In a game about stories, not everything can / should be balanced. When everything is balanced, it's getting boring after some time, and that's something that nobody wants.
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Space expantion does not need to be planetary
- Thread starter Rhylsaldar
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Is that a common name for either of those things? Genuinely curious here, as I've certainly never heard it used to refer to either (usually the separation between light and dark is called the "terminator," although I recognize why that might be an unsuitable term in a scifi game), but I can hardly claim to have read all science fiction. I admit my first though about seeing "Ringworld" was the classic book by that name and its sequels, which is about an artificial ringworld around a star..
I'm very skeptical an actual ringworld could form naturally; it's not easy to imagine what dynamics would lead to that. Of course, it's a game, so they can use whatever they want.
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If history is anything to go by, space stations would pretty much be mandatory like shipping colonies on Earth for large galaxy-wide empires. You'd need them for shipping supplies to increase the range of your ships.I feel like a space station, especially a large one to rival the productivity of a planet, should be expensive but high-risk/reward in terms of how useful they could be. A small station acting as a major trading port would make immense amounts of money, only being slightly more expensive than colonizing a habitable world.
Culture Orbitals (3M kilometre diameter) are what Halos (10,000km diameter) want to be when they grow up big and strong
.Ringworlds (300M kilometre diameter) are what Culture Orbitals want to be when they grow up big and strong...
QFT
Or more likely,in-game terms. small, medium and large ringworldsCulture Orbitals (3M kilometre diameter) are what Halos (10,000km diameter) want to be when they grow up big and strong
Ringworlds (300M kilometre diameter) are what Culture Orbitals want to be when they grow up big and strong...
QFT
You all are discussing and talking about ringworlds and sphereworlds, but what about spheresystems? Okay, imagine a whole solar system that's engulfed by a huge sphere. This sphere, on the outside, has massive defenses pointing to everything to protect the inside. The inside has habitats, factories, hangars, whatever you may need for your people / for your empire. The energy for that thing would primarily be taken from the sun(s), because when you can build a spheresystem you are surely able to use a sun's whole energy output. And the whole thing is even big enough to store samples (either people in cryo chambers, or just DNA) of every (more or less) intelligent species in the galaxy.
So, you could even build a part of this spheresystem in a way that it would be a Universal Library of Everything. Okay, it may take a few hundred / thousand years to complete a spheresystem even for very advanced empires, but when it's completed it's a safe place for everyone and everything. And then (this is really just exaggerated ^^) you could give it a warp drive
So, yes, space expansion doesn't need to be planetary, it can also be solar.
Okay, imagine a whole solar system that's engulfed by a huge sphere. This sphere, on the outside, has massive defenses pointing to everything to protect the inside. The inside has habitats, factories, hangars, whatever you may need for your people / for your empire. The energy for that thing would primarily be taken from the sun(s), because when you can build a spheresystem you are surely able to use a sun's whole energy output. And the whole thing is even big enough to store samples (either people in cryo chambers, or just DNA) of every (more or less) intelligent species in the galaxy.So, you could even build a part of this spheresystem in a way that it would be a Universal Library of Everything. Okay, it may take a few hundred / thousand years to complete a spheresystem even for very advanced empires, but when it's completed it's a safe place for everyone and everything. And then (this is really just exaggerated ^^) you could give it a warp drive
So, yes, space expansion doesn't need to be planetary, it can also be solar.
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That's no different from a solid Dyson sphere (or shell) though, save that it presumably has a larger radius than the usual ones imagined.
They're not very efficient as habitats unless you have genuine artificial gravity, because spinning them (which works for ringworlds & such to simulate gravity) just means that everything inside will want to collect along the equator
. The material required to build one is on the order of a stellar mass too, so you basically need to turn an entire solar system into building materials in order to build one of these in another star system (!).At this point, you likely don't need the pitiful output of a star for anything other than the look of the thing. Just build dyson spheres out in deep space and light them with artificial light sources instead of stars
...Funnily enough, ringworlds and Dyson spheres need to have something like engines to remain in a stable position relative to their star. You do not want a ringworld colliding with its star after all
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Depends on:
- How late in the tech tree they show up: if they're late enough and expensive enough they'll just end up being one of those things you can only ever build when you've pretty much won anyway, if they're viable earlier, then they could potentially provide such advantage that the entire game would be divided into two phases: pre and post ringworld, and your entire pre- strategy is based around getting to the post- phase as quickly as possible.
