Dyson Sphere "real" energy production

[Bezborg]

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.

I always wondered this myself... Ok, unlimited energy, as in... unlimited supply? But not unlimited quantity at any one time? Or?

Also, let's say it's unlimited supply and unlimited quantity at any moment. But where? What's the range of this abundance? Just for the solar system in question? How does one transport that energy across the galaxy, and how does that impact the "unlimited" quality of it?

I'm very interested in your insights

 

[Bezborg]

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

Oh you already asked

yeah, I always thought the warp gates should have had a role there.

Tbh I always thought energy should have been seriously reworked into a capacity, not a quantity or currency

 

[Mastikator]

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.

Beam divergence is what makes it safe

 

[Bezborg]

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.

Unless we can create wormholes at will with all that energy, and send it around easily. I guess it's a serviceable sci fi idea

 

[SaintD]

Beam divergence is what makes it safe

If your giant energy beam is 'safe' it's no longer useful.

 

[Mastikator]

If your giant energy beam is 'safe' it's no longer useful.

It's only the size of several planets so you only need a medium sized mega structure to collect it locally (and then use that to fuel whatever mega-project you need a dyson sphere for in the first place)

 

[klopkr]

I wonder what a 'realistic' mega structure game would look like.

Would planets stop being relevant at the ring world tier? Does most of the galactic population live on a birch world? Is it easier to just send nukes to your enemies?

 

[Mastikator]

I wonder what a 'realistic' mega structure game would look like.

Would planets stop being relevant at the ring world tier? Does most of the galactic population live on a birch world? Is it easier to just send nukes to your enemies?

Well a ring world surface area is something around 3 million times bigger than Earth's surface area. So if only 25% of the surface of a ringworld is Earthlike and Earth has a size of 18 districts then a single ringworld segment would house 3 375 000 equivalent districts. About 6 million pops could easily fit into each segment, 24 million in the whole ringworld.
A ringworld would also have all of the material in the entire solar system (not including the sun). Jupiter and Saturn are very unhelpful because they're made of hydrogen, if we could fuse the hydrogen up to carbon then they could be used to provide the rigid structure.

 

[OwlOfSpace]

I wonder what a 'realistic' mega structure game would look like.

Would planets stop being relevant at the ring world tier? Does most of the galactic population live on a birch world? Is it easier to just send nukes to your enemies?

Don't really need Ring World for planets to stop being relevant, by the time a race can harness the incredible riches of mineral in asteroid field, they can pump up thousands if not millions of Habitat stations that make planetary life obsolete, like how living in caves is to most of us rn.

 

[ZeeHero]

Dyson spheres are fine as they are. the only change needed is better visual model options. disagree all you like, you're still wrong. just becuase you don't enjoy the game unless every expensive time consuming project is barely worth the bother, doesn't mean others will.

 

[CrazyJ]

when it comes to the issue of shipping energy(and resources in general really) it's kind of just handwaved away most of the time in the game so I honestly think that's probably the least unrealistic part of the whole thing given that gateways exist, what's stopping you from using miniaturized gateways, or if that isn't viable you could simply start shipping large numbers of rechargeable batteries around.

It'd be horribly energy inefficient, but with that kind of output you don't really have to care about efficiency. In Dyson sphere program(another favorite game of mine) that is the only real way to transport power in between systems and it really isn't very efficient, but with sufficient power production efficiency is the least of your concerns.

 

[SaintD]

I wonder what a 'realistic' mega structure game would look like.

Would planets stop being relevant at the ring world tier? Does most of the galactic population live on a birch world? Is it easier to just send nukes to your enemies?

Planets would be rendered obsolete only at the point when you're building artificial structures that are similarly capable of retaining gravity, atmosphere, and consequently a self sustaining biosphere without the need for any additional machinery or maintenance for all of those attributes. Planets are just too useful as a place to live that doesn't instantly lose all life support when you poke a hole in it, some equipment stops working, or you don't maintain it non-stop.

They would, however, become the residential and service industry zones of interstellar civilization. Heavy industry would move into space where all the resources and easy zero-g movement are. Planetary industry would likely be light and mostly for servicing local needs and providing amenities.

As time goes on, however, it would be quite likely that the planets develop into ecumenopoli, surrounded by space-based heavy industry and an ever-increasing 'suburbia' of habitats as people, depending on their class, either escape to wealthy habitats or are forced into habitat ghettoes serving as the work force for space industries.

 

[Pancakelord]

I wonder what a 'realistic' mega structure game would look like.

Would planets stop being relevant at the ring world tier? Does most of the galactic population live on a birch world? Is it easier to just send nukes to your enemies?

