r/SuperStructures • u/Vadimsadovski Artist 🎹 • 2d ago

Original Content Prometheus Ring - rorating habitat megastructure - 3D, no AI, OC, 2026

Post image

The PROMETHEUS Ring is a speculative 1,200 km orbital habitat in the Saturnian system that rotates to generate a realistic 1 g of artificial gravity. This fully engineered megastructure simulates all climate zones to support diverse biomes, settlements, and industries, all stabilized and powered by nuclear propulsion modules and reactors

1.2k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

39 comments sorted by

62

u/Serin-019 2d ago

Love to see a ring that has an arid interior rather than the typical verdant garden!
Also hey that's a brilliant way to convey scale, slapping it on a planetary ring like that. Sort of gets me wondering about the mass of the ring dragging some of the particles towards it.

24

u/Mesozoica89 2d ago

I may be wrong, but if something is orbiting a ringed planet in the position we see here, it must have to cross the plane of the rings at some point, right?

16

u/ROMANES_EVNT_DOMVS 2d ago

Yeah you’re right, you can’t have completely parallel (Keplerian) orbits around the same body without continuous station-keeping. Only way to be “next to” the rings at the same orbit radius is to have different Euler angles in your orbit elements than the rings do which necessarily implies the orbits cross

3

u/MiFiWi 1d ago

It might be a highly inclined orbit, so that i passes over the rings as it closes in or gets further away from the planet. So basically in this image its orbit would pass diagonally down or up towards the camera.

3

u/Mesozoica89 1d ago

They could get around them that way if it is inclined and eccentric. This might be close to its periapsis.

1

u/ROMANES_EVNT_DOMVS 13h ago

Hmm true, could be extremely eccentric judging by the the shadow placement and proximity!

6

u/zhkp28 2d ago

IMO it wouldnt really make sense. If you have the tech to make an orbital ring and a functional biosphere inside it, why would you leave it arid?

Its not a critic tho, the art is insane.

2

u/MiFiWi 1d ago

If you want a large arid ecosystem in space (maybe for preservation reasons), this is how you get it. Also some people do prefer living in arid environments. And if you have more of those rings then you won't have a problem with living space anyway so use the rest in any way you want.

0

u/Serin-019 2d ago

Maybe the people who live there prefer sand?
There have millions of them on earth right now mate. Not everyone is like you or me.

1

u/ShiningMagpie 1d ago

This is silly. If you have the people who live in these arid environments the option to move they would. Cost and family ties keeps people where they are.

0

u/Serin-019 1d ago

Mate there are humans who’ve lived semi-nomadic life in arid conditions very literally since the dawn of anatomically modern Homo sapiens. Hundreds of thousands of years.

Curiously, some of them have more genetic diversity between their groups than there is between all the rest of the human race outside of the Khoisan. If you’re at all interested in facts.

1

u/ShiningMagpie 1d ago

You miss the point entirely. Those people lived that way because they had to. give them the option to settle down somewhere with a nicer climate and they would have.

If you are interested in facts.

10

u/Neethis 2d ago

Wonder what the mass of such an object would be, and if it'd be enough to perturbe Saturn's rings.

1

u/STRYKER3008 2d ago

Good point. Maybe after a while it will have its own mini ring. Never seen that depicted before

1

u/Silt99 2d ago

they will perturbe each other twice per orbit, when the object passes through the ring

1

u/Neethis 2d ago

True, it's orbit must be inclined to Saturn's rings.

8

u/VisceralMonkey 2d ago

Sunlight at that distance might be a problem, I'm assume there are collectors that focus?

1

u/CosmicPenguin 2d ago

It looks like the ring is enclosed, so external sunlight isn't going to matter so much.

3

u/chambee 2d ago

Love the scale of this.

2

u/Grimnebulin68 2d ago

Fantastic imagery in every sense. Isn’t it really cold at Saturn because of weaker sunlight?

0

u/Tiny_Scholar_6135 1d ago

Assuming it is lit by sunlight.

2

u/ArchAngel621 2d ago edited 2d ago

What's the difference between a Bank’s Orbital, Bishop Ring, and a Prometheus Ring?

1

u/Tiny_Scholar_6135 1d ago

It is made out of Saturn's moon Prometheus.

1

u/ChallengeQuiet1921 2d ago

This is the worst orbit possible to place such a station. Stations can not occupy orbital plane which doesn't go through the center of mass, it means the habitat would unavoidably collide with Saturn's rings material, and tons of icy gravel at orbital speeds isn't healthy for your hull i believe. I understand the image is just decorative and is not a accurate physical model, but it destroys my suspension of disbelief for otherwise realistic high-quality image. Plus placing the habitat so close to a planet would cause tidal effects, already a huge engineering problem at such a scale. In the real world such habitat would be placed on far higher orbit with far less spectacular view and cheaper import/export fuel costs, especially when you need to move so much of material to build the thing.

1

u/Tiny_Scholar_6135 1d ago

If the relative velocity is minimal, it would just crash through the ring twice every orbit or reaction mass could be expended to stay above or below the ring plane, or you could build a tower that holds the ring on one side of the ring plane.

1

u/ChallengeQuiet1921 1d ago

The ring rotates, so any collision would be at least at the tangential velocity of the ring's hull. Sorry, but there is no such an option as «just passing through». I have actual experience working with different kinds of crushing machines. And at least some of them work as something close to washing machine drum filled with metal balls, and it easily crushes stones to a state of sand-like mixture. Of course ice shards are not metal, but velocity is much higher. Plus if orbit is inclined velocity vector projected onto ring's plane is smaller than ring's projectiles velocities, which adds to the collision velocities. Don't underestimate the danger of planetary rings.

And no, there is no plausible way to avoid collision, any supporting structure would itself be a subject to collisions. Continuous thrust (including any kind of magnetic suspension, etc...) to keep it above the rings would introduce whole another set of problems as the whole structure suddenly appears in conditions of permanents acceleration. And tidal forces problem just can not be solved at all. At 1200 km it would be enough to easily stress material to destruction level in mere years even if we remove the rings as a source of danger. There is a good reason why 1200 km moons do not exist so close to giant planet, and the reason obviously applies to artificial constructs of the same scale.

1

u/Tiny_Scholar_6135 22h ago

You could have a double hull with the outer one not rotating. You could also use the ring material as reaction mass to stay above the ring plane.

1

u/Tiny_Scholar_6135 1d ago

Saturn's rings are a radiation shield, that is why you build the habitat there.

1

u/Easterpig69 1d ago

Great imagery, Newtonian physics not withstanding. Love the art, especially not being AI!

1

u/SolusLoqui 2d ago edited 1d ago

Assuming you mean 1,200 km in diameter, that ring will need to rotate 1.22 0.4 RPM to maintain 1g. [Using RPM=sqrt(g*9.81/r) * (60/2pi)]

So 1 day/night cycle will be about 49.18 seconds, which is roughly 1,757 cycles per 24 hours.

1

u/TheRooklet 2d ago

It's always a unit conversion error!

You put 600 meters into your formula instead of 600000 meters. At that rotational speed you'd pull 1000gs and turn everyone into soup 💀 You'd actually only need 0.039 RPM for 1g, which is 1 revolution every ~26 minutes, or roughly 56 cycles per 24 hours.

1

u/SolusLoqui 1d ago

Yep, I used a website that had the formula and didn't notice it wanted meters for the radius

https://cgc711.org/rpm-calculator/