Megastructure thread

if you want to go over the top with scale, but also don't want the vast majority of your universe go to waste, travel has to be over the top as well.
teleportation, either by technological or biological means, should be a thing in your setting.
just an idea.
also, that ringworld-ship thing just blew my mind, looks awesome

might go with Tiger Tiger style psychic teleportation, or commonplace wormholes as doorways

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What Yes album is this?

The one where they want more money than the homeworld remaster cost.

I was autistic enough to replace the new credits theme with the Yes song in the game files before playing the game.

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>tfw the new citadel still has just one nightclub

>What are good ways to give players agency in a setting of cosmic sized structures and massive infrastructure short of giving them civilizations or gods to toss around?
What are good ways to give players agency in a setting where immense celestial bodies orbit a supermassive black hole (called planets and suns and the Galactic Core) without giving them the ability to throw planets around?

Because that's real life and most people say that humans have agency.

>Because that's real life and most people say that humans have agency.
how silly most people are

Doesn't deserve it's own thread, so I'll do it here.

Has anyone ever had a campaign, SciFi or otherwise, on a ringworld? How did it go? Were there any aspects of it you found more interesting than others? Thinking of drawing up a map and running a dee en dee 5e campaign on one.

>Because that's real life and most people say that humans have agency.
Only on Earth; on a galactic scale, humans are nothing more than dust.

Do people develop until the time of the campaign on the ring or do people get to the ring? I think that's an important question to ask, because each option sets up the world in entirely different ways.

>Only on Earth; on a galactic scale, humans are nothing more than dust.
Just because humans are nothing more than dust, it doesn't mean they can achieve nothing.

A single human, if virtually immortal, can take apart a megastructure by hand if necessary. It just takes time. Imagine if that single human could inspire a billion more.

Humans already have agency over human issues. To be a galactic player simply make the players super long lived, or have them command whole planets of humans.

I've had ringworlds in a Traveller game; they treated some as dangerous alien artifacts, others as just another starport.
If you are running 5e, the biggest concern is the in-world justification and your players trying to turn it into a sci-fi game.

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I think I want people to have been put there by the gods, but that was so long ago that not even the elves remember. So, their ancestors started with basic medieval knowledge and it didn't advance very far.

My justification that it was an ark created by the gods as the world faced apocalypse. It orbits that now completely ruined and nearly uninhabited world. So instead of a big metal space ring, it's a big rune-encrusted stone ring.

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I had a dark heresey game set in a ripoff of the virga/sun of sons world. Good series. Every town is a ring world stuck in ait currents around a sun, either the one at the heart of the planet, or smaller ones that tech priests still know how to make
The central sun makes huge EMI so tech doesnt work right.

Went pretty great except I made dm mistakes, like I could t figure out how to challenge an ascension level party. I think they enjoyed the setting and story telling though.

So its going to be regular fantasy on a very stretched out map and with weird cosmology?

Take notes from Ringworld and give them a simple objective that doesn't stretch across the entirety of the megastructure, like just getting off the thing and back to wherever they came from.

I'm thinking adding a little magic tech. Think on the same level as the first Jak and Daxter game. Otherwise, yeah.

Related question: How do you make the megastructure itself matter? I always end up running an otherwise normal campaign that just has a few setting notes that mention the difference.

I did a game in an original setting that was a big water map with two medium sized continents and one Island. Under the Island was a deep temple with "odd orb golems that crackled with arcane power" and at the bottom they went through a ring filled, with as one player put, "so it looks like a stargate" ripply puddle thing. It was actually a decontamination feild and they thought they'd gone through a portal until they got on an elemental powered lightning train that took them out under the continents through tunnels and then looped up over the world which it turned out was a inside a dome inside a world ship that had become adrift in space populated by mutants and zombies that where all that remained of the original crew not in stasis. They wound up having to wake up some stasis aliens and have them clear the upper decks so they could reach the bridge and get the aliens to re-start Sun.exe since they originally started out investigating the "Sun Temple because the length of days was getting out of sync. The Aliens shocked that their systems had been offline and they'd missed their destination by like a hundred thousand years and that their lower crewmen who'd become trapped in the lower levels had devolved and that their habitat pods that where basically giant Zoos had all evolved into civilizations. The idea was that they'd recruit the players and any of the people from their "planet" (in secret via a program akin to the Men in Black where if they leave they get mind blanked) that might be interested in helping them investigate the massive ship and check on what all had happened while the Aliens where asleep since they only had access to the very top command bridge and the rest of the ship was lost to coms and probes and filled with crazy things that where likely hostile or rogue robots/droids or the other world domes. My players had a lot of fun but one died in a car wreck and one moved and then I moved. I've been considering rewriting it for 5e though.

