Dyson Sphere "real" energy production

[OnyxAbussos]

Something I ponder on occasion:

What should the energy rating for a Dyson Sphere "really" be? Obviously the game needs it to make the number it does so it doesnt murder the game.

But like... if we were trying to be "realistic" in its in-game energy value, what would you out it at? Or like what order of magnitude?

Not proposing we change it. Just curious where you'd put the number.

 

[InvisibleBison]

A realistic Dyson sphere would provide essentially unlimited energy. Rather than have it give an amount of energy credits, I'd say it should simply reduce all expenditures of energy to zero.

 

[OnyxAbussos]

A realistic Dyson sphere would provide essentially unlimited energy. Rather than have it give an amount of energy credits, I'd say it should simply reduce all expenditures of energy to zero.

Even in the Galactic Market?

 

[InvisibleBison]

Even in the Galactic Market?

Yes, even in the Galactic Market. If we assume that a mining station harvesting a star represents a square collection of 100% efficient solar panels 1000 km on a side orbiting 1 million km out from the star, then the station is collecting 0.0000028% of the star's energy output. Stars typically have deposits of between 2 and 5 energy, so a Dyson sphere would produce between 72,266,600 and 180,666,500 energy each month - and the assumptions I made to arrive at those numbers are very favorable to the mining station, so it's quite possible the Dyson Sphere would be orders of magnitude more productive than that!

 

[Ryika]

Let's be honest, the moment someone builds a dyson sphere, energy credits as a currency are probably done for.
It's currency inflation on an unfathomable scale.

 

[Tim_Ward]

Conservatively, a dyson sphere could produce many trillions of times more energy than our current society consumes. If we take the energy output of a early space age primitives as comparable to modern earth, which I think is about 10-20 per month based on having two technician jobs, then a dyson sphere should produce somewhere between trillions and quadrillions of energy credits a month.

So, probably more in a single month than has ever been produced by every player and AI empire in every game of Stellaris that has ever been played.

Oh, and that's just for an sun like star. More luminous stars could produce more.

tbf the alloy requirements are way too low as well.

 

[emattosalves]

That last part of the low alloy requirements rely bother me.... At VERY generous scenario, you need at least mine one entire planet for the alloys needed to make a very thin dyson sphere. In the game, the planets give you minerals as long as you play, but realistic for me, you have to consume all usefull minerals from at least a dozen planets to be able to THINK in build one Dyson!

 

[mial42]

 

[Jamaican Castle]

Remember, the energy credit value is profit, not income. Dyson spheres are just really insanely expensive to run!

 

[The Founder]

Something I ponder on occasion:

What should the energy rating for a Dyson Sphere "really" be? Obviously the game needs it to make the number it does so it doesnt murder the game.

But like... if we were trying to be "realistic" in its in-game energy value, what would you out it at? Or like what order of magnitude?

Not proposing we change it. Just curious where you'd put the number.

In the real world?
A actually dyson sphere would require more energy to build then you could even get out of it. Because you need several solar systems worth of mass.
A dyson swarm is feasible.

The suns energy output is estimaed to be around 384.6 yottawatts (3.846 × 1026 watts).
In 1998 humanity used 12 terrawatt. What we can get is about 33 Trillion times that.
However, I would expect a lot having to be emitted as heat/IR radiation.

 

[Incompetent]

I think the point of the Dyson sphere as a concept (in general, not specifically the Stellaris implementation) is more of a thought experiment to understand the immensity of even a single medium-sized star compared to anything we have harnessed up to this point on Earth. It doesn't do anything especially clever, it's basically just a huge array of solar panels. You then have to consider the amount of material involved in building it, which may be a challenge even if you can rearrange all the matter in the star system (since most of it is hydrogen/helium, only a small amount is good building materials like carbon, iron and silicon). It's not necessarily a lot of energy from the perspective of some galactic-scale entity, since galaxies have billions of stars and other stuff (our galaxy is estimated at around a trillion solar masses). If you had already colonized a large part of a galaxy, the only advantage a Dyson sphere would give compared to just making the same amount of solar panels over numerous stars (and thus having fewer constraints on locally available material) is that the Dyson sphere concentrates a lot of usable energy in one place, e.g. if you want to build a really big computer without too much ping between opposite corners of the computer.

I don't think you can really convey all these orders of magnitude in a typical 4X game though, and if you tried, you'd end up making the game into more like Cookie Clicker.

 

[OwlOfSpace]

I have said it on other thread, but a proper Fully Cased Dyson Sphere should have been very difficult and long process (like several decades at minimum, only at specific star) of a Wonder Victory.

The more realistic version, Dyson Swarm (mentioned above) should have been the one buildable around any star for variable income/build cost.

