（外文电子版资料）Larry Niven - The Ringworld Engineers.doc

THE RINGWORLD ENGINEERS Larry Niven (c) 1980 by Larry Niven v1.0 (30 sep 2000) If you find and correct errors in the text, please update the version number by 0.1 and redistribute. DEDICATION Ringworld is ten years old; and I have never stopped getting letters about it. People have been commenting on the assumptions, overt and hidden, and the mathematics and the ecology and the philosophical implications, precisely as if the Ringworld were a proposed engineering project and they were being paid for the work. A man in Washington, D.C., sent me a full proofreading job on the first edition of Ringworld, with the title The Niven-McArthur Papers, Vol. I. It was of enormous help to me. (If you own a first paperback edition of Ringworld, its the one with the mistakes in it. Its worth money.) A Florida high school class determined the need for the spillpipe system. From a Cambridge professor came an estimate for the minimum tensile strength of scrith. Freeman Dyson (Freeman Dyson!) has no trouble believing in the Ringworld (!), but cant see why the engineers wouldnt have built a lot of little ones instead. Wouldnt it be safer. I hope the answer Ive given in this book is satisfactory. Of course there are no petrochemicals on the Ringworld. Frank Gasperik pointed out that any civilization at our level would be based on alcohol. The Machine People would be able to use the vegetable sludge for other purposes, up to and including a plastics industry. During a speech in Boston someone in the audience pointed out that, mathematically, the Ringworld can be treated as a suspension bridge with no endpoints. Simple in concept; harder to build. From all directions came news of the need for attitude jets. (During the 1971 World Science Fiction Convention, MIT students were chanting in the hotel hallways: THE RINGWORLD IS UNSTABLE!) but it took Ctein and Dan Alderson, working independently, several years to quantify the instability. Ctein also worked out data on *moving* the