About four years ago I mused about megastructures to space, which came to include the Lofstrom Loop. I figured it wasn't going to compete with the Starship in the long-term we're necessarily looking at. Last December, ToughSF took a look anyway. In light of the Baltimore bridge collapse... how's that looking now?
We have limited options for the Loop. A selling-point of the Loop as opposed to, say, Birch's ring is that we don't have to build it over inhabited areas. That means Loops can be built only over the oceans, blue-water. Those also need to be more-or-less equatorial, for best delta-V and ecliptic-aiming results; anyway too far north or south and we get into those hurricane-latitudes.
First problem: oceans aren't wholly devoid of human activity. We run shipping through them. Freighters are already large enough to take down a bridge in brown-water like Balto. Blue-water is getting massive; they might even get nuclear shipping. Imagine that monster knocking into a Lofstrom pillar. Leave aside if someone does this on purpose. How about on accident?
As I'm looking at the map, I'm calling that the Atlantic is offlimits. No Loop there. Just... don't. Indian and Pacific Oceans look better, though.
A South African ship (or any ship rounding that Cape) bound for India has two options of avoiding that east-west line. Luckily: that big Malagasy island already forces those choices. That landmass would appear to shield the Loop from the southwest; and, from all along the north, mission-planners can just plan ahead, we hope. We'd install this thing as far south as the storms let us; where the prevailing wind goes against our easterly trajectory, but maybe we can use ramjets (which we reuse) to assist.
On to westbound traffic running the Falkland gap, and basically all the Andes; in trade with western North America. There I suggest simply keeping such a Loop, or Loops, west of the line connecting southern Chile with California.
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