- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I'm... going to withhold further hypothesizing for now.
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To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest)
- Thread starter OneirosTheWriter
- Start date
- Sci-Fi
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- Tags
- star trek exploration fully automated luxury gay space communism top level canon (canon) #hashtagcontent all-encompassing space amoeba cardassian boy bands cardassian magical girls darkest bureaucracy debate makes the qm cackle like palpatine hoh is an empire quest it has to be foreign infiltrators more ships ship happens singers delenda est starfleet this is not an empire quest ur waifu is collective?
Enerael
We Shall Wake to Sanity
Snarkium? They have a bloody element of Snarkium.
What the hell Star Trek.
wat
...
No, seriously, what?
Tell me they really just found and moved in on an abandoned Dyson Sphere, right? Right?
Of course you did.
Enterprise-C continues to get outshone by the other EC ships...
75% Certain
25% horse thief
Even in canon, the "stupid" Pakled were able to outwit the Chief Engineer of finest ship in the fleet. They are smart, undeniably.
Season 1 & 2 TNG was really smug and really stupid.
Star Trek (TNG): Code of Honor
Star Trek (TNG): Samaritan Snare
- Location
- Near Water
I do not think pretending to be dumb means you have the intelligence to build a Dyson sphere.
acegunner
Planeswalker - Nicol Bolas
- Location
- Dominaria
Not if the ones they saw were the breeders, and the leaders are the protectors...
Ever read ringworld by Larry Niven?
"Pak"Led... Where are the damnable protectors, and how watered down are these Pak compared to the ringworld series?
- Location
- Aotearoa
Adriesta:
"Yes, yes, a noble tradition of service, is that a few centuries? Oh my.
Are you Terran ships always so to eager to talk of your age and provenance?"
<wink>
"The Pacificans still know me by my old name, in their dialect."
Adriesta, indignant:Enterprise-C continues to get outshone by the other EC ships...
"You would do well to show respect. She not only earned a handsome payment of Wozinium, but furthered the diplomatic cause of your Federation- lest you forget, seeking allies amongst the Nessic against the Harmony. Who here can say they have done half as much?"
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Made in reference to hypersonic. Listed on memory alpha as a 'real' Star Trek element collection.
There is a lot of stuff on that page that makes no sense in modern physics. For example elements Hydrogen, Hobbes and Kryptonite are all atomic weight 1.
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Well that would be because that table is a bunch of in jokes by the writers. If you want to take it at face value then one possible explanation is those are wacky physics elements that exist in subspace or something.
That....might be a problem, if that's where the GMs are going.
I mean, Protectors are pretty goddamned fucking scary.
Letting those guys out into Alpha Quadrant would be genocide.
Finagle007
[Verified Great Old One]
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Well, this is obviously not the same Dyson Sphere as found in canon TNG, otherwise they'd have picked up the distress signal from the Jenolen and found Scotty...
It is just the captain there so far, Ambassador has not arrived yet. So even if her comms gear could detect it, she probably isn't looking for Federation signals. Once the ship arrives, sphere wide signal analysis becomes more likely.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Polina Petrova:
[waves molecule quality assurance scanner at Admiral Leslie]
<ERROR!>
"Hmm, hang on, let me switch the spectroscopic attachment in... ah-haaah! Admiral, we've discovered some dangerous trace chemicals. Maybe that's what the scanners think is wrong with your molecules!"
[for reference, since tone doesn't carry over in text, the "charter member since 1814" bit wasn't in a 'pull rank' tone, but to carry the idea...]
Enterprise:
"Oooh, that's right! Sorry, didn't recognize you."
"Say, have you seen Apollo lately? I always wondered if he managed to drag himself out of that bower. The absolute swine. Wandering hands and everything."
[sniffs]
- Location
- Aotearoa
Adriesta:
"Hah, yes indeed. We're well rid of Apollo, chased off somewhere vaguely Spinwards some time ago. I suppose he had to land somewhere.
...That said, you can have no idea what 'handsy' truly means until you've tried nursing his father!
I gave up the nursing career for a more rewarding line in inescapable retribution after that. Can't think why..."
