Basically, any moving mechanical system has slop/clearance in it. When operating machine tools this is called "backlash", aka how far you have to turn an adjustment handle before it creates a real change in machine position. Any and all moving mechanical systems will have some non-zero amount of slop.

Skilled operators can compensate and "take out" this backlash so that each cut runs perfectly true. Basically as long as you take a "sloppy" machine and always adjust it to run against the very edge of its "sloppiness" zone, you get high precision... I have used lathes at my old college with probably 0.100" or more of backlash and was still able to turn parts that had less than 0.001" of runout.

And obviously once you get to computer controlled machining centers the backlash compensation can be baked into the program to get perfectly true cuts each time.

Loituma is a Finnish quartet whose members combine the Finnish vocal tradition with the sounds of the kantele. Loituma were selected Ensemble of the Year at the 1997 Kaustinen Folk Music Festival. Loituma members compose or arrange the tunes by themselves, often using improvisation. Lyrics come from many sources, two main traditional sources are the Kalevala, the national epic of Finland, and the Kanteletar.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqthspSKZV8

Ok, i wasn't exactly going for the historical approach here lol

They are made of people?

Yeah, but a space elevator is still in the realms of material science, unlike the space rail.

Original Possessor-of-the-universe-and-all-within

What I'm describing is actually possible with ordinary materials, unlike the space elevator. This is less science fiction than a space elevator. Steel is good enough. Oh, and the throughputs possible for systems like this make a space elevator look like a toy.

I'm referring to concepts like the orbital ring.

You could absolutely build a train to space using such active support methods. And a more fanciful and impractical version is vast water-filled structures that allow one to literally a sail a boat to the Moon. I doubt someone would actually go to the trouble of building such a massive and impractical construct for such a silly purpose. But in principle it is possible.

I do think you need active components to keep it stable. Might also be in the range already, where gravitation itself rips it appart.

I think you have it reversed

I feel like the people in the forground don't have enough detail to be berserk, but that was Miura's Era (RIP)

I don't think you understand the concept. "Gravitation itself rips it apart?" The whole idea is based on the idea of harnessing gravity and orbital mechanics.

Simplifying what the others said, humans discovered Fire. But they did invent the campfire, the torch, the cooking fire, the pyre, and a bunch of other "fires" (as tools).

So, the "invention of fire" makes sense just fine, I think

I think i do? But earths gravitational field is a potato, which is why constellation satellites like GPS and Starlink need to adjust now and then. And even if it were a perfect sphere, there's still the moon and the other planets pulling on it. Look at Jupiters Lagrange points for a example how wobbly space around the sun actually is:

L3, L4 and L5 are fields of pebbles (asteroids) Jupiter pushes/pulls around it's orbit by deforming space.

About ripping apart: no matter how high the tensile strength of the material; scale it up enough and it's a sandcastle. Wikipedia has a small table here for the lightest materials and i think Steel is around 100 km. That combined with the potato grav field of earth and it breaks apart.

Ok I'm sorry. Yes, it likely would require some minimal active control to maintain stability. You have a point about perturbations from other bodies. But the Trojan asteroids and Lagrange points have minimal effect. And it's not like the gravitational field around the Sun actually changes that much, percentage wise, unless you're right up close to the planets. The Trojans and Lagrange points are just examples of locations where objects gently placed in certain locations can maintain stability.

Jupiter's Hill Sphere has a radius of 50 million kilometers (actually much smaller than the outer gas giants.) Its orbital radius is more like 780 million km.

Now, this does mean it would be quite difficult to build a Solar System-sized orbital ring right near the orbital path of gas giant, or any other planet. You could build a ring around Jupiter, but building a Solar-centric ring right near Jupiter's orbit would be a problem.

Orbital sanders trip me out every time. I want to lift it off and put it away sideways like any other tool but orbital sander goes "lol dude you can't do that".

Any games that allows us to explore that concept? Sounds like the perfect stuff for shenanigans

The anime in great relaxing Friday choice

Loved how people compared the drawings quality to the gumball episode where everything just becomes blocks. Still liked the commitment to the story.

Most people think this started with centrifugation and it was one of there options but, the bombs dropped were diffusion.

are you saying the large extent of the two Trojan fields shows "wobbliness" of space? because you'd expect all the debris to be right at the exact L4 and L5 points?

if so - no, because a LaGrange point is (despite being massless itself) something a light body can have a stable orbit around. it's not just the only stable point, it allows a large zone for stable orbits.

Yeah, but a structure going through it all would break – ignoring realistic materials.

It's our infinity glitch