  We study simple, knotted and linked torus windings that are made of tubes of
finite thickness. Knots which have the shortest rope length are often denoted
ideal structures. Conventionally, the ideal structure are found by rope
shortening routines. It is shown that alternatively they can be directly
determined as maximally rotated structures. In many cases these structures are
also zero-twist structures i.e. structures that neither rotate one or the other
way under strain. We use this principle to implement rapid numerical
calculations of the ideal structures and subsequently quantify them by their
aspect ratio. The results are compared with the aspect ratios of biological
torus molecules.
