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The Dyson's Sphere is just wrong

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  • rylanadionysisrylanadionysis Member Posts: 3,359 Arc User
    edited November 2013
    ryvaken wrote: »
    I never did like that argument. Yes, it's a work of fiction. Yes, that means the designers have license to do whatever they want. But that doesn't mean that the players have a responsibility to like it. And while I've seen any number of people arguing that it doesn't matter how realistic a bit of scifi is, I've never seen anyone argue that something is TOO realistic.

    The franchise has

    - equipment that can replicate objects down to their subatomic level, but cant just remake a person if they die

    - ships that travel through a medium that constantly changes via redact after redact until the whole concept of warp speed is as fictitious to itself as it is to "real" science

    - in star trek, god is afraid of mortals (q and borg)


    And we are complaining about a sphere
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  • hasukurobihasukurobi Member Posts: 1,421 Arc User
    edited November 2013
    I recall one of the Dev Team commenting that nobody really knows what the inside of a Dyson Sphere would really look like.


    While I agree with the curvature, I have to disagree with your assessment that we wouldn't be able to see the walls on the other side, since the star would be illuminating the entire interior structure. So we very likely would be seeing the far ends of the sphere.

    No one may be able to perfectly know what the inside of such a sphere would look like BUT we can make some good educated guesses with physics and what we understand about atmosphere and light.

    Be mindful... I am not saying you could not see the other side in a SHIP. Why? Because we know ships have VERY long range sensors and they may be able to show you the other side through all the radiation and interference. That is to say that while in your ship I am ASSUMING that the view you see is what your ship's sensors are showing you. That would seem supported by Antimatter spread's effects and nebula distortion etc...

    However... When you are on the ground your EYE would not be able to see it for 3 very important reasons.

    1) It is too far away to see with any clarity. We cannot even make out the surface of Luna perfectly with our eye and it is a LOT closer than 11+ Light Minutes. Look at Venus or Mars, again they are MUCH closer but all you see is a little glowing dot.

    2) The atmosphere you are under would distort the incoming light making whatever chance you had to see the other side with clarity ruined by dispersing the light into an ambient glow being reflected back at you.

    3) The star is in the way. It's massive glow and radiation would be blinding to say the least if you looked that way. Just like you do not see any celestial body outside of Luna during the day you would likewise not be able to see past the star's massive output of light.


    I will also throw out there, like others before me, that the Voth having a Techno Rex is just beyond stupid and is another thing that detracts from the realism of the scenario badly. Why?

    1) The Voth are herbivores. Feeding an obviously meat eating giant dinosaur would be difficult for a species that does not grow animals for food and who would be squicked by watching such grotesque displays.

    2) The Voth themselves may well be a bit instinctively terrified of such a monster and not WANT to bring it about.

    3) You have to FEED the darn thing and let it sleep and keep it somewhere. They obviously have the tech to build massive Battle Mechs which do not require that.

    4) A flesh and blood dino is pathetically weak compared to a metal battle Mech with shield generators and loaded down with all sorts of weaponry. Even WITH the Rex being outfitted with armor it is still a weak replacement.

    5) It takes up a lot of space whereas a Mech could be designed to collapse into a smaller format allowing more of them to be stored in the same space to greater effect.

    6) A Mech could be infinitely smarter, more precise, and perfectly loyal without any question due to its programming. It would also require less maintenance than the Rex.
  • ghyudtghyudt Member Posts: 1,112 Arc User
    edited November 2013
    Ok, first off, NEEEERRRRD!!!!!

    Now that that's out of the way, who really cares? Just enjoy the game and the new stuff (if you can).

