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Gamasutra is offering an excerpt from Halo Effect: An Unauthorized Look at the Most Successful Video Game of All Time, a book featuring a collection of essays examining the Halo phenomenon from a variety of angles. Gamasutra's excerpt attempts to unravel the science behind the massive Halo structure itself.

A 5,000 kilometer radius would yield a circumference of roughly 31,400 kilometers. If the Halos had a width-to-radius ratio similar to that of Niven’s Ringworld, they would be approximately 5.37 kilometers wide. They are significantly wider, though, at 320 kilometers. The Halos, then, would have a surface area of 10 million square kilometers— slightly larger than the surface area of Canada, and approximately 2 percent of the surface area of Earth. Of course, since we know that there are lakes, seas, and rivers on the Halos, the livable surface area would be fractionally less.

What raw materials would it take to construct a Halo, and in what quantities? In order to determine the amount of raw materials required, and what elements may exist in the necessary abundances, we first must calculate the volume of the structure. While a Halo is proportionally wider than a Niven Ring, it is thicker in absolute measure. Niven proposed that a Ringworld be 1 kilometer thick, whereas the Halos are quite a bit sturdier at 22.3 kilometers thick. The total volume of a Halo would be roughly 224 million cubic kilometers, a bit more than 0.02 percent of the volume of Earth.

Gamasutra: Halo Science 101

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