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A moment of nerd rage...

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  • neoakiraiineoakiraii Member Posts: 7,468 Arc User
    edited August 2013
    hevach wrote: »
    Those weren't Dyson Spheres, they were just spherical space stations. They'd have none of the drawbacks or construction challenges of a Dyson sphere, and have some advantages over more complex shapes.

    I am aware of that I'm talking about shapes here not the science
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  • hevachhevach Member Posts: 2,777 Arc User
    edited August 2013
    Which is a complete nonsequiter, because nobody in that chain of quotes was talking about the shape in general.
  • jumpingjsjumpingjs Member Posts: 0 Arc User
    edited August 2013
    I would like STO to have a Dyson sphere*, and not a shell, that would be frickken awesome, and more cool in someways that a shell?

    Who agrees with me?

    *Like satilites or Rings
    Hopefully I'll come back from my break; this break is fun; I play intellectual games.

    I hope STO get's better ...
  • neoakiraiineoakiraii Member Posts: 7,468 Arc User
    edited August 2013
    hevach wrote: »
    Which is a complete nonsequiter, because nobody in that chain of quotes was talking about the shape in general.


    I was so meh :P
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  • logicalspocklogicalspock Member Posts: 836 Arc User
    edited August 2013
    tacofangs wrote: »
    Alright, you want to get into specifics?

    A Dyson sphere is very large, and has a lot of mass, but it's not very dense. 99% of it is empty space. So. . . . gravity? Does the gravity pull you toward the center of the sphere? Does it pull you toward the edge? (even on the inside?) Is the edge dense/thick enough to warrant localized gravity that would allow you to stick to the inside?
    Now's where someone says the whole sphere is spinning, and that what holds you to the inside is centripetal force. That would work well enough in a ring world, but you can't spin a sphere in all directions simultaneously, so you're going to end up with areas with less (or no) apparent gravity (like the poles).

    Ok, so enough with gravity, when you're standing on the inner surface of the sphere, and look up, what do you see? If you're inside the atmosphere, you'll see sky, but you'd also see the opposite wall of the sphere. Those of you who argue that you couldn't see the opposite wall, why not? I can see Jupiter on a clear night. Now if Jupiter was the whole sky. . . I'm pretty sure it would be pretty damn bright.

    How about if you are above the atmosphere? You don't get sky anymore. . . but you don't get blackness. The entire sky would be filled with brightly lit planet surface, perhaps with some darker sections if there is something shading them from the sun.

    Which leads us to night/day. Lots of Dyson concepts show big panels encircling the sun (presumably orbiting) such that they cast shadow on the inner surface. But. . . the opposite side of the sphere is entirely lit. It'd be like standing in the shade at earth. Just because you're not in direct sunlight doesn't mean the entire sky isn't brightly lit (and thus, indirectly lighting your side) Plus, if you have big wedge shaped solar blocks like that, you'd still have a problem at the poles.


    What did I miss?



    I know we have it posted on here somewhere, but I couldn't find it, so I just did a google search. That's the only one I could find.

    The gravitational forces inside a Dyson sphere cancel out. The proof involves only basic Newtonian Dynamics and I believe Newton himself may have presented a geometric proof.

    The star's gravitational field would be no different than on a planet other than the lack of tidal forces. At 1 AU it would be negligible compared to gravitational acceleration at the Earth's surface.

    I see no reason why you could not see the other side of the sphere, although due to the brightness of the sun (which would always be shining) and depending on the reflective index of the inside of the sphere, it might just be a black or grey nothing.

    As for gravity, I would assume that the sphere would only be inhabitable in a "ring" and the other parts would be used for things such as farming and energy collection.

