Okay, thanks.

It's like landing a highly manouverable jet interceptor (thinking of the CF-104 Starfighter, known as 'the widow maker')... you are trying to balance on a knife edge and if you fall of it a bit, you're liable to go over faster and faster. Like a catamaran.... once you get it leaned over enough, it'll pull itself over. Most keelboats, by contrast, will get heeled over in high winds and if they get too much wind, they'll heel over enough that the rudder comes out of the water, then the boat will naturally turn into the wind and depower the sail. But a catamaran.... over past a certain point and she's going over the rest of the way. Or like a feedback loop where the feedback takes the system further from a stable equilibrium condition at an increasing rate.

I'm wondering if a ringworld would need to be very much stabilized to not have the same thing happen....

On Thu, Apr 30, 2020 at 4:51 AM Vareck Bostrom <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
It's covered in brief on the wiki page for it:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klemperer_rosette

Simulations of this system[2] (or a simple linear perturbation analysis) demonstrate that such systems are unstable: any motion away from the perfect geometric configuration causes an oscillation, eventually leading to the disruption of the system (Klemperer's original article also states this fact). This is the case whether the center of the rosette is in free space, or itself in orbit around a star. The short-form reason is that any perturbation destroys the symmetry, which increases the perturbation, which further damages the symmetry, and so on.

On Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 1:32 AM <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:


On Wed, Apr 29, 2020 at 6:16 PM Vareck Bostrom <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
Rosettes are not dynamically stable, even when they are of the same mass. 

I kind of thought they would be. What makes them not a stable configuration? Does it require some sort of eccentricity or the action of other bodies in the system to cause the instability?

TomB

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