    Since we're on the topic of the Dyson Sphere, I'd like to take this opportunity to ask the devs to tone down the amount of stuff going on at once here. I'm currently playing the game on minimum graphics, the lowest you can possibly get to, and I normally don't have a problem anywhere else, but inside the sphere I'm playing almost frame by frame, and it gets really irritating to try and do these assignments with so much glitching.
  • totenmettotenmet Member Posts: 592 Arc User
    edited November 2013
    And do you first poster think Kirk and Worf and star trek is real?
  • markhawkmanmarkhawkman Member Posts: 35,236 Arc User
    edited November 2013
    ryvaken wrote: »
    Big, critical hole in your argument. It's never night inside the sphere. The star is always, by definition, directly above you. Venus is closer than 2 AU but we can't see it at high noon.
    We can see it at sunrise and sunset though. :P
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  • azurianstarazurianstar Member Posts: 6,985 Arc User
    edited November 2013
    hasukurobi wrote: »
    1) It is too far away to see with any clarity. We cannot even make out the surface of Luna perfectly with our eye and it is a LOT closer than 11+ Light Minutes. Look at Venus or Mars, again they are MUCH closer but all you see is a little glowing dot.

    I never said anything about clarity. To us, with the exception of MAJOR details, the sphere would be nothing but a solid background. It likely would be a mix of metallic grays, browns from soil, and blues from water.

    And comparing to Venus or Mars........they are pinpricks of light compared to a Dyson Sphere. A planet is going to reflect like less than 1% of the total output of a star, while a Dyson Sphere is going to reflect 100% of it.
    2) The atmosphere you are under would distort the incoming light making whatever chance you had to see the other side with clarity ruined by dispersing the light into an ambient glow being reflected back at you.

    We are talking from the viewpoint of Starships flying above the atmosphere.
    3) The star is in the way. It's massive glow and radiation would be blinding to say the least if you looked that way. Just like you do not see any celestial body outside of the Luna during the day you would likewise not be able to see past the star's massive output of light.

    Yes, in that direction. Even without the atmosphere, the stellar background of a Dyson would be similar to the blue skies above your head. Except with some detail.

    Overall, while it's not perfect, the Art Team did a good representation.



    The only way to really know what a Dyson Sphere would be like, would require a really powerful supercomputer.
  • sardociansardocian Member Posts: 187 Arc User
    edited November 2013
    hasukurobi wrote: »
    I know this has been brought up before but it gets even WORSE when you go to command and listen to what they say about the Sphere...

    They say it has a 200 Million KM diameter. REALLY?

    That would be to say that it has a diameter of: 124,274,238.447 Miles.

    That means that each part of the sphere should be orbiting the sun at roughly: 62,137,119.2235 Miles

    Terra orbits our sun at: 92,960,000 Miles and is in the optimal zone for comfortable living.

    Venus orbits our sun at: 67,240,000 Miles and is considered to be too close to be habitable even if it were terraformed.

    So first and foremost you have the walls of this sphere being close enough to that yellow dwarf that it would really COOK them. Now I guess you can try to make the argument that they use some kind of cooling technology (not that the star seems dimmed in any way) or that the collection of the star's energy by the Sphere helps to prevent its walls from heating up too much. I would consider that a bit questionable but I MIGHT be willing to suspend my disbelief about that.

    I dont feel like reading this entire thread, so this may have been pointed out already.. but...

    You are making the assumption that our sun and the star this sphere orbits are the same temperature. That does not have to be the case. Some stars are cooler than others, some are hotter. Some are larger, some are smaller. Not all stars are the same, so perfect distance to get the ideal temperature is not the same. Therefore, your first "problem" is perfectly explainable.

    I have nothing on the second problem..
  • solidshatnersolidshatner Member Posts: 390 Arc User
    edited November 2013
    Hmm . . . never really thought about the night and day aspect. I suppose if you really wanted to get anal about it, devs could eventually come up with an object that was close enough to the star to eclipsed it on a 12 hr orbit (a possible warmer Tholian PvE environment for the future?). This would create an artificial night for half of the sphere on a rotation. That really sparks some creative possibilities as it would be beautiful to look at the sky with your toon and mistake the lights of civilazation as stars in a dark sky. Actually . . . its kind of hard to imagine WHAT that would look like as you would surely see the other (lit) half of the sphere too.