    Like I wrote earlier, it does not matter how massive the Dyson sphere is. There would be no net gravitational acceleration inside it. The only way to have "gravity" in a Dyson sphere is acceleration (such as by rotating it) or by whatever magic they use on the Enterprise to keep the budget under control and avoid having to film every scene in some kind of simulation of "weightlessness".
  • logicalspocklogicalspock Member Posts: 836 Arc User
    edited August 2013
    cgta1967 wrote: »
    or .... have enough mass to generate its own..... planets reach hydrostatic equilibrium...which draws all the collected mass into a sphere shape.

    you wouldn't have to generate hydrostatic equilibrium on the shell surface of the dyson sphere.... but just have enough mass to self generate it's own gravity.


    or.... just have fictionally generated "gravity plating" like the Star trek ships all have......

    which is probably the easiest way. :rolleyes:

    As I and several other posters have explained, if you do the calculus, Newton's Law of Universal Gravitational proves that there is no net gravitational acceleration inside a sphere. If you were standing on the surface of a perfect Dyson's sphere you would start slowly accelerating toward the sun. No matter how massive the sphere was, the gravitational acceleration toward the surface of the sphere would cancel out.
  • logicalspocklogicalspock Member Posts: 836 Arc User
    edited August 2013
    tacofangs wrote: »
    Remember, it's my job to figure out what it looks like. . . so I HAVE to be concerned with what you see.

    As for the amount of material, that is what makes Dyson *Shells* so insane. You'd have to harvest hundreds/thousands/millions of star systems to get enough material to make one, small (relatively) shell.

    Something else I didn't mention before. Let's pretend they have come up with some method to create a day/night cycle on the inner surface. Even with that, the sun is still fixed. i.e. the sun is always in the exact same position, day or night. There is no sunset as we know it, there is no sunrise as we know it. That means all shadows on the surface always fall in the same places all the time. Potentially, this creates insane microclimates.

    My point in all of this conjecture on the 'realities' of a Dyson Sphere*is that the mere concept of one is so ridiculous and insane, that it's silly to me to argue that someone didn't get it 'right.'

    Yes, there is science behind some of it, but because of how insane and ridiculous and far beyond our full comprehension such a system is, there is SOOOO much wiggle room in there, that I am not terribly concerned with making everything perfect. Again, gameplay is king. If we can make you FEEL like you're in a Dyson Sphere, and the game play is fun, and the story is interesting, I think we've done our job.

    *Shut up, I know, it's a Shell, but TNG says it's a sphere (and it looks like a sphere) so there. :::raspberries:::

    Assuming that the habitable portion were in a ring, you could place a ring around the star at the right distance to create slits to simulate a day/night cycle.

    However, I see no problem with having it be noon 24/7. People who live in the far northern wastelands, like Canadians, Alaskans, Russians, and Scandinavians don't seem to suffer too many ill effects from the lack of a sunset during the summer.
  • l30p4rdl30p4rd Member Posts: 334 Arc User
    edited August 2013
    Far to realistic on the gravity front. This is science FICTION we already have the answer on every starship its called grav plating !
  • logicalspocklogicalspock Member Posts: 836 Arc User
    edited August 2013
    l30p4rd wrote: »
    Far to realistic on the gravity front. This is science FICTION we already have the answer on every starship its called grav plating !

    Scientific realism makes it better.

    The problem I have with gravity plating is, what happens when it fails? On a starship, people and equipment just drift around the bulkheads until it is restored.

    On a Dyson sphere, a gravity-plating failure means all the water, atmosphere, people, plants, and animals leave the surface of the sphere, start heading toward the sun, and die.

    Which brings up another good point. If you want to retain an atmosphere, you probably will not be able to do it via rotational acceleration unless you have some kind of apparatus (such as a 50 mile high wall) along the populated parts to keep the atmosphere from moving along the surface and escaping the centripetal force.
  • neoakiraiineoakiraii Member Posts: 7,468 Arc User
    edited August 2013
    Scientific realism makes it better.

    No, no it doesn't
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  • jetwtfjetwtf Member Posts: 1,207
    edited August 2013
    jheinig wrote: »

    Wow i understood none of that lol. But then again if you advance technology enough it will look like magic to less advanced.

    I say just make it and call the technology used in its creation "magic" because it is too advanced for us humans in the early 21rst century to comprehend. Let them science geeks work out how over the next 500 years.

