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The book Seveneves has a lot of vivid descriptions of futuristic orbital mechanics solutions.

It's a bit of a heavy read emotionally but it's very rare to find hard sci-fi of that quality.

I actually don't think the later orbital development makes any sense at all. Assuming you could even build it, and I think that's doubtful, it's almost certain to get trashed along large enough time spans, and the problems it would cause clearly outweigh any benefits. See Chasm City by Alastair Reynolds for a modification of physics that allows such structures but shows why it's a bad idea anyway. Does the same thing for mind uploading, in case you are interested.

Currently reading this and thought the same. Lots of scenarios I hadn't considered, and fun to see IRL work in the same vein.

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