We all know the pictures of the astronauts on the ISS floating around. We also suspect that a lack of gravity is bad for the body as the muscles go weak and such.
Why don’t spaceships just rotate to cause the effect of artificial gravity through centrifugal forces?
Could you not solve the spinning-ring-friction problem via magnets? The same way maglev trains work.
It doesn’t change that this isn’t really a great idea for the ISS, but that’s an obvious solution to the problem of having a static central core.
This is already quite a bit beyond where I have any definite knowledge, but I guess if you had a core completely separated by magnets that might work, but you’d still need points of connection for people who docked to join the actual ring from.
If you did that, the core would also need its own propulsion system to spin down and spin up so that anyone docking could actually go out into the ring.
It’s worth noting here, too, that the inner core would need to spin like crazy fast for a small station to have anywhere close to 1G in the ring, so that would be its own fun thing in the core.