Attacking Darius:

munroburton wrote:
And the HV doesn't have a power source problem. They get more than enough from fusion, solar and warshawski sails in grav waves. Raw resources are still their development bottleneck, perhaps due to a lack of specific technology. I'm not sure why they can't or don't crack Mercury-type planets open and mine them yet.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

cthia wrote:They could have built a Dyson sphere or some function of it. Costly, yes. Very costly. And unlikely. But I never boarded the bus that the MA were financially hamstrung. When you are tapping into your neighbor's energy grid, the cost of energy doesn't matter. The MA may have been channeling funds and materials from the wasteful SL for centuries. And the RF systems may have been sending unfettered funds home unchecked for centuries as well.

A Dyson sphere or swarm actually pays for itself in the medium-term. You do need a large, initial capital investment, in the form of equipment to create the first solar energy collectors (which includes cloud scoops to fuel the ships necessary to move the ore in and collectors out). But once a sufficient number of them are in place that they can supply the factory itself with a surplus of power, it's a runaway process. The surplus of energy can be sold or be used to create other things that can be sold. This surplus therefore pays for the salaries of any workers you need, assuming the whole process isn't automated.

The surplus of energy can be so great that can use it in energy-inefficient processes, like creating anti-matter in large particle accelerators. Provided you have a safe way of handling it, you could sell it to power ships and weapons. Even if not, the surplus of energy brings the cost of energy down (supply & demand), which means every single energy-intensive process is cheap, which lowers the cost of almost everything tangible. That has a cascading effect in the economy, since now you can provide for a high quality of life to everyone at minimal cost.

This is what futurist Isaac Arthur called the "Dyson Dilemma": if Dyson spheres (or swarms) are inevitable, why do we still see any stars at all?

None of this is likely to happen in the HV, though. If any system would have created a swarm of energy collectors, it would have been Sol, followed by Sigma Draconis, the oldest settled colony. That hasn't happened. And I made this point earlier in this thread: no system in the HV has had this incredible exponential industrial and population growth that is possible, so Darius won't either. Something is holding the growth in check and I suspect it's simply the Author's Silver Hammer (read: we won't get an explanation).

Especially since the MAlign and Manpower were using capital-inefficient processes like slavery. They're not interested.

cthia wrote:In the HV the obvious thing that would be holding such a project back is war. I would imagine such a project would place a huge drain on All of a system's resources; its economy, infrastructure, R&D and manpower. Endless wars would be a total drain on all of that. But the nail in the coffin would be the destruction caused by your enemy. If the MBS would have been 75% complete in building a Dyson sphere, Oyster Bay would have been crippling. I can't see a system that is constantly at war being able to build a centuries long project. Which is why I suggested the MA, who have never been in a war. And since they are hidden, they don't have an ominous cloud hanging over their heads.

It would be like the Tower of Babel being destroyed by God.

Or, remember when you and a sibling worked on a sand castle all day long at the beach, then high tide or some very malignant kids laugh at your effort.

Jonathan_S wrote:

cthia wrote:In the HV the obvious thing that would be holding such a project back is war. I would imagine such a project would place a huge drain on All of a system's resources; its economy, infrastructure, R&D and manpower. Endless wars would be a total drain on all of that. But the nail in the coffin would be the destruction caused by your enemy. If the MBS would have been 75% complete in building a Dyson sphere, Oyster Bay would have been crippling. I can't see a system that is constantly at war being able to build a centuries long project. Which is why I suggested the MA, who have never been in a war. And since they are hidden, they don't have an ominous cloud hanging over their heads.

It would be like the Tower of Babel being destroyed by God.

Or, remember when you and a sibling worked on a sand castle all day long at the beach, then high tide or some very malignant kids laugh at your effort.

Oyster Bay didn't bring a fraction of the firepower needed to break up a 75% complete Dyson Sphere. Probably the most destructive attacks they could have done would be to either impact it kinetically at very high frac-c speeds, or else run a wedge along it for the minutes a missile's lasts (though both would require the missile be visible for long enough for anti-missile fire to have reasonable chances of countering it) But even if every single Cataphract they'd brought punched out the volume of an entire planet it'd be a negligible impact on the sphere as a whole.

