Alternate winning condition:Dyson sphere

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muxec
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Alternate winning condition:Dyson sphere

#1 Post by muxec »

http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Dyson_sphere . Dyson sphere would be an alternate way of winning the game... In should probably start from stellar ring and than be expanded... Or it may also be implemented in the game in different way.

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#2 Post by Satyagraha »

:shock:

if it weren´t written in Science, i´d have said it´s too unrealistic to be implemented ^^ maye not as a win condition, but it would make a good wonder.

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#3 Post by LithiumMongoose »

If it's good enough for Star Trek it's good enough for Free Orion.

:p

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Geoff the Medio
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#4 Post by Geoff the Medio »

I've mentioned this a few times in other threads. It's a fun idea I'd like to see included. Probably not a victory condition though...

"Mr. President, the Valarian Star Empire has constructed a shell of metal around the star in the Draelock system!"

"Well, I guess we'd better surrender then. Too bad, since we were about to transcend this plane of existance and simultaneously wipe out their homeworld with our massive unstoppable fleets. You win some, you lose some, I guess."

(Granted, this makes about as much sense as the Civ-win for launching the spaceship...)



I'd also like to bring the "Startree" from Dan Simmons' Rise of Endymion to everyone's attention. Rather than a shell of metal or a fleet of independent sun-gathering sattelites, the Startree was a giant sphere of... well... tree, around a star. Books in that series also had starships that were essentially trees in space (see here: viewtopic.php?t=751 )


LithiumMongoose wrote:If it's good enough for Star Trek it's good enough for Free Orion.
Having your empire believe in the Prime Directive might be an interesting drawback... you'd be barred from settling any planet with pre-FTL natives.

I don't know about William Shatner acting though...

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Prime directive!

#5 Post by Manilla Moxy »

aha! that is a great idea - you could have an option for races, and one is a prime directive thing and if you click it you can't settle on planets with natives, but because you do have the directive you get much less revolts pon your planets or your ppl cooperate more instead of always fighting.


I got an idea too!!! Yuo could win by having to explore each system to find certain things, then you would need a mid level tech to discover the secret item. Once you make the discovery, something happens in a certain system, so you have to build a ship and take it there!!!!

Like this!! You keep scouting the entire galaxy, until you find the 5 key codes. You then discover the technology for eternity. When that happens, a random area on the map is choosen and you have to send a colony ship to it. You could have monsters or evil races or allies guarding it or enemies guarding it!
It's cool man!

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#6 Post by PowerCrazy »

I want Dyson spheres as well. I'm not sure hwo we would balance them, or make them "realistic" because the whole concept of them is why it would interesting to have them anyway. And balancing 10^13 population units in one system....shit....

But I love the idea of them.
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#7 Post by muxec »

It could be another very hard to implement way. Civs star with either starlifting, Dyson sphere or hyper drive and these are mutually exclusive. One race conquers space, other conquers it's own system, third develops round the start... And one year they start to interact.

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#8 Post by StratCaster »

I think a Dyson sphere would be a great idea. Not as a way to win, but just as a tech upgrade. It would give those planets huge production bonuses. And of course it would take forever to build..but it would obviously be a late stage tech or discovery.

Nothing would have to change in the any screen, except for an added layer of protection when an enemy fleet is in the solar system. They would't be able to get through to the planets unless they got through the sphere. Like having a planetary shield around your solor system.

Trade wouldn't be effected since the trading ships would have proper clearance in and out of the sphere.

And managment of the planets wouldn't have to be any different because you'd still have seperate planets.

I guess raids could still happen if enemy ships could puncture a hole and get in. It shouldn't disrupt the integrity of the sphere since its whole mass is orbiting around the star....only a drop in productivity...

The sphere would have to be destructable...and hard to defend given the size (batteries and missle bases would be useless unless you had millions of them).