    Just some thoughts. :)
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  • knucklesstarknucklesstar Member Posts: 103 Arc User
    edited November 2013
    How about this;

    Cryptic are not mathematical or physical geniuses. We are talking about the SAME PEOPLE who put Dinosaurs with lasers on their heads because they thought it was "cool" in their own small and immature way. I'm not surprised they lacked the foresight to see that any "Dyson Sphere" that they developed would be physically compromised by the weaknesses of their own engine.

    All they did was re-skin the Khitomer Space map, added some towers and tried to pass it off as this new amazing thing. You can see that minimal thought and effort was put into it so they could get back to what really matters. Your bank accounts and extracting funds from it.
  • starkaosstarkaos Member Posts: 11,556 Arc User
    edited November 2013
    How about this;

    Cryptic are not mathematical or physical geniuses. We are talking about the SAME PEOPLE who put Dinosaurs with lasers on their heads because they thought it was "cool" in their own small and immature way. I'm not surprised they lacked the foresight to see that any "Dyson Sphere" that they developed would be physically compromised by the weaknesses of their own engine.

    All they did was re-skin the Khitomer Space map, added some towers and tried to pass it off as this new amazing thing. You can see that minimal thought and effort was put into it so they could get back to what really matters. Your bank accounts and extracting funds from it.

    This can said about Star Trek and most Science Fiction stories in general. Sometimes they luck out and something becomes possible like Cellphones. There are too many instances of Star Trek not taking itself seriously. Gangsters and TRIBBLE in space as well as Greek Gods are just a few examples. Not to mention those two races that were the same except their markings was reversed to show the stupidity of racism.
  • paxfederaticapaxfederatica Member Posts: 1,496 Arc User
    edited November 2013
    starkaos wrote: »
    This can said about Star Trek and most Science Fiction stories in general. Sometimes they luck out and something becomes possible like Cellphones. There are too many instances of Star Trek not taking itself seriously. Gangsters and TRIBBLE in space as well as Greek Gods are just a few examples. Not to mention those two races that were the same except their markings was reversed to show the stupidity of racism.

    As I like to argue, if not one, not two, but three different Star Trek series can get away with doing space-TRIBBLE episodes, then a Dyson sphere populated by dinosaurs with laser beams in the same universe doesn't seem so far-fetched.
  • knucklesstarknucklesstar Member Posts: 103 Arc User
    edited November 2013
    starkaos wrote: »
    This can said about Star Trek and most Science Fiction stories in general. Sometimes they luck out and something becomes possible like Cellphones. There are too many instances of Star Trek not taking itself seriously. Gangsters and TRIBBLE in space as well as Greek Gods are just a few examples. Not to mention those two races that were the same except their markings was reversed to show the stupidity of racism.

    Yes, lets not dare say that Cryptic actually did a bad job and out of their league with this... Oh wait... we can't can we or the Neo-Cryptic drones attack you.
  • artan42artan42 Member Posts: 10,450 Bug Hunter
    edited November 2013
    linyive wrote: »
    Second, if the 'Big Bang Theory' was definitively proven, the scientific community would no longer call it a 'theory'.

    That is not at all the definition of a Scientific Theory, look it up ;).
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  • shurato2099shurato2099 Member Posts: 588 Arc User
    edited November 2013
    hasukurobi wrote: »
    Deletia Happened.

    I am reminded of an ancient and venerable ballad which contains the sage advice:

    "If you wonder how he eats and breathes and other science facts / Tell yourself "It's just a show, I should really just relax!"
  • hevachhevach Member Posts: 2,777 Arc User
    edited November 2013
    artan42 wrote: »
    That is not at all the definition of a Scientific Theory, look it up ;).

    I'll save you the trouble, actually:

    http://science.kennesaw.edu/~rmatson/3380theory.html

    Law comes first, describing equations, ratios, constants, or general relationships seen in raw observation. Theory comes later, adding understanding and reason to law. Theory is never upgraded to law - theory requires law already in place to exist. In some cases a theory is built on certain laws and then supported by new laws, but this is not an upgrade so much as a retrofit, the new laws still fall beneath the theory they support.