- If they show in the tech tree at all; it is possible that ringworld's only exist in fallen empires and the only way to use one yourself is to somehow evict them.
- Depends on what they mean by ringworld: A Banks Orbital or a Halo, uh, Halo or a full Niven style ringworld.
The thing about artificial structures is that they are inherently pretty small. Terraforming a planet can actually be easier. All you'd have to do to get Mars started is let off some nukes at the poles and you're most of the way there. That's what we could do with current technology, and compared to making a space station with space equivalent to Mars' surface, it would be so much incredibly cheaper that to compare it is like comparing an ant to the sun.
Or maybe they're ringworlds from Larry Niven's Ringworld.
Probably they'll shun realism in this regard and a ringworld will only be able to hold the population of like a dozen earths, making it a great find but not a game-winner. Or perhaps it really will have thousands of tiles (though that seems unlikely purely from a technical standpoint) and simply will have no deposits, meaning that it won't produce any resources until you coat the ring in useful buildings, which would offset the benefit by a massive cost. It's still a huge windfall, but finding them is probably going to be rare, and I would imagine that ones created by fallen empires will have lots of unusable tiles that need to be cleared, while ones you create yourself would be massively expensive. Thus the cost need not necessarily be lower than that of taking a bunch of worlds anyway.
Ringworlds are already system-sized, they go around the sun. The sphere you're talking about is called a dyson sphere. A solid sphere isn't actually physically viable with any known or theorized material, but a dyson cloud is.
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Just putting them in a stable solar orbit wouldn't work?Funnily enough, ringworlds and Dyson spheres need to have something like engines to remain in a stable position relative to their star. You do not want a ringworld colliding with its star after all
Being able to sustain a long term industrial and cultural presence in orbit will pretty much be a prerequisite to interstellar travel; your ships have to be able to reliably maintain a survivable biosphere, after all. However, the planet-focused gameplay we've seen demonstrated so far argues that they're going to largely ignore the irrelevance of planets once a species has developed interstellar travel and the abililty to build habitats in vacuum.
I like the concept of space nomads, who have millions and billions of their population on their carrier ships, which also serve as their military carriers.
The immobility of a planet or even an O'Neil or ringworld construct, is strategically limiting for a civilization that is concerned about mastering warfare.
The Culture's post scarcity and ship Minds is what allowed it to go semi nomadic. And Heroic Age used instantaneously telepathic communication and psionic powers greater than that produced by equivalent technology spaceships, to make some space nomads that didn't live on planets or habitats.
So it would be interesting to see it done on a lower tech level, in the beginning. Space pirates are too parasitic, so their logistics are still stuck on somebody else's schedule. Colonization ships want to go to a planet, rather than exist statically between the black.
Insurance. For most big investments, people should have fail safes. And in post scarcity economies, it's not like there's a reason to limit your resource usage.
The immobility of a planet or even an O'Neil or ringworld construct, is strategically limiting for a civilization that is concerned about mastering warfare.
The Culture's post scarcity and ship Minds is what allowed it to go semi nomadic. And Heroic Age used instantaneously telepathic communication and psionic powers greater than that produced by equivalent technology spaceships, to make some space nomads that didn't live on planets or habitats.
So it would be interesting to see it done on a lower tech level, in the beginning. Space pirates are too parasitic, so their logistics are still stuck on somebody else's schedule. Colonization ships want to go to a planet, rather than exist statically between the black.
Insurance. For most big investments, people should have fail safes. And in post scarcity economies, it's not like there's a reason to limit your resource usage.
Nope. Orbits work because they balance the inertia of the orbiting objects against the centripetal force of gravity (or whatever is maintaining the orbit*). Since a ringworld/Dyson sphere will basically cover the entire orbit, it's not maintaining that balance.
Consider a planet in orbit; it's being pulled towards the sun** by gravity; that's the force that causes its path to bend into an orbit (you can compare it to "falling" towards the sun, but never hitting, because its own momentum causes it to miss). Now consider a point on a ringworld: it also experiences gravity pulling it towards the sun. However, for every point on the ringworld, there is a point directly opposite on the other side of the sun which is also being pulled towards the sun, but since they are on opposite sides of the sun, the force acts in the other direction. The result is we have no net force acting of gravity acting on the ringworld as a whole, since every point is exactly cancelled*** by a different point. So there's nothing to sustain the orbit.
*For instance, you get a similar dynamic if you take a ball on a string and spin it around your head; here the tension of the string is acting the same as gravity would for a planet in orbit.
**Technically the center of mass of the system, but that's essentially the sun.
***I've assumed a circular orbit for simplicity, but making it elliptical makes the math messier without making it any more stable.
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Erm it should still hold an orbit as long as it's spinning around the star, it'll even negate its own weight and reduce stress on the structure if it's spinning at the right speed.
Space Empires has been implementing it for over 15 years now.
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That's what I wanted to say xD So, I simply pressed the agree button. Generally, it seems that the Space Empires series has many little ideas that could be nice to see in Stellaris as well.
Such as all kinds of planetary (tectonic bomb) and solar destruction (black hole generator, nebula maker), and forming asteroids into planets xD
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Haha, I didn't even know that was a game until you mentioned it ;p
well apart from Space Empires I don't see other Strategy games implementing this at least not any good strategy games ;o
And nothing to perturb it either.
Without orbital mechanics, and hence some angular momentum, the pull of the primary's gravity would have to be counteracted by the rigidity of the ring, else the whole thing would just crumple in towards the star. If everything is in orbit, joining the sections up doesn't change whether anything falls in or flies away, because it's all in "free fall". The hard part is imparting enough spin to generate a felt ~1G (for human-habitable) of pseudo-gravity and not having the thing tear itself apart at a "goldilocks zone" orbital radius.
For stellar orbit circumference ringworlds at least. Dyson spheres are an order of magnitude or two more challenging.
That kind of mega-engineering, though, is essentially a vanity project for an Ur-civilisation. "Practical" space habitats don't have to be nearly so large and elaborate.
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There's always something to perturb it. It just doesn't come from the star-ringworld interaction, but they aren't the only things in the universe. And since there is no net force from the star on the ring/sphere (do a simple Gauss Law for gravity argument to convince yourself, if needed), that's not going to keep it in the same location relevant to the star when it does inevitably get perturbed. If nothing else, there's the motion of the star itself.
Yes, it will continue to spin at essentially the same rate, but there's nothing to keep the actual physical ring itself from drifting. This would be fine if you were a ringworld or sphere in empty space, but presumably you are around a star, and would like to keep your ringworld at more or less the same distance from that star (not to mention tidal forces adding stress if the star isn't in the exact center of the ring/sphere).
Which is why the subthread that began this long diggression (this will be my last post on the topic, I promise!) mentioned that you'd need something (e.g. thrusters) on the ringworld to keep its "orbit" stable (as, indeed Niven added in one of his sequels when someone pointed out that the ringworld would be unstable.
And I agree ringworlds/Dyson spheres are mostly impractical; I expect they are included in the game for the "coolness" factor.
Yes, it will continue to spin at essentially the same rate, but there's nothing to keep the actual physical ring itself from drifting. This would be fine if you were a ringworld or sphere in empty space, but presumably you are around a star, and would like to keep your ringworld at more or less the same distance from that star (not to mention tidal forces adding stress if the star isn't in the exact center of the ring/sphere).
Which is why the subthread that began this long diggression (this will be my last post on the topic, I promise!) mentioned that you'd need something (e.g. thrusters) on the ringworld to keep its "orbit" stable (as, indeed Niven added in one of his sequels when someone pointed out that the ringworld would be unstable.
And I agree ringworlds/Dyson spheres are mostly impractical; I expect they are included in the game for the "coolness" factor.
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Well, it's an end-game project, you need an absolutely massive amount resources to construct it, and a permanent fleet of building vessels around the star.
Though the ring world is surpassed in requirements and therefore difficulty, by the Sphere World (Ergo, the Dyson Sphere).
Or you cheat xD
Or, to make a map a little more interesting, you put in two or three Sphere Worlds in systems not connected to the rest of the galaxy. Free Dyson Spheres, Yay!
But seriously, I think in Stellaris the Dyson Spheres should still be very expensive, but they should actually be useful. In SE, they are just something to put your resources into when you have too much, and which (after years of building facilities) award you with some better production. Wow!In Stellaris, they could stop enemy fleets from flying through their system without massive damage, or they could be used as storage places, habitats, or whatever else you desire them to be.
One feature I'd like would be: Building a ringworld in a system with a pre-FTL and probably even pre-spaceflight civilization. They would just sit there and think "Wow. Those guys are building a ring around our star. I assume they didn't realise that there is someone living in this system!!!"