Before we understand this artifact, we must understand its history. Or rather, the spacefaring history of its creators.

As a summary, the Pak are a race of primatoids from a moon orbiting a gas giant. They have a three-stage life cycle, with infants, fertile adult "Breeders", and a special stage known as the "Protector".

Pak Breeders are sexually mature, unintelligent and sub-sentient primatoids. Towards the end of their reproductive life (about 42 years), Pak Breeders acquire a craving for a root containing a symbiotic virus that triggers the physical and intellectual transformation to the Protector stage where sexual characteristics disappear. The transformation to a Protector takes perhaps a week to complete, during which time the Pak is in a coma.

Pak Protectors are highly sensitive to the smell of their close relatives and 'weed out' those that smell wrong, which may indicate a potentially dangerous mutation and thus protect their own bloodline. This weeding also suppresses positive mutations, essentially halting Pak evolution.

Protectors are fully sapient, and are far more physically strong and intellectually intelligent than equines, possessing "diamond like" clarity of thought. However, this superior intelligence only serves a Pak Protector's hard-wired instincts to protect its bloodline at any costs, including resorting to war, mass murder, or genocide. Their major source of nutrition is the Tree-of-Life, even periodically, to maintain the virus in its body, without which the Protector will weaken and die. A Protector can survive indefinitely on Tree-of-Life root, although it can eat other types of food provided Tree-of-Life root is a regular part of its diet.

Pak technology and society - with the most intelligent Protectors on top - quickly developed to protect and advance the interests of their bloodline, with treachery and alliances of convenience becoming the norm in inter-bloodline relations.

Because of this, since before the start of their recorded history some four million standard years ago, Pak society has been trapped in the same form. Bloodlines continually struggle and war for advantage. Their constant wars lead to cycles of devastation on their world, with equivalent cycles of rebuilding and repopulating their world to the point where the cycle begins again. Obviously this state of affairs has greatly slowed their rate of increase, in terms of both numbers and technology.

The Pak have mounted many small slower than light expeditions to nearby star systems over different civilizational cycles, but perhaps fortunately they cannot easily colonize other habitable planets as they need an environment with large quantities of heavy metals to keep alive the virus that initiates and maintains the Protector transformation.

Because of this, evolution occurs in the resulting colonists once the Protectors die off, leading to races such as the Red Martians, Orovars, Okars, First Born, Thither, Ma-Gongi, Sorn, and Hrossa on Barsoom (Mars) (Though these were modified slightly by the Qu to be better adapted to the Martian ecology from the outset, explaining their ovivaporous reproductive habits)

However, the Pak, for all their shortcomings, proved to be excellent engineers, and so created their own colony world.

Which brings us to the Ring.

Imagine a giant ring, a million miles wide, with a radius of one Equis orbit and a circumference of some 600 million miles, orbiting around a star. The Ring is far enough out that the heat is comfortable for life to live on. It spins to mimic gravity, and has walls a thousand miles high to keep the air from spilling off its sides. Such a ring would have an inhabitable surface area equal to almost three million planets the size of the Equis. Plates surrounding the star give the Ring's various parts a day/night cycle, and the Ring itself contains a vast array of environments, ranging from deep oceans to soaring mountain ranges.

This was built during the heyday of Pak exploration, before the combined efforts of the Qu and the Forerunners of the Covenant Faith scattered the colonies (and in the case of the Qu, "modified" them into an array of non-sapient species).

The Ring contains the sapient and non-sapient descendants of the Pak colonists, evolved to fill various niches, ranging from small baboon-like scavengers to grass-eating giants.

This artificial world has been classified as a Type 4 Nursery World (a planet with advanced sapient species on the verge of spaceflight)