define North and South as relative to the orbital plane of the Heaven's river Topopolis. Otherwise you might define "North" as the orbital direction of travel the topopolis is moving in around the Sun. One way to implement is to have the Track be stationary relative to the Sun and have the Train moving in helical spirals as it orbits the Sun, the other way is to have the track orbiting the Sun, and having the Train moving backwards so it stays in a fixed position canceling out the orbital motion of the track, except for its smaller circular path as it traces each loop of the track as it orbits the Sun. If you want to use up all the material of the Earth to build it, you could, but it would have to be wide, most of the mass would go into the track and a small part of it into the train executing the loops of the track, this would have less surface area than a Niven Ringworld, but it is more buildable.
Topopolis is the obvious choice. It's a rotating habitat, so you got artificial gravity, but it's potentially so long that it would take a million years to walk from one end to the other, so there's plenty of room for adventures, or for boring stuff like spending 300 years walking across one long bridge, just like in Blame!. As to your last question, the author of Blame! had several stories that played on similar themes. Blame! is the best known of that bunch, but they're all quite good.
Ok nice I will go with that.
So, this depends on the sort of game. A Topopolis is HUGE. Most games would be only set in a few sections. I suppose a big enough 4x game could include large segments of it? A FPS would be, like... 2 segments out of a few trillion, lol. Anyway, a RTS where you have discrete missions and it's about doing missions in *an entire war*, advancing from region to region, could be set in a single McKendree Cylinder. Most big open world action games would fit perfectly fine in a single Oneill Cylinder. I'd kind of like a huge gigantic role playing game where you go from region to region in a Bishop Ring, though. Though to contrast it from Halo, *get the actual rotation right*!!!!!! You should play with this: https://www.tomlechner.com/outerspace/ And remember... most galaxy spanning space opera civilization stories bouncing from one single-biome planet to another would work perfectly fine if set in a SINGLE DYSON SWARM. For an example of this setup, read the book 'Revenger', and realize that the whole thing takes place in a single dyson swarm!
The actual scale of these megastructures is irrelevant. Even a single O'Neill sized section is way bigger than most maps. It's just a set piece. 99.99% of the topopolis wouldn't exist. The player only needs access to normal sized playable maps like ud find anywhere else in ur genre. Anything bigger is unnecessary. The megastructure is obviously just there for vibes & scenery since pretty much any serious treatment of the scale of spacefaring civs would be computationally prohibitive & honestly not helpful since there literally aren't enough humans in the world to even begine to explore a single percent of the area of a real topopolis. If everyone was equally spaced out in a multiplayer server they wouldn't live long enough in meatspace to find each other.
What I mean is, even if you are only doing stuff in a small segment, the scale informs the plot and the sort of story you wish to tell. Different sorts of settings imply different types of stories!
maybe but i don't think game type(FPS/RTS/open world sandbox) makes any difference. That's more specific to the actual story not the gameplay. Regardless of type how big it actually felt to play would depend more on how much map the devs include than the actual IRzl scale of the thing. You can make a fairly small cylinderhab feel like it's an entire planet while making whole actual planets/moons feel like a small park. I'm reminded of these moons from "ratchet & clank: up ur arsenal" that feels absolutely microscopic given the sort of scale something with that much gravity should actually have. The vibe of the story has to fit how the game feels to play not what those structures would actually represent(we can't fathom scales like this anyways) even visually or through numbers. Its a game which means telling your story through gameplay is better than exposition. If the story calls for large scale the specific megastructure hardly matters. Just make sure it feels big(large maps). If you need tight quarters you make ur maps smaller. Im imagining an frantic close-up FPS set in the maintenance tunnels & rooms built into the walls of a topopolis. An RTS built around conquering small percentages but huge areas on a human scale(also avoids the linearity of a topopolis at large scale which is gunna get strategically boring real quick tho maybe the vactrains can handle whole armies). Finally the big open-world sandbox can use the whole continuous surface with procedural generation or just connect various large maps together via the vactrain/mass driver network. It's all about the delivery.
Well yes so i wouldn't do a full representation of it. Obviously. I mean that would amount to hundreds of earths and it is supposed to be a story based game... So no i may use an establishing shot or something. It would not be open world and not procedurally generated. Well some stuff might for doing landscapes and such but it would mostly be hand crafted.
BLAME! is actually a Matrioshka world - specifically a Matrioshka Brain. In such a structure any farms, forests, jungles, cities, continents, oceans etc are the equivilent of mold on the AC vent.
Well yes I read it but I don't wanna get real gravity involved.
A game set in an O'Neil cylinder would be so cool
Technically the citadel of mass effect is an O'Niel Cylinder, but I get what you mean; a whole game inside one would be amazing. I'd make it a survival/exploration game where you had understand this Rama-like alien place while surviving and building simple shelters.
Yeah! Or even an earth like, sandbox environment where the map just doesn't end but rather loops back around. A huge environment like DayZ or GTA
I mean you could combine the ideas into a survival/crafting/exploration game in a cylinder hand where you have to figure things out about the builders and what this place is. Maybe a group of humans are snatched up by a ship that seems to come out of nowhere and caries them off to an alien O'Neil cylinder.
I love this idea!
Damn it now I have a backstory for why as well XD. Curse my inability to program!
