Ring Worlds. Feasible or simply "I want them so I can have them" nonsense?

[karakris]

Hmmmm - not sure about any of these

I used to like the idea of Ringworlds. But Larry Niven only made that possible in his "universe" by having the people who created it - use methods of Matter Transmutation to convert a lot of the Mass into some super-hyperstrength metal, for the base ring of the Ringworld.
Of course, I kind of went off the Ringworld when he made it seem so very different in "The Ringworld Engineers".

I am in a Sci-Fi Game which is play-by-post - in fact I am now the Game Master of it.
It is now 2137 - and we ( Humanity ) have had FAST FTL Drives since 2130.

We had a run-in with the galaxy-wide Slave Empire of some nasty evil Aliens.
We found that one of their Star Systems had a massive Alderson Disc - and we managed to effectively destroy it. We are getting ready to go seriously to War with them in a big way.

We have Colonised some 19 Star Systems - with Colonies on Planets, and in some cases on Asteroid in large Asteroid Belts.
In Sol, we are terraforming Mars, which is well underway - and we have started terraforming Venus.

The leader of one of our Friendly Alien peoples recently suggested that we should merge Neptune with Jupiter, to make a Brown Dwarf Star - ten put the moons of Jupiter and Neptune in orbit around it. This would give us a number of habitable Planetoids ( Dwarf Planets ).
They have just given us the Technology to control and manipulate Gravity - so to them it seems simple.

Any thoughts on that idea - people ??

[Wolfgang of Borg]

Well if you've got gravitics why even bother with planets, let alone mega-engineering?

Lots of cheap energy (no need to mess around with magnetic bottles, just make a small but incredibly deep gravity well and throw some hydrogen in, boom instant mini-Sun). Then for your houses make thin, high potential difference shells to keep the air in, uniform 1 g inside so the inhabitants don't get space sick, some soil or 'ponics gear at the bottom so you can grow food and you're all set. Terraforming's for chumps.

Think more like the planetlet Kobold from Protector or Major Tom's tiny ecosphereship from The Fountain (good film btw, loved the soundtrack and the Mayans, very Aguirre: Wrath of God):


Or even something like:


Or the one seen near the end of Dark City (another film i love (by the director of The Crow, back before he sold out),.. mute the sound for the first 30 sec for a superior viewing experience, until you see Kiefer Sutherland check his pocket watch (dumbass movie execs forced there to be an opening narration, which gives away the entire plot right at the start))

EDIT: Fuck i just realised i'm preaching to the choir here, of course you know how awesome spindizzies are. Sorry man.

[Brome Teks]

Borg's right, if you can manipulate gravity, there's all kinds of fun stuff you can do. Screw Jupiter, put Titan and Europa in the Goldilocks zone.

Though I should note, unless you are messing with gravity, the mass of Jupiter combined with Neptune alone (or, well, every single other planet in the solar system combined) is not enough to make it a brown dwarf. That requires about 13 Jupiter masses [1], and all the other planets in the solar system combined don't even add up to 1 Jupiter mass. [2]

[Wolfgang of Borg]

(I like how you've started citing numbered hyperfootnotes.)

[Brome Teks]

(I like how you've started citing numbered hyperfootnotes.)

I started doing it after I needed to call "Citation needed" on a member's questionable claims on another forum. =P

[themnax]

doing something just so the next star fairing civilization that comes along will wonder why in the heck they did, doesn't sound to me like a very good reason for doing so.
of course i'd like to be able to ride further on a train then where oceans on earth get in the way of doing so.