sciency fictiony things

There's a reason I used a picture of a Halo ring in this post, and not just because I was at one point a complete Halo freak and still have an undeniable soft spot for it now, but because while watching the new series of Thunderbirds for my reviews, I've been thinking about one very specific piece of technology that is used in the new series. In Thunderbirds Are Go Thunderbird 5 has a gravity ring, there are various forms of artificial gravity used in science fiction, but I m most interested by what is possibly the simplest, Gravity rings. The idea is actually pretty fun, when an object in an environment without gravity spins, anything inside the object will travel away from the centre of the spin because of centrifugal force, in that sense what the object is experiencing isn't gravity, but the centrifugal force pushing them away to the centre of the rotation, like when a hamster is going nuts on his wheel, and he loses his footing and just spins around and around on the inside of the wheel. I started to think about this idea, and where else it's been used in science fiction that I like, and naturally I thought big, and at 6000 miles wide, they don't come bigger than a Halo ring. As cool as I thought the idea of the Halo rings was, I never really thought about things like gravity, but this is very probably how Halo has gravity, Halo, a franchise with hollow planets and faster than light travel, and yet the Halo rings themselves are pretty easy to understand, or at least their gravity. For the unaware, a Halo is a machine built by an ancient race called the Forerunners in the final days of a war with a parasite called the flood, realising they couldn't beat the flood, they decided to kill it's food and starve it to death, by annihilating every living thing in the galaxy with sufficient biomass to feed the parasite. This was the function of the Halo's, when fired they would kill everything in their effective range. I am way off topic, this was supposed to be a random brief post about gravity rings, but the Halo universe is huge, and there's so much fun to be had exploring the history of the universe, but for now, gravity rings, they're cool.