    In the case of Big Bang Theory, it added understanding to such laws as the cosmological constant, Hubble's Law, and the Friedmann equations.


    One of my pet peeves: Our understanding of the universe is not lacking because it is based on theory - it is lacking because so much of it is NOT covered by theory.
  • tacofangstacofangs Member Posts: 2,951 Cryptic Developer
    edited November 2013
    reximuz wrote: »
    I'm not so sure on that, and I think you guys did a reasonable job translating it, though the distance detail is greater than it probably would be.

    In dispute of OPs point, Jupiter is 9AU from the Sun, and we can clearly see it in the night sky, so the idea that you wouldn't be able to see the opposite wall at under 2 AU is daft. I'm also going to dissagree with you however that you'd just see a solid color. While Jupiter does look like a white spec, much closer Mars looks red. I would expect that while we wouldn't be able to see as much detail as we can in game, I would also suspect that we would see at least large blobs of blue for the water and brown/green for the land, based on the massive scales we see those objects appearing in game.

    As for curvature, to me the maps look like, near the bottom where the atmosphere is, that the scattering effect eventually has the sphere fade into the "fog", and then you see the wall above the atmosphere. It doesn't seem an unresonable interpertation to me, you'd see something afterall.

    I concur that you would see something on the far wall. (I've cited Jupiter as well).
    However, what we see, is all dependent on the scale of the continents/oceans of the surface. Earth as seen from Saturn, is a blue dot. That's not just because the whole thing is so small, but because the scale of our oceans and continents at that distance are so small, that they all blur together for us in our mind. Think of it like looking at the sand on a beach. If you're close enough, each grain of sand is a different shape/color than the grain next to it. But as seen from any distance, it's basically all one color (or might have larger threads of color running through it)

    As for the last bit, yes, if you were inside the atmosphere, the atmosphere itself would cover up the transition, and you'd basically just see a wall rising in the distance (if you could make anything out on it). The problem we ran into is, if you're in space, above the atmosphere, the atmosphere wouldn't do the same thing. You'd be closer to one side of the sphere than the other, but I don't know if what you'd see is described so much as curvature, so much as distance variation.
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  • captahaabcaptahaab Member Posts: 12 Arc User
    edited November 2013
    Oh but the TV show writers in Hollywood are qualified?? Cant take you seriously at all.


    Yes, lets not dare say that Cryptic actually did a bad job and out of their league with this... Oh wait... we can't can we or the Neo-Cryptic drones attack you.
  • markhawkmanmarkhawkman Member Posts: 35,236 Arc User
    edited November 2013
    artan42 wrote: »
    That is not at all the definition of a Scientific Theory, look it up ;).
    True, the "Big Bang Theory" is a theory in name only. It's more like a half-baked hypothesis in reality.
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  • lomax6996lomax6996 Member Posts: 512 Arc User
    edited November 2013
    That's why Larry Niven later refined the Dyson Sphere concept into his Ringworld idea. A refinement of the Sphere that even Dyson acknowledged as superior. :D
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  • jonsillsjonsills Member Posts: 10,459 Arc User
    edited November 2013
    So much pedantism in this OP
    Pedantry.

    :D
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  • radagast75radagast75 Member Posts: 333 Arc User
    edited November 2013
    Most everything is scaled wrong in this game. Take earth spacedock for example. When you get to space doors with galaxy, it is too big to fit in. That station should be bigger.

    Moons and planetys are way too small and game lets you go way too close to them to the point where they just represent a size of huge asteroid, not planet.

    Moon is too close to the earth.

    Ships vary in size coimpared to shows. Look Defiant vs Sovereign for example in he beginning of "First contact" and then go to game and place them side by side.

