Mega-structure and massive engineering/architecture thread

got to love a big dumb object

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Google KIC 8462852 or Tabby's Star
Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction

Thanks man I'll absolutely be doing that.

Someone out there is constructing a Dyson Swarm.

Our only hope is that we are too far away and insignificant to bother them.

Hold me I'm fucking terrified.

If it helps you sleep at night they are 1500 light years away so probably not too much to worry about

Of course, we're also seeing them at the technological level they achieved 1500 years ago. Who knows how advanced they are now?

It might help more to mention that a bunch of people have already worked out what type of long-wavelength emission you would expect to see from a Dyson swarm (the results are very generic: they come from elementary thermodynamics). Occasionally you'll see post-docs who don't care about getting faculty positions doing surveys to try to find them.

They looked for this characteristic emission around Tabby's star and didn't find it. The leading candidate right now is that it's some sort of complicated ISM process.

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>Starship size comparison chart
>Great A'Tuin

Best chart ever!

The KIC pattern isn't unique anymore either. A similar (if not identical) phenomenon was recently detected at EPIC 204278916.

I'll still hold to the idea we're looking at an artificial object when it comes to Tabby's star there's just too much weird shit around all that not to be raising some eyebrows. That said it makes me really want to do a space opera-ish game where the party stumbles across an abandoned stellar object ala Rendezvous with Rama

youtube.com/watch?v=XEDR-G2EDRM

As much as I'd like that to be true, it's more likely to be a quirk of our evolving detection technology. Much like the way pulsars freaked out the first radio telescope listeners, these light-dipping phenomenons will prove to be some natural occurrence we yet to understand.

Yeah I know, has there been anymore about that Russian Radio signal that got picked up a few years back?

Isn't Great A'Tuin not shown to scale, though? I don't know how far across the Disc is, since it's left intentionally vague by Pratchett, but it should have a diameter about equal to that of Earth, right?

That should make it significantly larger than Unicron, who is smaller than Cybertron, which is itself only *generously* around the size of Earth's moon.

tfwiki.net/wiki/Scale#Planets_and_planetbots

(and that's extremely generous; Cybertron is in all likelihood more like a few hundred kilometers across, max)

Why is space station Liberty listed as being from Legend of the Galactic Heroes?

Also
>Gandam instead of Gundam.
>Sovereing class = Sovereign
>The Hitchhiker's Guide Tu The Galaxy

Which now that I think about it means that Unicron is wildly out of scale, too. He was smaller or at most around the same size as Cybertron; certainly Cybertron was too large for him to eat, given that his mouth could only just fit two of Cybertron's moons, themselves notably smaller than Cybertron itself.

Now I find myself calling that entire chart into question.

We aren't so far away from building our own Dyson Swarm. A few hundred years, and we will have the nanotechnology necessary to take Mercury and rip it apart to build a swarm.

Alien civilisations don't make these because it is easier to build a partial one to power manufacture Kugelblitz (artificial proton-sized Black Hole for power source made with Gamma Lasers).

I think you seriously overestimate our technological prowess there bud, more likely we're nearing the point of energetic collapse and will settle down to a lower level of energy use in the coming centuries.

Mercury dindu nuffin though.

Nice try, Mercury. I'm afraid you have outlived your usefulness.

>more likely we're nearing the point of energetic collapse and will settle down to a lower level of energy use in the coming centuries.
That seems somewhat unlikely, given the near-monotonic rise of energy consumption per person since the industrial revolution.

You leave Mercury alone you bully! Sure he isn't the biggest guy, and no one would claim that he's the life of the party, but he's always been there for me!

Take Pluto instead. Not even a planet.

Toe the line Venus or you're next. Don't tread on Earth!

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Anybody got anything for a layered sphere shellworld type thing? I forget the actual word for it.

It's called a Shellworld.
Go to orionsarm.com/eg-article/47856a978e732 , there's quite a bit of cool stuff on that website.

Rama is my megastructurefu.

Isn't that the setting with the mary sue magic god AIs and other dumb bullshit that tries to sell itself as the best hard sci-fi ever.