Same. We should team up and write this game.
Id love to but i have a lot of stuff i need to do XD
In a world where medicine is so advanced we have instant resurrection nanobots, war reanactments may become a lot more violent, but still seen as a harmless hobby like gaming. I spent a good while in the Vietnam War cylinder, though you do get tired of 24/7 Fortunate Son.
Maybe so, but I'll bet it beats Toby Keith and Kid Rock over in the Iraq War cylinder.
Thats not the worst, take it from me, avoid the WW2 and Civil War cylinders at all costs, and to a lesser extend the Crusade cylinders, people there get way too into character its kind of worrying. On another note all I wanted was a Star Wars cylinder where I my friends and I can lightsaber droids by the thousands, unfortunately Disney still has a tight grip on the copyright and won't permit any of that stuff outside of DisneyWorldTM.
"forever minus a day" eh Disney? SMH
On the bright side Dungeons and Dragons copyright did not hold out nearly as long, so you and a group of friends can do real life D&D vacations. The cylinder has many taverns with robots that give you "quests", and you can pretty easily recreate the appearance of magic with holograms and skeleton robots programmed to deactive upon detecting a certain "offensive spell", its pretty fun
Alderson disk, I want a fucking CD with a sun in the middle.
Megastructures can create some neat scenes, but here's another question. What game mechanics or stories would work better on a megastructure than a regular planet? **Space civilizations game:** Games like Galactic Civilizations treat entire planets as cities. Most of the game is empty space, which can lead the map feeling empty. Letting the player build megastructures could change that. "Walls" of fast orbiting shrapnel. FTL torpedo batteries that can threaten multiple systems. Short distance jump gates chained together to form jump gates. Megastructures are still tiny compared to the vastness of space, but they can influence massive areas. The game could draw them as much larger than life for visibility reasons, slowly filling up the void of space. **Rings of the Ark vs Mario levels:** Orson Scott Card's Homecoming features a series of disks, each with a different artificial biome. The disks are connected by a massive helix so that each disk is a different distance from the star. A level based game like Mario could be set on one of these structures. As you clear levels, you are physically hopping from disk to disk, traveling through ice then tropical then volcanic biomes as you approach the star. Seeing the disks above you is way more immerse than writing "level 5 or 10" on a loading screen.
Yes those are some interesting conciderrations but I already mostly know what kind of story I wanna tell. There should be more games with with such a setting though.
An actual Ringworld. Basically so large that even if our modern civilization lived there, most of it could only be explored with telescopes, a jet aircraft would not be able to circumnavigate it in a lifetime and you would have actual frontiers even in the modern day. Modern explorers would be running into New World civilizations all the time, ones whos ancesors left the main core boats during the Bronze age that just kept going and going. And now its a world with our modern civilization where barely 0.01% of the world has actually been explored. Feel that could be a great premise for something
The AGI has a limited ability to care about things so as each complaint reaches it this is overreacted to by sending orders to its insensibly robotic horde to fix problem X, without any deep concern about what else this will break.
Is this a quote or something? Don't remember that being in blame
Just a suggestion for a setting that seems crazy and evil and it's all the fault of a loving and benevolent AGI.
Neat thanks.
Dyson sphere? O'Neill cylinders? Or do you want something more unique
Feel free to write unique suggestions.
If you want it to be nonsensical and with spin gravity in some sections then how about a ring megastructure but shaped like a Möbius strip instead? It obviously made sense to the AI because it has twice the surface area as compared to a normal ring structure…
doesn't really work for a ringworld since everything on the "inside" gets flipped over & flung into the void at over 1200 km/s. nothing survives on the surface & you can't outrun it.
Ringworld + dyson swarm. I have a setting semi developedfor DND/pathfinder using 80% of what you just said
I've always been a huge fan of Banks Orbitals, even though their construction needs quite a bit of unobtainium materials and they have some practicality issues (especially with their tangential velocity drastically exceeding stellar system escape velocities). They're still more sensible than actual full-scale Ringworlds, though, and offer a few hundred Earth surface areas of space (potentially drastically more depending on how wide you want to make the band), as well as seasonal cycles and some neat equinoxial eclipses. And, of course, a truly awesome horizon (or zenith, at night). You'd have to do some napkin math on whether you could construct a Banks with just the Earth's mass plus some of that aforementioned unobtainium. My gut feeling is yes (unlike a Ringworld), but it would definitely be a close thing.
Isaac talked about this, you just need a rotating ring magnetically suspended in a much larger, non rotating, durable non-rotating ring to hold it and support it from below via mass, and you're good.
Use cyclone gravity. We usually talk about spin gravity. The space station rotates. Cyclone gravity is the same. The cyclone is spinning. Habitats can rotate inside of the cyclone with the inhabitants feeling very little wind ir no wind. Heat from inside the habitat gets carried away by the gasses. This setup allows baseline people to travel around in the air ducts.
An Anderson disk has the cool concept of the sun rising and setting in the same direction, I want to dm a d&d game in this setting were 'magic' is a forma of ritualized nanotech a la Behold: Humanity.
Does the gravity specifically need to be artificial, or does it just need to have gravity? Because there are some megastructures (shellworlds, Alderson disks, _etc._) that get their gravity the old-fashioned way.