Here’s a scary thought: a creepy, parasitic alien race like the Flood could be out there, waiting for us to stumble upon them. How would we theoretically build one of the gigantic, Flood-killing Halo arrays from the Xbox series of the same name? With super-science, of course.
A new video over at Nerdist breaks down the various astronomic and practical considerations that would come into play if humanity were ever to try to make something like a Halo. It’s probably no surprise that building a superstructure that could surround a planet would require special materials but it is a bit of a revelation to find out that the physics on a ringworld probably wouldn’t work the way they do in the Halo games.
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6 responses to “Here’s How Humanity Could Build Halo’s Ringworlds”
AUTOPLAY
KILLIT
Well given that the Halo in Halo was based on the Ringworld series by Larry Niven, no it’s not even remotely surprising, engineering hasn’t changed an awful lot since the principles of space were understood. Le Sigh, when can someone bring out a new Ringworld game that shows Halo for the uninspired mediocre shooter it is.
But I thought I was the only one that thought Halo was an insipid and uninspired bullet sponge simulator with neon added for 90’s cool. IT’s not even like it’s a bad game… it just does everything other shooters did 5 years earlier. But not as well.
This is like finding someone else named Millhouse…
A bit, but much more based on the Orbitals of Iain M Banks’ Culture novels – a ringworld completely circles a star, an Orbital is a much smaller ring that orbits a star in the life zone – a star can only have one ringworld, but could have many orbitals.
There’s even a map in Halo 3 called “orbital”, as well as a load of Culture allusions in the games. 🙂
The creators of Halo actually admitted they based it on ringworld
http://web.archive.org/web/20050408113351/http://www.cdmag.com/articles/028/170/halo_preview2.html