The virtuality is a bubble dimension, with one port. In the 'Scoop' (nice term, mind if I steal it?) resides everything physical or seperate, that needs/wants to remain physical, and that wants to interact with the virtuality with high bandwidth FTL communication. Everything from high frequency, planck-second stock trades to interaction with the long dead or shared dreams depends on this information bandwidth. Even your post-physical free energy scenarios would also need to be within that golden minute for meaningful interaction and a physical structure would far easier to anchor to than some gravitational arrangement? As a result of the economic, strategic and cultural significance of the golden minute, development exploded at the expense of a more even, and gradual progression throughout the rest of the Ark....And wild barycenter wouldn't really be a problem if- Beyond the ring (which is a roughly 15,000km thick) none-equatorial regions of the scoop weren't just tens/hundreds of meters thick (ie millions fold reduction in mass)- The ring wasn't strong enough to withstand sheer forces in excess of the wobble created by two binary g type stars orbiting at .1 au (ie also millions of fold the amount of stress created by the actual structure)I guess it's my fault for not really explaining in the above, but most of these ideas came up during the design process, "what if's" that gave the structure it's own identity.Anyway, I'm working/thinking about the Kacylis, the homeworld to the Arkaedians antagonist - maybe an old, thin, ring encapsulating a matrioshka brain within a blue-hypergiant system? - patiently awaiting a supernova for some long speculated, civilisational transformation...