First reaction: No! No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, NO!
Second reaction: Wait, define “uniformly”. We may be using that word differently.
The article talks about increased abundances of particles of a particular size, it doesn’t say its made all the same size.
The paper also talks about uppper und lower size limits. This suggests logically an inbetween range of sizes.
And then it also says:
Frequent collisions between large ring
particles in this dynamically active region likely fragment the larger
particles into more numerous smaller ones.
[quote=“TARS, post:203, topic:582”]
The article talks about increased abundances of particles of a particular size, it doesn’t say its made all the same size.[/quote]
Nor should it be taken that anyone else is saying that each ring segment is made up of particles of all of the same size. There is a smooth distribution of sizes in each region. That distribution isn’t uniform (the same number of particles of all sizes in the stated range). I don’t know what you mean by “the particle sizes vary somewhat uniformly”, though. That’s a technically true statement, but it can be applied to a huge number of very differently looking size distributions.
This was part of the post I was originally replying to:
their really isn’t any transition in size between rocks. their are transitions between each ring
So, understand what a power law distribution implies: The number of particles of radius r varies as r-q, where our best estimates of q based on measurements from Cassini, Voyager, and from ground-based asteroid occultion observations vary between 2.75 and 3.5 over the spawn of Saturn’s rings.
This is what that distribution looks like:
The blue line is q = 3.5, while the green line is q = 2.75. This is plotted in steps of 1 mm. Note that these values aren’t normalized to the absolute number of particles. Instead, they’re normalized to a radius of 1.0 m. The lines tell you how many particles there are with a radius of r m for every rock with a radius of 1.0 m. As we don’t know how many rocks there are with a radius of 1.0 m, it’s just the relative values that are important.
What this chart is telling us is that, depending on where you are in the rings, for every single basketball sized particle there are between 140 and 530 softball sized particles.
For every single beach ball sized particle, there are between 200 and 900 softball sized particles, but only between 1.5 and 1.7 basketball sized particles.
For every single desk-sized chunk of rock, there are between 600 and 3200 softball sized chunks, but only between 3 and 4 beach ball sized ones.
And for every Smart car sized ‘asteroid’ you’d find, you’ll have to fly past between 4400 and 42,000 softball sized particles, or between 20 and 50 beach ball sized rocks, or between 8 and 13 desk sized boulders.
There are house sized rocks in those rings, yes, but for every single one of them, there will be hundreds of car sized boulders, and millions of snowballs.
Kimmo posted an image of the Bomber next to one of the in ring “roids” a while back. It should help give an indication of scale. Density is another discussion, (as you’re already engaged in) but as you can see the planetary rings as portrayed in the rings video aren’t very densely packed, but they aren’t small either.
For reference, the bomber is roughly 10m in length. (I also don’t think that’s the largest “ring debris” that can be seen.
https://twitter.com/inovae_kimmo/status/532369901013708800
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This screenshot is one of the most beautiful I’ve seen (because it gives a lot of informations :)).
The planet seems to not be perfectly spherical. Is this a realistic result of gravity effect or just a visual effect ?
Oh man, how did I miss that picture until now?!?
I think knowing the size of those rocks in the rings video relative to an average ship would have made it much more impactful, because that screen shot makes a hell of an impact. But c’est la vie.
So, we’re looking at a radius of about 15 metres for that ring rock there. And there seem to be plenty more at similar scales. Assuming the power law distributions discussed above (because why not?), we should expect to find between 20 and 45 ring rocks the same size of that ship for every single one the size it’s flying over, and between 300,000 and 10 million basketball sized bits.
Obviously, the smaller end of the scale isn’t going to match up to current models, but when paired with the ring video the distribution seems both accurate to within reason, while still leaning more toward favouring game scale variety.
In other words… SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
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That would most likely be due to the FOV camera setting used in engine.
A variable that is easily changed.
HOW did i not see that??? that’s a beautiful screen, worthy of desktop status. And it’s a rare thing to see ships in with the environments… you should release more screens like this! Just to feed my curiosity, how many properly textured, finished ships do you currently have in engine?
Apparently!
Because you are talking about it here;
ring system that is 200 times larger than that around Saturn.
message from Universe to I-Novae : “the only boundary is your imagination”
THIS is rings !" 
Universe 1 : 0 I-Novae Studio
I sooo ninja’d you guys in the Awesomes thread.
Super Saturn there might be an excellent opportunity to show off that engine tech. Can the engine handle rings with a 120 million km diameter?
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Can the engine handle rings with a 120 AU diameter? That’s what’s needed to deal with a huge system still in its early stages of formation, right? I’d love to fly into a forming system that was just chock full of gas, dust, debris, planetesimals and such.
It would be interesting if the engine worked that way - where all systems were just disks in some stage of coalescing larger bodies - and of remaining as debris inside the Roche limit.
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I’ll have to try that… hmmm, next screenshot perhaps…
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That won’t work out of the box. The engine should be able to handle it, but some parameters such as the depth of the data structure ( a tree ) handling the ring was adjusted for saturn-type ring dimensions. And it’s hard coded. So I’d need to move these params to a config file before we can do the test 
But yeah, other than that, it should work.
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That works once the disk coalesces. Before then, younger systems will have spheroidal shapes of varying oblateness. But yeah, disks with the gaps where protoplanets are would be a really cool extension of that.
Astronomical disks are basically all treated the same in the literature, anyway. Some are hot, some are cold, some are optically thick, and some are optically thin, but from a structural point of view they’re all envisioned the same. So, a black hole’s accretion disk should look like the Super Saturn’s ring system, only without the gaps in the rings. It’d have a hot atmosphere instead of a cold atmosphere, so it’d glow and whatnot, or it might be translucent, but it’s all the same thing at the most basic level.