Ouaddai (Wadi)
Circumstellar Ring Megastructure
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Ouaddai (Wadi)Circumstellar Ring Megastructure
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| Ouaddai (Wadi) - Data Panel
Galactography System: Ouaddai Primary: Eggen/Greenstein 471 white dwarf Region: Inner Sphere; 50.5ly from Sol, Constellation Cetus Planets :
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The development of oil reserves in the early 21st century c.e. in the Republique du Tchad financed extensive solar powered nanotechnology and ecological management programs; by the third century a.t. the Republique was involved in developing asteroid resources from Near Earth Orbit to the moons of Uranus. When the Nanoswarms attacked, many of the Republique's NEO'S were lost or declared independence; before long the Republique was limited to a single moon of Uranus, Oberon.
During the brief nanotech window a hastily constructed Seeded RAIR interstellar craft, the Bismillah, allowed several thousand vitrified colonists to escape to Epsilon Eridani, in what became the Eridanus League. However this nearby system was soon crowded with refugees from Earth; by 900 a.t. the Bismillah was rebuilt and set off again for the white dwarf star E/G 471, 40 light years further on.
In the current era, E/G 471 is a white dwarf system, but one and a half billion years ago it was a class F star on the main sequence; by one billion years before present it had swollen into a red giant, and then began to expel its atmosphere in a ferocious stellar wind, forming a spherical planetary nebula around the now shrunken central star. The closest planets to the star were destroyed in this process, but the outer two gas giants were smothered in silicon and carbon soot, and although they lost much of their volatiles they still retained hydrocarbon compounds when the central star finally shrank to a white dwarf. It was to these carbon rich worlds the colonists of the Bismillah were drawn.
During the Federation period, this cluster of semi-independent colonies, now called the Ouaddai League, became advanced in the design and construction of carbon-shelled structures. Building a series of rotating habitats around the dwarf and the two cinderworlds, the Republique colonists recaptured the musical lifestyle developed long ago on Oberon. Later contact with the Sophic League and the Stellar Umma led to a rich spiritual development among the enhanced and augmented sections of society.
By 2100 a.t the construction of a two million kilometre wide ring around the tiny but bright white dwarf star was commenced; the ring itself was constructed of diamondoid/carbon buckyfibre weave. The structure rotates in order to produce a centrifugal gravity of 0.8 gee. This ring is in fact the oldest fully circumstellar ring in the Known Galaxy, and is almost two million kilometres in diameter. Even this strongest of physical materials would have been torn apart by centrifugal force if it were not for the additional weight of the counter-rotating mass particle beams pressing inwards toward the star; these iron particles, all that remains of the core of the dismantled planet Bonaventure, are accelerated in efficient magnetic tubes until they are stationary with respect to the central star, so exert no centrifugal force themselves, but balance the outward pressure of the rotating surface. This surface is covered with an Earth-like artificial environment on the inside face, constantly bathed in sunlight from the tiny white dwarf in the centre, an object only 9000 km across. Every night the power collection swarm closes in and obscures the star, giving the illusion of night-time. A ring shaped filter cuts out the harmful hard UV rays emitted by this very hot dwarf, and the quality of the resulting sunlight falling on the ringworld surface is remarkably similar to that received on Old Earth.
From 4800 to 7600 a.t. Ouaddai Ring culture was predominantly Mortalist, largely because of close ties with other similar Sophic League and Umma worlds; both the nearbaseline humans and the posthumans of that world rejected excessive life extension and digital immortality, but chose freely to die of old age, and to go forward into a supposed afterlife which had no physical connection with our own existence. A series of schisms and power struggles, some ferocious and bloody, eventually allowed the immortalists of the Materialist Tendency to practice transcendental uploading; the society of today is a mixture of mortalism, materialism and cosmopolitanism.
