Superconductors on the outer edge, where it's nice and chilly?
Assuming a multiple section sphere, I suppose eventually you'd have to go with some sort of wireless transmission to get between sections, probably pulsed lasers to reduce power loss over distance, unless there is a more safe option. Each section would have to retarget to the next nearest section as the current nearest section orbited out of range...

Pulsed lasers would be fine, as safety is already an issue.
You are very, very close to a Sun.
Lasers are the least of your troubles, right?

Grif, no offense man, but you seem to seriously not be grasping the kind of Dyson sphere we're talking about, since you've been informed multiple times that a "sphere" (don't take the term literally) of a collection of individual satellites with plenty of space in between them would probably be perfectly feasible, but you keep talking about a fully solid sphere with no gaps, which is specifically a Dyson shell (just one type of Dyson sphere). Nobody said that the dyson sphere is something that civilzation has to physically live in or on. We can all stay on Earth, and the area outside of the "sphere" will still have plenty of light escaping to it.

These images from Wikipedia pretty much illustrate what we're talking about, if you consider each dot being an individual sattelite:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dyson_Ring.PNG
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dyson_Swarm.png
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dyson_Bubble.png
Heck, even the ring would probably generate a sufficient amount of energy, and that would hardly make the area outside uninhabitable. Nor would it be particularly hard to create, given enough time.

A major point just brought up that might be an issue in some misunderstandings is the fact that current common energy transfer technologies wouldn't really help out with transferring energy between the satellites and Earth (or wherever else needs power). Obviously, we're not stringing cables between the satellites and planets. There are possible methods of wireless energy transfer though: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_p ... ansmission


Humanity doesn't need a lot of things. Like that's ever stopped us. Though as in my above example, you don't necessarily need a whole sphere to catch every possible ray, so we probably wouldn't make something on that ridiculous of a scale if we don't have to.

See, I'm still on Dyson shells (if you require specification) because if we're making something as ridiculously massive as a bubble/swarm then we've obviously got a tremendous amount of some ungodly material, which lends me to think that acquiring matter is not the issue.

If you've got the resources to build a dyson ring why not futureproof to a dyson shell? You get massive increases in power generation, and no one's saying you have to build it all at once. Hell, you could put the planet just inside it (relatively) if you want to keep it, but habitation along the sphere is going to be a necessity from a practical standpoint just in order to repair it.

Unless you retrofit the orbit of the Earth/the rotation of the shell to make a stop on each part within a convenient span of time, but reworking orbital mechanics is probably somewhat outside our scale.

Again, it's not that I'm not grasping that you're not referring to a Dyson shell, it's just that downscaling an idea that massive would be somewhat like drafting the Sistine chapel, then cutting little circular bits out of it and only building those.
Take those links you posted, positing roughly circular "stations" around the sun. Well, first off, they're all going to need propulsion forward, and something that doesn't require fuel. Ion power's going to have to get a hell of a lot better, I guess. Now, each of those is visible, easily, from a distance that renders the "sun" well inside the gap. That means each of those is clearly larger than the entire surface area of the ENTIRE EARTH, and probably close to Jupiter's (if not larger).

We could mine every scrap of material out of the asteroid belts, collect heavier metals from Jupiter's atmosphere, dissolve Venus and Mars, and still not have close to enough material for a swarm.

Also, having habitats directly on the station neatly solves the problem of power transmission.

Likely it would be constructed over a period of hundreds of years, with new settlements slotting into predefined orbits calculated to produce a Dyson swarm after enough settlements. I imagine by the time we can construct such large structures we'll have discovered some way of procuring sufficient material to build the entirety of it. Perhaps robotic mining ships sent out at near-C to nearby systems.

I thought you were arguing against a shell the whole time, since there's no way to make something that big structurally sound, like you said. Which I agree with. Now you're confusing me.


