The party demands a Dyson Ring!

[ExtraPlanetal]

The new political leaders of the Space Program has a problem. One of their election points was that they would give Kerbin a planetary ring just because it would look cool, but they never got round to doing it.

Until now.

Due to upcoming elections and a recent wave of protests calling the party leaders "liars", we have decided that we should scrap all ongoing pointless scientific projects (unessential things like meteorological data, interplanetary exploration and such) and devote all resources to construct a planetary ring round our wonderful world, to give the people something nice to look at.

The specifications of the ring are yours to design, but it must just be one solid ring and visible from Kerbin. The party also decrees that all options are open when it comes to construction - break the laws of physics if you must!

The party is looking forward to your success.

[Tommygun]

I think this may be the only way and then you would probably need to do the construct of it as a pre-written program.

Also a very fast computer to track all those parts.

Edit: these are not my pictures.

Edited August 31, 2012 by Tommygun

[ExtraPlanetal]

How I'm planning to do this is to put a lot of things in orbit by editing persistence files, docking them one by one and then hoping my PC can handle it (i7, GTX550Ti, 8GB RAM might be able to). It would be tedious and time-consuming, but possible (well at least I think so).

If you think this is impossible due to the sheer size I can change the challenge to build one around Minimus?

[Tommygun]

I think this one is outside my abilities.

I'll stick to jumping out of things, but I look forward to screen shots.

[Whatshtisthis]

I got an idea for this, build a rocket to get into orbit, the rocket should be as long as possible. Then launch more rockets and dock with the previous rocket, a joint from the Damned Robotics pack could be used to give the rockets a slight curvature.

Once the first ring is done(it might take a while though), more rockets with large foldable parts could be sent up to dock with the ring to widen the ring so that it can be seen from Kerbin.

I don't have the patience nor the skills to pull off this plan, anyone wanna try this?

[Bluejayek]

The problem with all docking ideas is that as soon as you defocus the craft (as when you go to the launchpad to launch a new one) physics modelling ceases, and whatever clamp you are using to hold them in place will let go, allowing the crat to drift apart.

By the by, a dyson ring specifically refers to a ring around the sun, not another body.

A more possible endeavour would be a dyson swarm; thousands of disconnected sattelites arranged in an orbiting sphere around the sun.

[maltesh]

A secondary problem: Under normal circumstances, objects further than 2.5 km from the active scene aren't visible. THey get a marker if they're within 100km, and are completely invisible otherwise, regardless of size.

A tertiary problem: Solid rings around objects are unstable. James Clerk Maxwell realized that in 1859, proving that it must mean that the rings of Saturn were made of innumerable small pieces in orbit. Larry Niven didn't realize that in 1970, leading to chanting at Sci-Fi conventions and three sequels.

[FractiousBullet]

Halo just comes to mind.