    Just make the gameplay fun and less grind.
    Join Date: Nobody cares.
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  • hevachhevach Member Posts: 2,777 Arc User
    edited August 2013
    The gravitational forces inside a Dyson sphere cancel out. The proof involves only basic Newtonian Dynamics and I believe Newton himself may have presented a geometric proof.

    It was Gauss actually, Newton didn't do very much good math on gravity at this scale, he mostly did point-body stuff. Gauss didn't immediately realize his law simplified out to Newton's, but it did prove more useful for situations like this.
    I see no reason why you could not see the other side of the sphere, although due to the brightness of the sun (which would always be shining) and depending on the reflective index of the inside of the sphere, it might just be a black or grey nothing.

    The big thing here is the atmosphere: You'll be seeing everything through an atmosphere that we'll assume is approximately Earthlike like most M-class worlds in Star Trek. You'll have a blue sky. Near the "horizon" the immense thickness of atmosphere you're looking through would make it impossible to see parts of the sphere on your side, and near the zenith the sun will glare out most of it, but you should still be able to see large features in between.

    A thinner atmosphere or one with different gas content (an inert gas in place of nitrogen perhaps) could alter the sky color. If there's no atmospheric coloring or distortion, the limiting factor on seeing the opposite side of the sphere is the size of features - even something many times the size of a planet would be a point. Features would have to be hundreds of thousands of kilometers across to show any shape.
  • cgta1967cgta1967 Member Posts: 86 Arc User
    edited August 2013
    As I and several other posters have explained, if you do the calculus, Newton's Law of Universal Gravitational proves that there is no net gravitational acceleration inside a sphere. If you were standing on the surface of a perfect Dyson's sphere you would start slowly accelerating toward the sun. No matter how massive the sphere was, the gravitational acceleration toward the surface of the sphere would cancel out.

    who said anything about the mass being evenly distributed ?

    drrrrr .....


    your "science" snobbery is getting in the way of your entertainment comprehension dude......
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  • cgta1967cgta1967 Member Posts: 86 Arc User
    edited August 2013
    Scientific realism makes it better......

    not when it comes to reading 'your' posts it doesnt......

    by the way; this isnt nasa or mensa...it's star trek.
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  • dixoniumdixonium Member Posts: 219 Arc User
    edited August 2013
    Star Trek is not hard science fiction.
  • fredscarranfredscarran Member Posts: 222 Arc User
    edited August 2013
    Almost everything in this game scales wrong.
  • cgta1967cgta1967 Member Posts: 86 Arc User
    edited August 2013
    Almost everything in this game scales wrong.

    what do you mean by wrong ?


    perhaps things are scaled the way they are because this games priority is about entertaining gameplay and not trying to placate those who nerd out about canon with every single detail.

    .
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  • thecosmic1thecosmic1 Member Posts: 9,365 Arc User
    edited August 2013
    Almost everything in this game scales wrong.
    Most of the ships are scaled correctly to each other, until you get to the Small Craft. They're generally made larger so that you can see them. If we actually tried to have a shuttle and a Galaxy Class fighting next to each other the shuttle would quickly get lost due to the massive size difference - and you'd never be able to see something that small 10k away to target it. Some allowances need to be made for the sake of ease of play.

    Likewise, starbases, like DS9, are scales so that you can see them when surrounded by 75 other ships in the zone. If DS9 were made the correct size you'd never see it past the Galaxy and Oddy who are sitting next to each other trading Boffs.

    Interiors are made over-sized due to the fact that you can have 5 people moving and fighting inside of them and the game doesn't want anyone to feel like they're losing line-of-sight or unable to move due to close quarters. Again, this is a gaming allowance so that everyone can play and not feel restricted due to the map.