And we'd have enough for a dyson shell? Also, I don't think the individual satellites would have to be as big as you say. I'd think they'd maybe be around the size of a terrestrial solar panel field, and even somewhat bigger than that wouldn't be even approaching the scale you suggest would be necessary. The fact that they would get sunlight 24/7, and there'd be many of them, would make up for each one's small size. I would hope anyway. Plus the small size would require less energy to maneuver them, and hopefully routing some of the power earned from the solar collection into some kind of thrust system would be feasible.

I agree on there being habitats on the stations though. Heck, it'd be an excuse to make them bigger, probably. Still not planet-sized though. I'd say it'd probably be the population of a large city, kinda like space colonies in Gundam.

Can't we just put some smaller planet like Mercury in a giant furnace and call it a day?

what would that achieve?
we're talking about dissolving planets for material and you decide you want to combust some of that material?
this would be pretty neat. or even just swarms of planet dissolving drones with pretty kickass matter compression systems.
sorry if any of that is malformulated, i've just realised that i have less than two hours to get my contest entry in. commence head explosion O_.

Oooh! I forgot about the contest! JOY!

The major reason I chose a mining ship (which in my mind is like a big barge with littler ships that actually do the mining and dump into the barge) over individual drones is that you have to get back somehow with the material, and it looks like Ion drives (most economical right now) do best when in very large groups. A large barge would be able to mount a larger reactor and thus larger and larger numbers of drives compared to a singular drone.

Nothing runs quite like a dyson! (i'm sure some idiot had already said this.)

no

you are the first idiot to say that

Also, I love von Neumann probes for interstellar exploration

Darlos, basically my argument is that if we've got the tech to build massive orbital solar platforms we've got the tech to make a whole shitload of them. I really don't think the cost to benefit ratio of an orbital solar platform is going to be make it more worthwhile than developing things on Earth until A: we need an utterly insane amount of power or B: we solve the cost problem.

I'm... still confused as to where you stand on this Grif. You keep changing up your commentary.

"Darlos, basically my argument is that if we've got the tech to build massive orbital solar platforms we've got the tech to make a whole shitload of them."

This statement is confusing. Earlier you seemed to be arguing FOR a Dyson shell. Now you seem to be saying "if you can make one solar platform, you can make many." Which sounds more like a Dyson ring/swarm/bubble. And is also what I was arguing for, and therefor isn't contradictory. Unless I'm misunderstanding somewhere. And I'm actually pretty certain I'm misunderstanding somewhere.

As for energy requirements, it's not just an issue of an amount of energy. There's also all of the environmental and political issues that it could potentially solve. No more reliance on coal and oil? Awesome. No pollution due to burning oil products, or disposing of nuclear fuel? Even awesomer. There are a variety of benefits.

Though as the population increases and more of humanity gets up to speed on technology, there will be both population and energy consumption issues (both primary and secondary). These solar platforms, as I described earlier, could address both problems at once, since they could also potentially provide living space.

He's saying that if you have the technology and resources to make a Dyson Ring (Which is already far outdside of our abilities right now), Then you probably have the ability to make an entire shell. So, why not just do that and future-proof yourself?

I was thinking a dyson ring could be relatively low cost way to amplify power production if it was slowly projected out from our planet, keeping the same orbit as us but behind or ahead of us. This would keep the 1AU thing going comfortably, and would mean we A: wouldnt have to destroy the planet B: wouldnt have to burn too many resources, as we're just producing a ring, rather than a swarm or shell or whatever and C: would produce a ♥♥♥♥ more energy than we could on our planet normally. The power output could be pretty quickly relayed back to the planet for use (well, at most in just over 26 minutes on average (pi * (1AU in light minutes)), so about half an hour with some latency from the furthest collecting satellite), or used on the colonies on each of the collectors for their own needs. Meh, I just thought it could be better/more currently feasible than going straight to "lets make a swarm", but we are talking "THE FUTURE" so its not really that much of an important argument.
I think the reason I like this discussion is partially due to how cool it all is. Especially the fact that it makes ideas like trade between colonies with mass drivers and energy to matter converters and heck, just megascale engineering feasible. Its just fun. So thank you, gentlemen.