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- Location
- alphen aan den rijn
i`ll assume you meant to say plays? but i am not sure.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Not everyone is aware, but 'lay' has an older meaning as a term for ballads, poetry and verse.
- Location
- alphen aan den rijn
uh i swear i learn something new every day on this forum!
thanks for clearing that up!
My god that would be a clever play on words.
10ebbor10
DON'T PANIC
- Location
- Present
It may just be the case that they consider language beneath them.
Why do soft science like linguistics and xenopsychology when HARD SCIENCE let's you build a Dyson Sphere.
- Location
- Aotearoa
Orion Pirate slavers used to destroy planets and build these all the time. It's no big. 
Just be glad the Hishmeri Pirate slavers haven't unlocked their T5 Dyson sphere tech slide yet.
Just be glad the Hishmeri Pirate slavers haven't unlocked their T5 Dyson sphere tech slide yet.
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To give an idea of why this is so lets compare a Dyson Sphere vs. Dyson Swarm.
At Earth's radius from the sun (149,598,023km) a sphere has a surface area of of 2.81x10^17 square kilometers. That is roughly how much livable area you can get out of Dyson Sphere.
A O'Neil Cylinder has a usable area of approximately 325km. Lets say each cylinder, which is 32km at their longest, has a bubble 64km in radius around it for safety. That gives a volume of 1,100,000km^3 per cylinder. The Earth's orbit varies from closest approach to furthest approach by 137,390,500km. A shell that wide would have a total volume of 1.4x10^24 cubic kilometers. In such a volume you can fit 1.27x10^18 cylinders (with their bubble of clear space) with 325km^2 of land each for a total usable surface area of 4.14x10^20 square kilometers.
Or to put that another way switching from a Dyson Sphere to Dyson Swarm increases your usable living space by over a thousand fold. That is being generous since you can easily expand the size of the Dyson Swarm into lower and higher orbits while the Dyson Sphere isn't really expandable. That isn't even going into how constructing a Dyson Swarm is vastly simpler then a Dyson Sphere and more useful since you can use it from the moment you construct a single cylinder while a Dyson Sphere basically has to be completed before you can use it.
Basically only really advanced idiots would build it. So really it's the perfect thing for the Pak'leds to do. Well that and I suppose some really advanced civilizations might do it once or twice as a vanity project if they've got nothing better to do.
- Location
- Outside the Box
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Pakled Home is round. Round make star go. Home is fast. Pakled is smart.
(Pakled's main character trait is that they're infuriating to talk to.
)For some simple speculation: We don't actually know it's a full shell. It could be that it's a partial shell of land and that the rest of the sphere is made of swarms instead, making the big area here a solar sail of sorts. Or maybe the material limitations don't matter: The sphere's structure is formed of energy like a hologram or forcefield is. Ooor maybe the vanity is the point: Any less advanced civ can build a dyson swarm, but only a Smart one can afford the insane resources needed to make a full shell.
Maelore
Totaly not a Romulan
- Location
- Fairfax, VA
Unless it's built for a purpose other than living space. Also an alien species might have a psychological reason to prefer a single Hugh construct over a swarm of tiny(relatively) ones.
I only used O'Neil cylinders since they are convenient. You can scale your habitat to any size your material science is capable of supporting. Given they are capable of building a Dyson Sphere without it immediately catastrophically failing material science obviously isn't a concern. The McKendree Cylinder for example relies upon carbon nanotubes, and thus probably isn't possible IRL, but has a surface area about equal to Russia. If even that isn't enough for the species' psychology then Shell Worlds easily provide enough concentrated space while still being more efficient.
As for other reasons; AFAIK there aren't any reasons to build a Dyson Sphere that can't be better accomplished in other ways. It really is just a vanity project.
The reason Dyson Spheres are popular in Sci-Fi is because the more practical solutions are also more complex. A Dyson Sphere is a very simple idea that is easy to explain to to an audience and fairly cheap from a production budget standpoint. So as a short hand for "This guys are mindbogglingly advanced" it works quite well.