What do you mine on suns? Solar energy? Yes, it mines solar energy, in SF
The real problem with such a sphere would be the fact …
… that it turns the whole ■■■■■■■ system dark …
… because even semi-transparent dyson spheres are nonsense.
There would be need for a comoletely seperate lighting design, which means that there is no way such a thing would get implemented, unless they make a new one for it, which simply isn’t going to happen for good reasons.
Everything in space depends on the star, otherwise we would be in perpetual darkness. Even if ships had local lighting, due to the insane distances in space these would be of no use for lighting up anything beyond a few dozen meters at best!
This idea would demand a redesign. The only way to make it “believable” enough would be to not have a complete dyson sphere, and the structure far enough spread out across the star, so it would only dim the system a bit, but not cover it with complete darkness.
There. Sorry for shitting in your cereals. Personally, I like the idea for what would happen if someone decided to not take sov, but instead turn a system dark, rendering it unusable…
well… sure, overview and dscan exist, but this would take “spreadsheets in space” to a whole new level.
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It could be not full sphere, but sphere, created with stripes.
Thus, it may leave some light to the system
If it’s not complete it’s not a sphere but a construction.
Dyson Swarms, though that’s basically like a complete covering of megastations above the solar surface
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Indeed, there are good science articles on Dyson spheres around white dwarf stars, dead stars that are only about the size of earth. Brown or red dwarfs could work out too, but they are bigger.
In addition, IIRC, about half of all solar systems are binary stars. Some are even trinary or more. Don’t remember if EVE systems reflect this, but it would be possible to have a main star, and a smaller star in the same system, then build a Dyson sphere around the smaller one without affecting the system much. However, white dwarfs are ancient stars, and would have to be paired with the “right” stars to maintain such a mechanic and still make some scientific sense.
Also, this idea could be linked to another thread about interstellar cannons to power such a device. But I will leave the linking of the thread to the OP or anyone else if such an idea is interesting enough…
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Point of order, binary/trinary systems can be light-years between the component stars, rarely do you see the majestic near-stellar encounter systems where one feeds off the other
The stars that feed off each other usually lie within the orbit of Mercury or closer and would be a sight to see. Binary system, or more, stars usually orbits within AU’s of each other. When talking of light years from each other, it becomes debatable if they are even gravitationally bound to each other. Alpha Centauri is about 4 light years from earth(Alpha Centauri is a trinary system IIRC)
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Nevermind, I’m recalling something incorrectly it seems. Binary/trinary systems would be cool to see regardless.
It would be more efficient and practical to build energy collection arrays around gas giants that would be able to collect the heat that is produced by the gas giant and then convert it into usable energy.
Less material waste
Faster development
Power grid is up and running sooner
I like the idea of energy collectors buy Dyson spheres would DRASTICALLY alter the scale of the game. I mean, even if they’re 99.9999% hollow we’re still talking quadrillions of tons of material required to encapsulate an entire star. Not even the Jovians had that kind of macro-engineering technology. Few races in ANY science fiction have it. The stations we have in game now are hundreds of orders of magnitude smaller, the largest NPC stations are to a Dyson Sphere what a matchstick house is to the three gorges dam. we’re talking about a sphere so large that LIGHT ITSELF would take a quarter of an hour or more to pass from one side to the other here.
EVE deals with races that, though scattered across a small area (in galactic terms) of space, are still really class-1.5 to 2 Kardashev-- the total energy output of an entire race is is less than the total output of a single star, but more than could be harvested from a single planet neighboring a star. (a Kardeshev I civilization is about 100,000 times earth’s current energy output, and it’s an exponential scale). Given that EVE characters use fusion freely, we’re probably hovering in the middle between 1 and 2. 2 is when you have a SINGLE dyson sphere, and represents a race of power almost unseen in fiction. Thanks to Antimatter Star Trek might approach a type-2 civilization, or the Precursors from various science fiction series (the Halo Builders were probably type-2).
At type 2 you can also build things like Ringworlds that are a contiguous strip of matter occupying an entire orbital band, rather than a sphere moving along the orbit.
So if you have MULTIPLE Dyson Spheres you are entering Kardashev III status-- beings of literally unimaginable individual power and total mastery over space and time. Living Gods. Not just transhuman but transcendental, with enough power at their disposal to do things like bend spacetime to their will, build and use Tipler cylinders to travel freely, make artificial wormholes (okay so we do have jumpgates and jump drives but those rely on soft sci/fi timey wimey stuff not just getting so much energy together that its mass bends spacetime into a null fold we step across), in fact once you have more than a hundred or so, you are beyond the Kardashev scale, into Kardashev IV status. Where you have access to so much energy and mass that you can literally do anything (think the Q Continuum from Star Trek).
Getting back to Terra? a Type III civilization could build an artificial copy of the New Eden wormhole. At level IV we could build ships that could eat lunch in the Andromeda Galaxy, have dinner on Terrra and be back in Jita before bedtime. At that level war becomes unthinkable, because the SMALLEST weapons you have vaporize planets, and the largest ones you have can compact galaxies into antimatter versions of highly-charged (Reisser-Nordstrom not Schwartzschild, so they’re target-seeking to some extent, you see) black holes and launch them at each other. No culture could survive class III let alone IV status without evolving beyond war or evolving a way to keep it very strictly controlled, so either you’re fighting duels with swords again or you’re launching galaxies of antimatter at each other while taking refuge in alternate-dimension fallout shelters.
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I just combined this idea with the concept of the Interstellar Cannons thread.
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That has a lot of potential, tying all this together with Interstellar cannon, triglavian technology and abyssal deadspace.
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I believe that no race advanced enough to build one would be stupid enough to do so, because they would simply not need it. To be able to pull that off they would already need energy amounts far beyond practicality. All that energy saved by not doing it could be used plentifully otherwise.
And what would people do with all that energy they gained anyway? Create a paratron force field around their star systems to defend them from evildoers from outside?
You’re right. It does seem like a vanity project in a way. We can do it, so why not? One thing to consider is just how much energy of a star is wasted, being radiated out into the void, serving no purpose. The infinitesimal amount we get on earth has been more than enough to keep us alive for millennia. But if you could harness all that energy, it’s a daunting task to think of everything you can do with all that free energy.
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