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  • reximuzreximuz Member Posts: 1,172 Arc User
    edited November 2013
    radagast75 wrote: »
    Most everything is scaled wrong in this game. Take earth spacedock for example. When you get to space doors with galaxy, it is too big to fit in. That station should be bigger.

    Sorry, that's canon. When the Ent-A docks at ESD it barely fits in the space doors. Then ent-D docked at a different spacedock in the series.

    Most everything was scaled wrong/inconsistently in the series too, so terrible scaling is canon. ;)
  • knucklesstarknucklesstar Member Posts: 103 Arc User
    edited November 2013
    tacofangs wrote: »
    I concur that you would see something on the far wall. (I've cited Jupiter as well).
    However, what we see, is all dependent on the scale of the continents/oceans of the surface. Earth as seen from Saturn, is a blue dot. That's not just because the whole thing is so small, but because the scale of our oceans and continents at that distance are so small, that they all blur together for us in our mind. Think of it like looking at the sand on a beach. If you're close enough, each grain of sand is a different shape/color than the grain next to it. But as seen from any distance, it's basically all one color (or might have larger threads of color running through it)

    As for the last bit, yes, if you were inside the atmosphere, the atmosphere itself would cover up the transition, and you'd basically just see a wall rising in the distance (if you could make anything out on it). The problem we ran into is, if you're in space, above the atmosphere, the atmosphere wouldn't do the same thing. You'd be closer to one side of the sphere than the other, but I don't know if what you'd see is described so much as curvature, so much as distance variation.

    Is that your excuse for making the Defiant so large in this game. Nearly all the ships are completely incorrect in both size and dare I say it, function too. So I didn't expect much from the Dyson Sphere. Just some of the usual disappointment and anger at why CBS hasn't stepped in to slap you people for ruining the franchise more then JJ did. Seriously, at least Activision make an effort.
  • talonxvtalonxv Member Posts: 4,257 Arc User
    edited November 2013
    reximuz wrote: »
    Sorry, that's canon. When the Ent-A docks at ESD it barely fits in the space doors. Then ent-D docked at a different spacedock in the series.

    Most everything was scaled wrong/inconsistently in the series too, so terrible scaling is canon. ;)

    Nope earth space dock. Don't believe me, first season IIRC, enterprise D was in THE earth spacedock, was stolen right out of space dock and warped away from earth.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhiSKHlkXIs
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  • knucklesstarknucklesstar Member Posts: 103 Arc User
    edited November 2013
    talonxv wrote: »
    Nope earth space dock. Don't believe me, first season IIRC, enterprise D was in THE earth spacedock, was stolen right out of space dock and warped away from earth.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhiSKHlkXIs

    That wasn't Earth Spacedock, that was Starbase 74 which is also an Ournal Class Starbase of similar design to the one used at Earth Spacedock. That was also not Earth but Tarses III

    The episode you are referring to is

    http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/11001001_(episode)

    Sorry, hated to sound like a pompous twit but I just wanted to back up what you were saying with some additional information.
  • radagast75radagast75 Member Posts: 333 Arc User
    edited November 2013
    Size is here a bit smaller than earths orbit on the sun.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECLvFLkvY7Y

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    http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
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  • tacofangstacofangs Member Posts: 2,951 Cryptic Developer
    edited November 2013
    Is that your excuse for making the Defiant so large in this game. Nearly all the ships are completely incorrect in both size and dare I say it, function too. So I didn't expect much from the Dyson Sphere. Just some of the usual disappointment and anger at why CBS hasn't stepped in to slap you people for ruining the franchise more then JJ did. Seriously, at least Activision make an effort.

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  • macroniusmacronius Member Posts: 2,526
    edited November 2013
    tacofangs wrote: »

    Taco ... you don't have to be so defensive. I like that DS9 looks like it is about the size of the death star. "... that's no moon ..." :D
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  • azurianstarazurianstar Member Posts: 6,985 Arc User
    edited November 2013
    tacofangs wrote: »

    Seriously, you guys need to make an FAQ.
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