 

[Surimi]

I think the point of the Dyson sphere as a concept (in general, not specifically the Stellaris implementation) is more of a thought experiment to understand the immensity of even a single medium-sized star compared to anything we have harnessed up to this point on Earth. It doesn't do anything especially clever, it's basically just a huge array of solar panels. You then have to consider the amount of material involved in building it, which may be a challenge even if you can rearrange all the matter in the star system (since most of it is hydrogen/helium, only a small amount is good building materials like carbon, iron and silicon).

The thing is, if you were realistically thinking about building a dyson sphere, you'd be looking at a swarm of satellites made of giant but extremely thin solar panels. You could make enough of those to effectively collect most or all of our suns output by deconstructing the planet mercury.

And sure, most of the matter in the solar system is hydrogen and helium, but that still leaves an unbelievably giant amount of usable heavier elements. Consider that while only 2% of the mass of the sun is made of heavier elements, the sun accounts for 99.8% of all the mass in the solar system, so lifting matter from the sun would be a very convenient way to obtain the mass required to build megastructures (it would also prolong the lifespan of the sun, if that was ever a consideration).

 

[aroddo]

With the energy of a sun at your disposal you could power projects that are theoretically possible but too costly to be practical otherwise.
For example: create matter.

Realistically you'd use solar engines to create more solar engines to create a Dyson sphere to create everything.

 

[Pancakelord]

The thing is, if you were realistically thinking about building a dyson sphere, you'd be looking at a swarm of satellites made of giant but extremely thin solar panels. You could make enough of those to effectively collect most or all of our suns output by deconstructing the planet mercury.

You'd also need something like a moon's worth of dumb/metalic mass to replace them whenever the sun farts out a solar flare and cooks several arcs worth of satellites + the energy to clean that slag up (assuming that trillions of satellites shotgunning out of their orbits don't cause Kessler syndrome or shower the rest of a systems infrastructure in fragments) + any collector electronics (the satellites may be dumb mirrors, in an orbit held in place by gravity and solar wind pressure, but you do still need some logic to orient them properly and beam or focus that power to solar collectors or a battery-moon, somewhere.

Side note, I remember reading an article a few months back that suggested our sun is an uncommonly stable specimen of its stellar class, emitting far fewer flares than what models would assume it to, rather than a typical one.

People rarely talk about solar flares - or even just the possible ablative effects of charged solar wind/particles (which would be more pronounced nearer a star) and ultra high energy cosmic radiation - when discussing Dyson spheres and other megastructures irl, but I dare say they'd last a lot less time, and require a lot more spare parts, than futurists would like us all to believe.

 

[SaintD]

A Dyson Sphere project is pointless, insofar that anyone who can actually build one already doesn't need it. It's just style points. You can relocate the mass of a few entire star systems across interstellar distances in a reasonable time frame. You already generate a pretty arbitrary amount of energy defined as 'as much as I need to do whatever I want'.

And then you build the thing and start harvesting all that energy, here's the bit no-one ever bothers thinking about....how are you gonna use it? It's practically useless because you'd have to build ridiculous battery arrays to store energy and move it where you actually needed it. For all the efficiency of encasing a star to collect its entire energy output, the fact that everything that needs energy is interstellar distances away makes the whole endeavour massively inefficient. It sucks.

A dyson sphere only makes sense as the power plant, a component of, another absolutely absurd megastructure, not as a thing just on its own.

 

[klopkr]

How would one ship the energy from a dyson sphere to the rest of the galaxy?

 

[Mastikator]

A real dyson sphere would take hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions of years and use up more material than entire gas giants are composed of.

I'd put it at 2 million energy production per month because that is the maximum amount of energy you can in theory store. An space empire that can harness the entire energy of a star wouldn't store it, the storage is a star anyway and they last for billions of years.

How would one ship the energy from a dyson sphere to the rest of the galaxy?

Focused beams of light pointed at various stars across the galaxy where it is collected and split by other mega structures, each split beam then powers whatever.

 

[firenze419]

Dyson Sphere in itself is unrealistic. I mean, how could you even put a static sphere around a moving object?

Dyson Swarms might be doable, if they were all in orbit and you could keep them from crashing into each other.

But that's basically just a bunch of solar panels so you get as much or as little energy as you need.

 

[SaintD]

Focused beams of light pointed at various stars across the galaxy where it is collected and split by other mega structures, each split beam then powers whatever.

Beam divergence says 'hell no'. And if you could somehow make such obscenely precise beams of such horrifying power, you have the two problems of A) Actually stopping the beam so you can use it, and B) Creating a galactic web of lines that can effortlessly slice planets in half and would take decades to millenia to stop once the source is turned off is the act of an absolute madman when you can just....build a power plant.