Overall I'd think of it as a production bonus only, and it'd have to be worth it.
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#9 Post by Geoff the Medio »

Disclaimer: the following is based on speculative realism, so is perhaps irrelivant.
StratCaster wrote:It would give those planets huge production bonuses
[...]
Like having a planetary shield around your solor system.
I think you're partly misunderstanding the purpose of the proposed structure.

The sphere is not for protection; its purpose is to collect all the energy emitted by a star for use (or use the star's heat to generate useful energy in some other form). Any such creation would likely be quite vulnerable, depending on the defensive technologies available (could you erect an energy shield around the whole thing?).


My initial reaction was that the sphere would have a radius much smaller than the orbital radius of most planets in this solar system, but some quick research suggests that something somewhat larger than Earth's orbital radius (150 million km) would be better (450 million km) in this solar system, and possible by disassembling jupiter (300 million km at 2-3 m thick).

http://www.daviddarling.info/encycloped ... ngine.html

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/fa ... hfact.html

http://www.daviddarling.info/encycloped ... sonsp.html


As an alternative, building a "generating station" around a small black hole or a neutron star might be simpler. In either case you'd need a source of matter to feed the accretion disk... probably a companion star that was already losing mass to the black hole/neutron. The polar jets of particles from a black hole would be "easily" gathered with a Niven-esque ringworld around the hole/neutron, oriented perpendicular to the plane of the accretion disk. A full sphere probably wouldn't work in that case, as you need to keep feeding matter in to get radiation out (or so it seems from what I'm reading). There might also be some problems with gyroscopic precession of the orbit of the ring if you had to rotate it so the incoming matter from the companion star was always going through the axis of the ring, and the ring didn't cut into the flow as the star and hole spun around eachother...


A micro-black hole might be a useful low-volume portable power supply (on ships). Really small black holes that don't have a nice continuous big supply of matter with which to fuel themselves shrink as they emit hawking radiation until they disappear. This radiation could be collected and used. I imagine this would be easy to refuel, as you'd just have to add matter, though I'm not sure if adding matter would increase the engery generation rate significantly, such that you'd need to be careful when you did it, and not do it too much, lest the hole grow in size... though I don't imagine you could carry enough matter onboard to grow the hole large enough to destroy the ship or anything... Also not sure about how to port one around, or if there is a size below which the hole has a hard time sucking in matter at an appreciable rate. The novel Earth by David Brin had a microblack hole orbitting inside the planet that was only very slowing growing in size.

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#10 Post by StratCaster »

I was just thinking about the STNG episode. When they encountered the Dyson sphere there were two abandon planets and a star about to go super nova inside.

I believe the interior surface of the sphere was collecting the massive amounts of energy from the star which fueled the planet needs.

It definitely would not be for protection...like I said, production bonuses.

Otherwise if you encapsulated a star, the orbiting planets would probably go a little haywire without their star....espec. if they supported life!

That black hole idea is cool though...
"The mighty warships of the Vl'Hurg Empire dived screaming upon the unknowing Earth, where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog." -Hitchhikers Guide

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#11 Post by Geoff the Medio »

StratCaster wrote:I was just thinking about the STNG episode. When they encountered the Dyson sphere there were two abandon planets and a star about to go super nova inside.
It was called Relics, and also featured Scotty from TOS.

http://www.startrek.com/startrek/view/s ... 68566.html
It definitely would not be for protection...like I said, production bonuses.
You also mentioned protection...
an added layer of protection when an enemy fleet is in the solar system. They would't be able to get through to the planets unless they got through the sphere. Like having a planetary shield around your solor system.
Otherwise if you encapsulated a star, the orbiting planets would probably go a little haywire without their star....espec. if they supported life!
If you had a dysonsphere, you would have no need for planets orbiting inside it. Consider Larry Niven's Ringworld:

http://www.tor.com/niven/whatisringworld.html

That's just a ring, not even a whole sphere, of approximately earth's orbital radius as its radius. Niven's page says it's 10^6 miles across and 6x10^8 miles around, and that this is a habitat three million times the area of planet Earth.