    STO is an action MMORPG. It's not a Sim. It's important for people to keep that in perspective.
    STO is about my Liberated Borg Federation Captain with his Breen 1st Officer, Jem'Hadar Tactical Officer, Liberated Borg Engineering Officer, Android Ops Officer, Photonic Science Officer, Gorn Science Officer, and Reman Medical Officer jumping into their Jem'Hadar Carrier and flying off to do missions for the new Romulan Empire. But for some players allowing a T5 Connie to be used breaks the canon in the game.
  • fredscarranfredscarran Member Posts: 222 Arc User
    edited August 2013
    thecosmic1 wrote: »
    Most of the ships are scaled correctly to each other, until you get to the Small Craft. They're generally made larger so that you can see them. If we actually tried to have a shuttle and a Galaxy Class fighting next to each other the shuttle would quickly get lost due to the massive size difference - and you'd never be able to see something that small 10k away to target it. Some allowances need to be made for the sake of ease of play.

    Likewise, starbases, like DS9, are scales so that you can see them when surrounded by 75 other ships in the zone. If DS9 were made the correct size you'd never see it past the Galaxy and Oddy who are sitting next to each other trading Boffs.

    Interiors are made over-sized due to the fact that you can have 5 people moving and fighting inside of them and the game doesn't want anyone to feel like they're losing line-of-sight or unable to move due to close quarters. Again, this is a gaming allowance so that everyone can play and not feel restricted due to the map.

    STO is an action MMORPG. It's not a Sim. It's important for people to keep that in perspective.

    Groovy, still doesn't change a single thing I said.
  • fredscarranfredscarran Member Posts: 222 Arc User
    edited August 2013
    cgta1967 wrote: »
    what do you mean by wrong ?

    .

    .

    opposite of "right"
  • thecosmic1thecosmic1 Member Posts: 9,365 Arc User
    edited August 2013
    Groovy, still doesn't change a single thing I said.
    I think it puts perspective into your use of the words "almost everything." YMMV. :)
    STO is about my Liberated Borg Federation Captain with his Breen 1st Officer, Jem'Hadar Tactical Officer, Liberated Borg Engineering Officer, Android Ops Officer, Photonic Science Officer, Gorn Science Officer, and Reman Medical Officer jumping into their Jem'Hadar Carrier and flying off to do missions for the new Romulan Empire. But for some players allowing a T5 Connie to be used breaks the canon in the game.
  • logicalspocklogicalspock Member Posts: 836 Arc User
    edited August 2013
    hevach wrote: »
    It was Gauss actually, Newton didn't do very much good math on gravity at this scale, he mostly did point-body stuff. Gauss didn't immediately realize his law simplified out to Newton's, but it did prove more useful for situations like this.

    Gauss proved it for electromagnatism and derived a similar formula for gravity, but I believe Newton proved it long before, although in a manner different from Gauss. It is in the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica somewhere. If I remember correctly, Newton proved it geometrically rather than using the new tool of calculus he invented, which is required for proving Gauss's law for Gravity.
  • cgta1967cgta1967 Member Posts: 86 Arc User
    edited August 2013
    opposite of "right"

    now read the second part of my post smarty pants.
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  • logicalspocklogicalspock Member Posts: 836 Arc User
    edited August 2013
    cgta1967 wrote: »
    who said anything about the mass being evenly distributed ?

    drrrrr .....


    your "science" snobbery is getting in the way of your entertainment comprehension dude......

    If mass is not evenly distributed or at least symmetric in some way, you run into the problem of the thing become unstable. It's center of mass would be someplace other than the star around which it orbits and that would create all sorts of problems.

    Minor perturbations are not going to change the gross effect of Gauss's law of gravity.

    And you have it backwards. Big scientific inaccuracies get in the way of entertainment, not the other way around. When science fiction authors and screenwriters put in something that is complete scientific nonsense, it shows that they need to get a different profession. Science fiction is the genre about our best current scientific understanding of the universe and how it might translate into the future. People who do not care about science should stick to fantasy.
  • cgta1967cgta1967 Member Posts: 86 Arc User
    edited August 2013
    ..... When science fiction authors and screenwriters put in something that is complete scientific nonsense, it shows that they need to get a different profession.......

    that is why 'they' are the popular and beloved writers whereas your style of over analyzing....not so much.....

