The orbitals are megastructures with artificial habitable environments orbiting stars in vast ring systems in Ian Banks Culture series. Considering how much the Culture series explores the social effects of a post-scarcity economy, it is very strange that the series downplays the non-congestional results of such habitats and overblows the significance of replicators and resurrection machines.
See also[]
- hollow asteroid/comet colonies
- Dyson sphere
- O'Neill Cylinder
- Stanford Torus