Not sure if this is the right place to ask, but I've been wondering for a while.

If someone succesfully builds a Dyson Sphere, would it have it's own gravity, so that when you walk on it's surface, the sun in the center is "down"? Or would it all be centrifugal force? So that you walk on the inside of the surface, and the sun is "up" while the void of space outside is "down"?

What if the Dyson Sphere rotated around the sun, same as planets do? Would gravity/centrifugal force be stronger around the equator? Or near the top and bottom? Weaker?

>can't unsee giant penis and balls

Thanks user, I really needed that.

So basically it went from Not-LotR to Not-Star Treck to Not-Space Hulk. You could probabbly also have mini-campaigns in untouched Hive City levels that have been maigntained by automated drones and space-roombas and where fine until you turned the power back on and let in ghoulish zombiens from conecting tunnels and insane mutants and cultists if you wanted a semi-self contained Mall Horror/Undead Nightmare Survival game possibly with recently awakened cryo-sleep Aliens that you need to rescue. Alien Space Dead Rising. Alternatively have the other World Domes be more/less advanced or post-Apoc or have encounters with other Dome Worlders be they good or bad. World Domes could be other "Planes" as well with Teleportaion/Plane Shift magic just being accidentally tapping into the ships haywire Teleporters. Magic could also just be manipulatin the ship's atmosphere or gravity. There's always options for entire flooded Ship Sections for Underwater campaigns, or Space Walks on the hull in Hi-Tech space suits, or a combo of Necklaces of Breath, and Rings Against Pressure and Cold/Heat if you want a low-tech Magical alternative.

>i.imgur.com/RXuSpLf.png
Scribbled down a rudimentary map in paint. Might be a pain in the ass to read since there's really no good way to draw a halo in 2D. I'm thinking of making it so that travel is a clusterfuck since there's an expansive desert and a iceberg-infested frozen sector blocking round-the-world ocean travel, and seeing races other than the ones in your little segment is uncommon. Plot will revolve around reactivating "waystations", which are basically derelict warp points. Doing so would allow the world to free up inter-continental trade and stuff, and maybe one of them holds the key to getting back to their old planet since the apocalypse has long since passed.

Limited building space and conflicts that leads to. Pollution patterns matter more and are more predictable.

Aging structure needs maintenance
Any age structure put off balance by human actions like war or other construction projects.

Ancient structure has high tech to harvest, or too much is harvested and it starts to fail.

Structure needs to be adjusted to compensate for sun or orbit changes or asteroid impacts.

I prefer the idea of a person being in multiple places at once. They take a sample of their DNA, and send it to the distant reaches of the galaxy, where their brain and spinal column are cloned. Then they have a super cool cyborg body built for them around it.

When original, or Body A is sleeping, it's hooked up to some machine that allows the consciousness to integrate fully with the second, or Body B. All of it's recent memories are fully downloaded, and Body B moves around and interacts in real time. And then when Body B sleeps, Body A is up and moving around. So basically, a single consciousness, but two separate bodies, in two separate parts of the galaxy. Although technically, each body is asleep, what you get in effect is a single person who is up and running 24/7. Plus, assassination attempts would be ridiculously impossible, because you'd have to coordinate them to perfection and kill both bodies at once. Literally within the same second. Otherwise, the third body, Body C, simply comes online and the owner of all three bodies is fucking pissed.

The real question is, what is all of the plant and animal life going to be like without darkness?

Fucking hell, that could make good inspiration for the gravity mines of Manifold's streamers. I need to take another look at Blame sometime.

Fair enough, but that's not true of current humans, now is it?
It also remains to be seen whether mortality is a necessary part of the human condition.