Man I love Blame, would have been better as an art book and not an actual manga though

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>THIS IS MY TOY
>NO IT'S MINE

Not as good as ringworld

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Why? Or are you talking about the literary merits of the books themselves.

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thats the most likely cause of the collapse, ever increasing consumption causing war as we run out of old resources (oil, freshwater, farmland) before implementing enough new tech (nuclear, "green energy", good enough batteries, hydroponic tanks for prole chum)

pretty much this. I'd like to pretend we're gonna have a glorious shining future but...humanity has shown anything but. Though a post-apoc setting I've been working on Humanity got a bit further than we are particularly in genetic engineering before it finally collapsed and had several colonies on the Moon and Mars of which the moon colony periodically comes down to investigate how Earth is doing, leading to tales of 'strange hairless figured with beautiful features and porcelain skin'

Niven is an engineer, ring world's ring is just so much better- in scope, depth and ingenuity. The day night cycle created by giant solar panels bound by near unbreakable wire is just fantastic

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>Now I find myself calling that entire chart into question.
>some geek randomly cut out pictures of his favorite space shit and called it "to scale"
>nobody except this guy notices or cares
>stay lonely, friend

Maybe if you notice that everything in the upper right corner is labeled "Overscaled Objects Not Included in Chart". You can easily tell by looking at the sizes listed for those objects that they are much, much larger than the things in the rest of the picture.

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A spare japan, just in case

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I remember than manga, it's premise was very good.

Where did it go wrong?

How would the gravity on that thing feel?

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There are ringworlds in the Culture. Orbitals are just one of the megastructures they build.

There are even ringworlds made by aquatic species that are made out of water filled tubes.

I looked that up the other day, it's supposed to be the sorta-homeworld (as in the place where their civilization is based, not where it's from) of the Forerunners from Halo.

This almost fits considering the feeling it inspires with you having to fight it on foot, especially after it extends its massive GENOCIDE GUN.

These are all retarded fan ships aren't they? What are they doing on the image.

Dude
Helium 3

That doesn't have the feeling of a 'worldship', it seems more just like a regular space station they randomly SCALED THE FUCK UP for shallow impact

Of course
>Comicbook writers/artists
>Having any understanding of scale

He stole that idea from Halo.

>Dune: Brian Herbert
BAKA

Dude has anyone made a working and stable fusion reactor with a positive output?

Probably about the same.

You're only going to start building stellar-scale structures if you've reached an absolute technological plateau.

Have some 18th century mega-structure designs.

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It's on sale on steam right now.

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How would that have a day-night cycle?

It really wouldn't. However, you could have massive plates orbiting the sun that block light to simulate a day/night cycle.

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Serious question: is there ever actually a reason to build a megastructure other than galactic dick-waving?

I get that a dyson sphere can harness all of that starts output energy, but since when is that something anyone wants or needs to do? You also set yourself up to get royally fucked the moment the star has any kind of traditional solar activity. You get 100% of the solar power, but you eat 100% of the coronal mass ejection to the face too.

Building a ringworld? If you have that technology, why are you not just terraforming planets? Seems less effort, and cheaper too.

Fancy space stations are nice, but megatructures usually reach the point where they outstrip any kind of conceivable practicality.

actual dyson spheres would be built considerable distance away from the stars and require massive amounts of material. The reason to build them is to enable any project with significant power consumption - for example, communication with far-away systems with a reasonable margin of success.

This video actually explains it.
youtube.com/watch?v=VNqNnUJVcVs

Matter efficiency. Iain M. Banks said that for one planet the size of Earth, they would be able to build 1500 Orbitals with the same amount of material, each one with a surface area twenty times that of Earth.

Most likely false in one way or another but because they sat on it the best we can do is waste one or two dishes on permanent monitoring status in the unlikely event it ever happens again.

is that a plateau though?

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You ever just get tired of the dickwaving in science fiction?

I'd say galactic dick waving is a perfectly valid reason.

No?

newton's tomb fucking cool

>cyberpunk as fuck before electricity has even been invented

>there is an alternate universe in which the Chicago lakefront was replaced with a kilometer-high Illuminati monument