Planets would stop being relevant at the habitat tier - possibly even the ecumenopolis tier, if it's habitation decks go deep enough.

If you're a fusion economy and can constantly hollow out asteroids in to habitats, that's a rate of land expansion probably enough to exceed even the land requirements for (by human standards) pre-industrial birth rates (whilst retaining post-industrial family-unit sizes). You can pack a lot of these things in around a star - It'd be enough space for trillions or more people, whilst packing these in around a star also lets them benefit from solar collection via on-board hardware. No separate dedicated solar collectors needed.

Orbital farms or meat/plant/'nutri-paste' synthesis (from recycled organic compounds) factories can also account for food production.

Most megastructures are excessive - possibly even less efficient - when viewed in comparison to a habitat swarm, and would just be a way to flex on anything in the same galactic region.

But if we could build a habitat swarm, we'd have unlimited living space/districts (as it's a scalable concept), tonnes of energy and still not have to arbitrarily render all colonies in a system frozen (as the habitats can leave small holes or clear orbit paths for sunight to reach various world's). Its also be functionally uninvadable as each one is a self contained city/fort - and there could be too many to count. So gameplay balance is a thing.

 

[Archael90]

Dyson Sphere = -99,99% of all EC costs, inputs, and maintenance.
Matter decompressor = -99,99% of al mineral costs, inputs, and maintenance.
Ringworld = 13 sections - each represents a "biom" including machine and hive world bioms, ecumenopolis, gaia, and 9 "common" world types, and each secion should have 8000 districts.

 

[Aepdneds]

Well a ring world surface area is something around 3 million times bigger than Earth's surface area.

This does sound too much, the earth has a surface area of 510,000,000km^2 and its distance from the sun is 150,000,000km which does result in a circumference of 940,000,000km. In order to have 3 million times the surface of the earth the ringworld would need a width of 1,600,000km, this is more than the diameter of the sun.

 

[Archael90]

This does sound too much, the earth has a surface area of 510,000,000km^2 and its distance from the sun is 150,000,000km which does result in a circumference of 940,000,000km. In order to have 3 million times the surface of the earth the ringworld would need a width of 1,600,000km, this is more than the diameter of the sun.

Ringworld is a 1970 science fiction novel by Larry Niven, set in his Known Space universe and considered a classic of science fiction literature. Ringworld tells the story of Louis Wu and his companions on a mission to the Ringworld, a rotating wheel artificial world, an alien construct in space 186 million miles (299 million kilometres) in diameter.

Lets assume that ringworld would have hight of Earths diameter = 12742 km
So RW circumference is 299M x π x 2
And its surface will be circ. x 12742
this counts to 23,925,908,240,000 km^2
But i dont think it should have earth diameter it looks loke 30 times earths diameter.
But agree, its still not 3M times earth surface, its ONLY 1,5M times earth surface.

 

[Unseelie]

If you want to store the energy you get out of a dyson sphere, and yes, even move that energy around, you use it to make kugleblitzes.

Which uh...gives you a new use for a dyson sphere, as well. Not that it matters in Stellaris, because we have hyperlanes and jump drives, but black-hole powerplants, with each black hole dialed-in to the scale of its specific use case.

That then makes the dyson sphere, or enough of an encasing/mirroring to make the event horizon part of a hypothetical tech tree. Custom black holes are useful, in a tech paradigm that Stellaris did not take.

 

[Aepdneds]

Lets assume that ringworld would have hight of Earths diameter = 12742 km
So RW circumference is 299M x π x 2
And its surface will be circ. x 12742
this counts to 23,925,908,240,000 km^2
But i dont think it should have earth diameter it looks loke 30 times earths diameter.
But agree, its still not 3M times earth surface, its ONLY 1,5M times earth surface.

The formula for the circumeference is 2*pi*r, you used 2*pi*d, so it is half the circumference.

 

[Kapi96]

Considering energy is somehow generated by trade... who knows?

 

[Archael90]

The formula for the circumeference is 2*pi*r, you used 2*pi*d, so it is half the circumference.

Agree, my mistake, but its still 750k (instead of 1,5M) more space than on earth.
We can add here another factor that is oceans that covers 70% earth surface, which leaves only 30% surface to development. On RW on the other hand we would change this ratio, and makes 60% land, and 40% oceans, or even 90% land with large amount of rivers and lakes and 10% oceans, which will increase our surface 2 or 3 times to 1,5M x of earth surface. Which is huge.
Assuming earth in stellaris has 16 sectors (its something between 16-18 iirc, so smallest RW should have 12M sectors, assuming each RW sector is 10x normal planet sector - maybe 12 sections of 100k sectors each. Its funcionally unlimitted in stellaris terms.