Dressians, Tropical Grassmannians, and Their Rays

The Dressian Dr(k,n) parametrizes all tropical linear spaces, and it carries a natural fan structure as a subfan of the secondaryfan of the hypersimplex \Delta(k,n). We explore the combinatorics of the rays of Dr(k,n), that is, the most degenerate tropical planes, for arbitrary k and n. This is related to a new rigidity concept for configurations of n-k points in the tropical (k-1)-torus. Additional conditions are given for k=3. On the way, we compute the entire fan Dr(3,8).