With more physics and attention, one could produce better numbers, but as a crude ballpark (using data from wikipedia):
Surface area of the Earth: 510,072,000 km^2
Circumference of ring, if it’s placed at 1 AU: 2 * pi AU = 939,951,956 km
So, if the ring is a little over a half a kilometer in width, it has the same surface area as the Earth—and could be smaller still, if we just compare habitable area.
Not much smaller than the earth at all!
With more physics and attention, one could produce better numbers, but as a crude ballpark (using data from wikipedia):
Surface area of the Earth: 510,072,000 km^2
Circumference of ring, if it’s placed at 1 AU: 2 * pi AU = 939,951,956 km
So, if the ring is a little over a half a kilometer in width, it has the same surface area as the Earth—and could be smaller still, if we just compare habitable area.
The scale of curvature there makes it clear it’s not 1 AU in radius.
Fair enough, I suppose. But then it’s not really a ring world so much as a… what? Space station?
Yeah, pretty much. If it were bigger, I might call it a Culture orbital).