That brings up a whole different aspect of this.
The Rogue Ring is essentially an evolution of a (reasonably) well-understood ISO type that becomes possible if we abandon the idea of needing to be near a star.
But the hoopworld is nowhere near being the only type of ISO that could evolve into something conceptually different if we don't have a central star.
For example, what's the 'Rogue ISO' equivalent of a Dyson Swarm?
You could have a 'Rogue Swarm' like a Dyson swarm, that orbits a common center of gravity, with no star required. Maybe there's a central Rogue Planet, and maybe not. The orbital mechanics would be an intensely complex n-body problem with course corrections made by other objects changing the parameters somewhat every day. But that's *almost* equally true of conventional Dyson Swarms. In a Rogue Swarm you'd presumably have some stations operating nuclear power plants to sustain themselves, and other stations positioned where there is a gradient of infrared radiation (ie, between those nuclear-powered stations and the Outer Darkness) living off their waste heat. So you have a central swarm of stations generating their own power, and the rest of the swarm operating as if those central stations were a very large, very diffuse, star - possibly living on radiation gradients that even most hiders would consider negligible.
The outer layers would have to be very very low-powered indeed. But operating a small group of 15 or 20 modosophont AI, on the Infrared power harvested from several hundred square kilometers of collectors, is not too hard to imagine. The little 'cabin in the woods' groups on the periphery would be isolated from their neighbors by lightspeed delay and limited in size by the amount of power available, making them a true 'hinterland' as an area where you can't really have significant population density - and a fair number of people would probably like that.
The Rogue Ring is essentially an evolution of a (reasonably) well-understood ISO type that becomes possible if we abandon the idea of needing to be near a star.
But the hoopworld is nowhere near being the only type of ISO that could evolve into something conceptually different if we don't have a central star.
For example, what's the 'Rogue ISO' equivalent of a Dyson Swarm?
You could have a 'Rogue Swarm' like a Dyson swarm, that orbits a common center of gravity, with no star required. Maybe there's a central Rogue Planet, and maybe not. The orbital mechanics would be an intensely complex n-body problem with course corrections made by other objects changing the parameters somewhat every day. But that's *almost* equally true of conventional Dyson Swarms. In a Rogue Swarm you'd presumably have some stations operating nuclear power plants to sustain themselves, and other stations positioned where there is a gradient of infrared radiation (ie, between those nuclear-powered stations and the Outer Darkness) living off their waste heat. So you have a central swarm of stations generating their own power, and the rest of the swarm operating as if those central stations were a very large, very diffuse, star - possibly living on radiation gradients that even most hiders would consider negligible.
The outer layers would have to be very very low-powered indeed. But operating a small group of 15 or 20 modosophont AI, on the Infrared power harvested from several hundred square kilometers of collectors, is not too hard to imagine. The little 'cabin in the woods' groups on the periphery would be isolated from their neighbors by lightspeed delay and limited in size by the amount of power available, making them a true 'hinterland' as an area where you can't really have significant population density - and a fair number of people would probably like that.