I've worked that out. The ring orbits a planet much like our own moon. The sun is regularly eclipsed by that larger planet, creating a night much like our own. Only the entire setting is plunged into night at once, instead of half-off half-on like Earth.

One of the largest issues with human biological immortality is that our perception of time gets slightly faster as we age. This is already perceptible when you're more than 18 years old, if humans ever become biologically immortal we'd need to free up space in our brain somehow, or else our perception of the passage of the time will just get faster and faster.

It's all in the description. Use the massiveness of the megastructures to add to the plot and story development. Don't make something up, and then throw in megastructures. Make megastructures and add people onto it.

Like, there is a city, a human city, but they all migrated there. The human city is housed within what USED to be a palace. The entire palace is large enough that it houses the equivalent number of people that live in New York, or Hollywood. Not only that, but the palace is so huge that what used to be it's courtyards and ornamental gardens/fishponds are now farming plots that can reasonably supply the entire city, it's almost entirely self sufficient.

But here's the real twist, that palace ALSO had a wall and moat and shit, equally huge and in proportion. And a few generations after the first ancestors settled the palace, a new group of people came in and settled the wall/moat. These people are fishermen, sailors, and in equal numbers.

The first group tried to kick them out, but then realized too late that they are literally surrounded by newcomers. Who are now incredibly hostile after being attacked for virtually no reason. Now the palace people are basically forced to trade and make nice with the wall/moat people.

The palace people trade cloth, wood, fruit, vegetables, flour, wheat, and other farm stuff. While the wall/moat people trade fish, lobster, turtle, edible seaweeds, salt, coral (it can be carved just like stone once dead, but it also grows so it's a renewable resource) clams/oysters, etc.

Here's a diagram from the authors website Karl Schroeder.

It's a hollow planet, not a dyson so here, it's like mars sized I thbo? But you live on the inside in a breathable atmosphere. Only comparatively few people live on the surface because it's so far away from the heart of the planet that provides the majority of the heat and light for the planet. More distant from the heart you will find nations built around smaller more recently made stars.

>If someone succesfully builds a Dyson Sphere, would it have it's own gravity, so that when you walk on it's surface, the sun in the center is "down"? Or would it all be centrifugal force? So that you walk on the inside of the surface, and the sun is "up" while the void of space outside is "down"?
IIRC, an interesting thing about rings is that when inside them at any point, the gravity is net-zero; same goes for hollow spheres.

All "gravity" would be centripetal.

Is that really such a bad thing, however? When you live for thousands and thousands of years, is it bad that you can't remember a specific day or week?
As the perception of time grows, wouldn't as well our base "unit" of time?

So the sun would be "up" and the outside, space, would be "down"?

Correct, assuming the structure was rotating fast enough.

Another thing to note is that in a dyson sphere, only the equatorial region would actually be habitable (equivalent to a dyson ring). Everywhere else would be for energy collection.

>jak and daxter

Mah nigga

I know that's not what the picture is showing, but looking at it now, I want to make a setting with a dozen or so concentric ringworlds around a sun that spin like a gyroscope, where you can only travel between them at certain dates when they almost intersect.
And each ring is dominated by a particular sentient species, each of which is at about our present technological level (enough to send a shuttle across close rings), or there's some kind of transport built in. All the inhabitants of the rings are awaiting the moment that the rings finally reach perfect alignment for a brief instant. Every race has a different prominent myth about what will happen on that day, some thousands of years in the future.
And it's called the Sudarshana.

Now is when somebody tells me that it's not physically possible on the planetary scale.

In the book Ringworld, at least, there are a bunch of huge squares strung together closer to the sun, that provide night cycles for the inhabitants.
The downside is that there's no gradient to night, it just suddenly pops up on you. One character freaks out when she starts working at noon, works for four back-breaking hours, and when she looks up it's still noon.

Why only the equator? Since it's a sphere, no single part of it would be any closer or farther away from the sun than any other, right?

Or are stars not a perfect orb, but rather an oval or some such?

Because you can only rotate a sphere one way. Once you move towards either pole, gravity starts to fall off.

What if it was divided into sections, all interlocked with each other, so instead of being one solid sphere, it's actually many separate rings, with both of the poles being discs? And the rings alternate, between power and habitats.