(I get 1500000000000000 km^2 for the ring compared to 510000000 km^2 for a sphere of Earth's radius, which is a ratio of about 3 million)

A (dyson)sphere of Earth's orbital radius would have surface area 281000000000000000 km^2, which compared to Earth's surface area is a ratio of 550000000... five hundred and fifty million times the area.

... I guess there might be other reasons to keep a planet inside though.

(makes you think about how much energy from a star is going to waste, and just how much energy would be available with a dysonsphere.)

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#12 Post by muxec »

I'm not sure if adding matter would increase the engery generation rate
The hawking radiation is neglectible, more important thing is the ability to get up to 1/2 of mass energy when the object is closing the event horizon. Ordinar fussion transforms less than a percent of mass to energy. Sadly for observer the object would never reach the event horizon. So for now collecting the energy in this way is imposible due to relatvistic side effect. Anyway nice idea

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#13 Post by Geoff the Medio »

muxec wrote:The hawking radiation is neglectible, more important thing is the ability to get up to 1/2 of mass energy when the object is closing the event horizon. Ordinar fussion transforms less than a percent of mass to energy. Sadly for observer the object would never reach the event horizon. So for now collecting the energy in this way is imposible due to relatvistic side effect. Anyway nice idea
I'm sure there were coherent thoughts behind that, but I can't quite figure out what they were... could you try to rewrite more clearly?


Also, from: http://casa.colorado.edu/~ajsh/hawk.html

"The Hawking temperature of such mini black holes is high: a 10^11 kg black hole has a temperature of about 10^12 Kelvin, equivalent to the rest mass energy of a proton. The gravitational pull of such a mini black hole would be about 1 g at a distance of 1 meter."

"In the final second of its existence, the mini black hole radiates about 1000 tonnes of rest mass energy."

... this seems like a useful power source to me... (though I'm not sure what is meant by a "gravitational pull of ... 1 g"

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#14 Post by Daveybaby »

Geoff the Medio wrote:
muxec wrote:The hawking radiation is neglectible, more important thing is the ability to get up to 1/2 of mass energy when the object is closing the event horizon. Ordinar fussion transforms less than a percent of mass to energy. Sadly for observer the object would never reach the event horizon. So for now collecting the energy in this way is imposible due to relatvistic side effect. Anyway nice idea
I'm sure there were coherent thoughts behind that, but I can't quite figure out what they were... could you try to rewrite more clearly?
I think he is referring to the fact that, if you are sucked into a black hole, you will never reach the event horizon (from your frame of reference) due to relativistic effects. He is missing the point, though. Everyone else will see you reach the black hole, and thus would 'easily' be able to collect any energy which resulted.
Geoff the Medio wrote:... this seems like a useful power source to me... (though I'm not sure what is meant by a "gravitational pull of ... 1 g"
Well, if you took the earth and squashed it down to the point where it became a black hole, it would still exert a gravitational pull of 1g (but only on an object at a distance equal to the earth original radius). Similarly any sized black hole would probably exert a pull of 1g, it just depends how far you are from it.
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#15 Post by StratCaster »

getting back to the dyson sphere being feasable in FO...

I didn't even think of not having planets inside.. I guess that's a whole other thing... although wouldn't it be ineffiecient...? you'd have to transport this energy potentially to another solar system...

Geoff the Medio, when I was originally thinking in my head about protection, I was thinking, game-wise/programatically which I didn't really explain properly. i.e. when your ships would arrived at a dyson sphere-ed star, normally the pop-up window would show the planets... this would have to change to an image of a dyson sphere. Unless the ship's government had somesort of treaty or alliance, they wouldn't be able to see the planets within. So for the game programmers it would add a layer... maybe that's difficult in the current game's framework?

although it would have to offer minimal protection against comets and space debris...right? and maybe some sort of shielding that would prevent someone just flying through it... (ie putting your hand through tin foil...)
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