    .
    _______________________
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  • logicalspocklogicalspock Member Posts: 836 Arc User
    edited August 2013
    cgta1967 wrote: »
    that is why 'they' are the popular and beloved writers whereas your style of over analyzing....not so much.....

    .


    If you look at many of the most popular science fiction writers: Issac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Aurthur C. Clark . . . many of these writers were scientists or engineers themselves and use a high degree of scientific realism in their work.

    One of the great things about Star Trek is, though they throw in the occasional scientific boner, a large part of the show is hard science fiction. For instance, warp drive is based on modern ideas in theoretical physics and the transporter has a Heisenberg compensator.

    This is why the show has inspired so many generations of children to become scientists and engineers themselves.

    Star Trek is somewhere in the middle between soft and hard SciFi. When it creates something that uses real modern-day science principles, it needs to get the science right. It actually has a pretty good track record in that regard (with the exception of the new JJ Trek) despite the occasional enormous failing.
  • hevachhevach Member Posts: 2,777 Arc User
    edited August 2013
    Ah, so Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, Arthur C. Clarke, Stephen Baxter, Fredrick Pohl, all the writers involved in Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5, Stargate, Battlestar, I could go on for several hours here hitting almost all of the major highlights of the genre, most of the middle ground, and a lot of the low points... all should just get out of your science fiction, and leave it to hard sci fi authors who never use contrivance or conceit to simply declare a scientific nonsense to be true for the sake of their story?

    That doesn't leave a lot of science fiction authors. Even the hardcore hard sci-fi authors use conceits to declare nonsense reality for the sake of storyline - hence why Asimov and Clarke are up there. And the vast majority of science fiction is soft sci fi, which is fundamentally built on the practice.
  • crypticarmsmancrypticarmsman Member Posts: 4,101 Arc User
    edited August 2013
    chainfall wrote: »
    The mistake was using a Dyson Sphere in the first place. A Ringworld is so much more plausible, possible, and lacks the drawbacks of a Dyson Sphere.

    But a Ringworld was never shown in a Star Trek episode. The type of Dyson Sphere (which as presented in TNG's episode 'Relics' really WASN'T a type that was in fact postulated by Freeman Dyson - but that's hollywood for you ;)) - was.
    ^^^
    that's why we're getting a Dyson Sphere adventure zone in STO (and I'm okay with that :D)
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  • cgta1967cgta1967 Member Posts: 86 Arc User
    edited August 2013
    .... When it creates something that uses real modern-day science principles, it needs to get the science right. It actually has a pretty good track record in that regard (with the exception of the new JJ Trek) despite the occasional enormous failing.

    here's the thing...it is 'you' that feels it 'needs to get it right' ... I'm sure most people dont really care and are very satisfied with the mumbo-jumbo science that is offered....obviously because the shows and movies have a successful fanbase regardless of getting the scientific equations in order.


    ...oh...and nice opportunity to take a jab at Mr. Abrams I see ....
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  • logicalspocklogicalspock Member Posts: 836 Arc User
    edited August 2013
    hevach wrote: »
    Ah, so Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, Arthur C. Clarke, Stephen Baxter, Fredrick Pohl, all the writers involved in Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5, Stargate, Battlestar, I could go on for several hours here hitting almost all of the major highlights of the genre, most of the middle ground, and a lot of the low points... all should just get out of your science fiction, and leave it to hard sci fi authors who never use contrivance or conceit to simply declare a scientific nonsense to be true for the sake of their story?

    That doesn't leave a lot of science fiction authors. Even the hardcore hard sci-fi authors use conceits to declare nonsense reality for the sake of storyline - hence why Asimov and Clarke are up there. And the vast majority of science fiction is soft sci fi, which is fundamentally built on the practice.

    You are not only making a straw man argument but clearly did not read and understand my previous post. Given that, I see no purpose in continuing to attempt to have a discussion on the subject.
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