Then you'd need to have the entire structure rotating another way, in addition to each individual ring spinning for its own gravity, to keep the spinning rings that are not centered on the sun in orbit.

The rings closer to the poles need to spin faster to create the same apparent gravity

Thanks for your input, would it be better to have the edges of the rings covered in magnets, sort of like those super fast hover trains, or would it be better to have all the rings interconnected via glorified cogs and gears?

You're in space, the distance between the rings is gonna be like .1 au. It'd be a cheap shuttle to move between rings.

You could keep a traditional sphere and have the low gravity sections be grim places only the tech priest equivalents go, and is full of low gravity abominations/spider people.

It's also your universe, if you want cogs and gears so you van crush a badguy in them, you can, but if you have a hard sci fi guy in the group he's gonna flip the table if your excuse is bs

Wait, why would the distance between the rings be that great? Obviously they wouldn't be super close tight together, but why couldn't the space between them be as small as a couple of feet?

It is a Dyson Sphere, after all, just split up into different sections that each rotate at their own speed to make as much of it as habitable as possible.

Niven rings are inherently unstable around their stars since they are not actually in orbit. They need course corrections from huge thrusters and shit. If a thruster failed for a second and the rings were only a few feet apart, they would crash together almost instantly.

Again, your fiction though.

Not if they are all interlinked together though. Maybe the Dyson Sphere could have two layers, the outer layer that is one giant solid piece, then the inner layers that rotate, to generate gravity.

Niven's ringworld had Shadow Squares in a nearer-to-the-sun orbit that provided ten hours of night in every 30 hour day.

If they are interlinked then you need unobtanium gears that aren't shattered by supporting half a solar mass worth of ring moving at thousand miles per hour relative to the next one.

Do not suggest that they are linked by static struts, because then the smaller ring could not be spinning faster. They would also be colder so they should be closer to the star.

This is what I was originally thinking, why wouldn't this work? Hover trains work. And if you have each segment built at an angle, so the the over all object creates a giant sphere, with the poles being discs, then wouldn't the rings themselves keep each other in place?

Then it's just a matter of slapping rockets/boosters/whatever on the outside of each ring, so that each ring rotates at it's own speed.

>Yes
Nice to see them getting popular lately. I'm distantly related to Rick Wakeman.

I kinda want to do a game in an orbital habitat, where the players are sent to find out why the habitat has stopped communicating and trading.

Shadow squares solve that neatly.

What's to stop it flying apart?

>What's to stop it flying apart?
Powerful magnets which keep them together, of course.

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My "setting" was based on a giant planet so there were huge fortresses the size of mountain ranges, basically grounded death stars. They were centers of military activity for thousands of miles if not more.

Of course the good guys lived in cities built out of ten mile tall trees so it doesn't make any sense. Its really autistic and I could never use it for an rpg anyway.

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It's a bit archive binge-y, but Schlock Mercenary has quite a few very large objects with relatively small crews doing missions

Quick, there's been a failure in sector 7-g! Hurry, it needs to be fixed now! Never mind, you're dead because you stared at a spot on the wall for 15 years instead.

What would it take to build an artificial ring around Mars? I'm asking for a setting I'm working on.

Said ring would act as a port, shipyard, and drydock for one of the major navies in-setting.

Your perception of time is mallable.

You can change it nowadays by using psychedelic drugs, or by living isolated from sunlight and clocks for a few weeks.

By the time your sense of time is out of whack because you're 400 years old, you can fuck around with your brain to fix such perception problems.

That's just because of metaphorical relativity.
When you're a kid, a year is a LONG TIME. a significant portion of your experiences.
When you're 20, years are shorter.
30? How the fuck did I get this old? Where did last year go?
40, 50, 60, they blend together. Cycles come and cycles go.
When you're 80, the world's moved on, every day is the same, time just blurs together as you wait for death.

Time moves a lot slower if you don't let yourself vegetate. Most of the 'time moves so fast' is because people don't DO anything.

Otherwise, you can significantly slow your perception of time by getting on an epic sugar high. Time slows right the fuck down.

Just provide adequate transportation.

i really like this idea and would like to see it expanded upon

I would certainly demand a lot less than building one around Earth, since the gravity is lower.
You can take inspiration from wh40k's ring around Mars. