If we have O'niel Cylinders...

Calaban

Calaban
Then we know the Developers have a certain knowledge base. And if they have this concept, then I feel certain we will find another article along the same O'Niel Cylinder lines:

A Cole Habitat


Basically, you take a large iron/nickel asteroid, drill out its long axis, cap the ends and pressurize the tunnel with water, set that thing spinning rapidly along that axis.. and heat the thing up.

Solar reflectors, high energy lasers, however, you carefully heat that sucker up to semi melting point.. where the (now) steam pressure inside will start to inflate it, balloon it out to a uniform cylinder...

Annnd Presto! A self built iron walled space station/colony! the trick will be heating it just right, and managing the variances and expansions just right (dont want the thing to "pop"!). but in the end, its a complex pressurized structure that you dont have to assemble.

So, here's hoping to see a few out there among the planetary rings... :smilie:
 

Milky82

M
Cool, I'd love to see a Dyson sphere out there some where, now that's worth a trip to the other side of the galaxy :)
 

Tinman

Tinman
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Rhaedas

Rhaedas
I don't think the ED technology is advanced enough for Dyson spheres. And I think they are as more of a thought experiment of how a Type II civilization could collect all the star's energy, not a practical solution. There are more efficient ways to do it outside of building a solid structure. Same with Ringworld, you can get the same or more land area without all the engineering miracles needed.

Another fun fact. The Bernal sphere was a first stage smaller project (Island One), leading up to the O'Neill cylinders (Island Two and Three), which would be scaled up to 20 or more miles long, dwarfing what we see in the game. Just imagine the outer ring of Aulin Enterprise, but 20 miles long as well, and open inside, with its own weather system.
 

Zenicetus

Zenicetus
Rhaedas said:
I don't think the ED technology is advanced enough for Dyson spheres. And I think they are as more of a thought experiment of how a Type II civilization could collect all the star's energy, not a practical solution. There are more efficient ways to do it outside of building a solid structure. Same with Ringworld, you can get the same or more land area without all the engineering miracles needed.
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I tend to agree, with one reservation.* By the time a civilization can build something that would meet the structural and mass-shifting requirements (you basically have to deconstruct all the planets in a star system as building materials), an alien civilization probably has better things to do with their time.

*The one reservation is that some advanced aliens might not be capable of separation of individuals from each other. Think insect hive minds, or sentient machine life that also operates as a hive mind with a network lag limit. That's the only civ that makes sense to me as a Dyson Sphere or Ringworld builder; an advanced species that literally can't engineer itself to remain socially separated, so they need maximum land surface around a star. They can't go anywhere else.

So I dunno, maybe they're out there...
 

Rog

Rog
FD have already spoken about 'inflatable' asteroid station/bases, so it's definitely on the cards.

Forget your Dyson sphere's though, nice thought experiments, but I want to see Iain M Banksian orbital habitats. I know certain devs are fans of the fiction.

Just one will do. :)
 

Zvanya

Z
It would be great to see a Cole habitat and other very large space structures. The proposals I read used mirrors for the initial heating and later to provide concentrated sunlight. Because you can use extremely light weight materials in space mirrors can be made really, really big, so such a habitat could be outside the normal habitable zone.

As for Dyson spheres I think a lot of people have the wrong idea about them and visualize something rigid like a ping pong ball. Dyson stated that a solid structure like that would be impossible. What he postulated was so many solar power collectors orbiting the star that no light escapes - except infrared.

EDIT: And Niven said that a Ringworld would be structurally equivalent to a suspension bridge - with no endpoints.
 
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Calaban

Calaban
I would greatly enjoy seeing an in work, or failed, dyson sphere as some sort of relic left by a long extinct civilization (remember the backdrop of the Tanis shipyard in Homeworld? :eek: )

but yeah a full dyson sphere is only a human engineer's fevered dream. to enclose a star at the habitable distance would require the tonnage of THOUSANDS of solar systems (the scattering of planets around a star are such a small percentage of that systems mass-compared to a star)
 

Zenicetus

Zenicetus
Calaban said:
but yeah a full dyson sphere is only a human engineer's fevered dream. to enclose a star at the habitable distance would require the tonnage of THOUSANDS of solar systems (the scattering of planets around a star are such a small percentage of that systems mass-compared to a star)
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Nah, all you need is a Sinclair® monomolecular chain, fashioned into a sheet weave, and a stasis field to hold it in place.

Just make sure you don't ever turn the stasis field off... :D
 

kfsone

kfsone
Given this is a kickstarter funded project, we may have to curtail our hopes and settle for a Bissel Sphere at first. Then, when we've met someone we're thinking about bringing home to our batchellor docking bay, we can upgrade to a dyson sphere to make ourselves look cooler.
 
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