Though one HV downside of such a large structure is that it's far, far, too large to protect by any type of sidewall. (They can't even project a spherical sidewall around a small moon; so even a Death Star sized object would be exposed -- much less a dyson sphere that's millions of times larger) That means that, while it is vast beyond comprehension, and so you should be afford to lose large parts of it, any particular part of it is less protected than a station that's a few km across.


Still, if Manticore had a Dyson sphere that far along presumably they'd have dispersed manufacturing and yards among the unimaginable volume of such a mega-construct. (Not to mention studded it with sensors, CMs, PDLCs, etc.) They'd therefore have lost a far lower percentage of their industrial base even if the volume devastated was hundreds of times higher.

cthia wrote:Agreed about Oyster Bay, but that attack merely served up oysters on a half shell. If a Dyson sphere had been that far along, then the purpose of 100 Spiders crawling around invisibly in that neck of the woods would have been obvious. And devastating.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

cthia wrote:Agreed about Oyster Bay, but that attack merely served up oysters on a half shell. If a Dyson sphere had been that far along, then the purpose of 100 Spiders crawling around invisibly in that neck of the woods would have been obvious. And devastating.

And nothing more than a tiny spider bite.

Freeman Dyson never suggested building a solid shell. That's nonsense from sci-fi writers. That's why I keep saying "sphere/swarm," to mean what Dyson really meant. If Manticore had a 1%-built Dyson swarm, that would be so many platforms and habitats that 100 LDs couldn't destroy a fraction of them before being intercepted. Destroying one does not affect the others, aside from maybe a Kessler Syndrome like the Yawata Strike was. Though such a system would probably have tools to deal with debris (then again, so should have Manticore).

A c-fractional strike wouldn't do much either. By definition, that would go in a straight line and catch no more collectors/habitats than its cross-section could strike, plus again Kessler.

Jonathan_S wrote:But even if they'd postponed until the Lenny Dets were avalible, even 100 of those likely don't have the depth of magazines to kill any significant part of a Dyson sphere/swarm. Though if they can keep sneaking into attack range undetected they might eventually be able to wear it away -- though given the 6 month insertion cycle it should only take them a couple centuries to do so

Jonathan_S wrote:But even if they'd postponed until the Lenny Dets were avalible, even 100 of those likely don't have the depth of magazines to kill any significant part of a Dyson sphere/swarm. Though if they can keep sneaking into attack range undetected they might eventually be able to wear it away -- though given the 6 month insertion cycle it should only take them a couple centuries to do so

kzt wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:But even if they'd postponed until the Lenny Dets were avalible, even 100 of those likely don't have the depth of magazines to kill any significant part of a Dyson sphere/swarm. Though if they can keep sneaking into attack range undetected they might eventually be able to wear it away -- though given the 6 month insertion cycle it should only take them a couple centuries to do so

Dyson spheres are likely going to be outside the hyperlimit. So you can just pop out of hyper and run over the swarm with your wedge until someone shows up to object. Then you drop back into hyper to reset.

Hmm, maybe that's why nobody has built one?

Jonathan_S wrote:

kzt wrote:Dyson spheres are likely going to be outside the hyperlimit. So you can just pop out of hyper and run over the swarm with your wedge until someone shows up to object. Then you drop back into hyper to reset.

Hmm, maybe that's why nobody has built one?

Why would they be that big? Most of the ones I've read about in sci-fi are 1 - 2 AU in radius; and even a 2 AU radius sphere/swarm would be inside the hyper limit of any G-class or larger star. (And a 1 AU radius would be inside the hyper limit of anything on the table except an Red Giant; a very low mass end of life star)


Plus it'd seem fairly crazy not to put defenses on / around such a mega construction - so there might be missiles already within range to object to your sideswiping it with your wedge (meaning you'd die before your hyper generator could recover to let you hyper out)


Finally, I don't know how such a massive shell of an object might create it's own local hyper limit. On the one hand it's got more mass than any single gas giant; and those create small hyper limits. But on the other that mass is concentrated around it's exterior, with the central section being left free for the star. It hyper limits always form from the center of mass, no matter the shape, then that would be centered on the star, and so it might just sum those masses making for a marginally larger hyper limit, or it might create some weird "hollow" hyper limit a short distance out from the inside and outside of the shell. (But if it is / can be outside the hyper limit that brings up the weird visual of ships hypering in within the [empty space] volume enclose within the sphere/swarm)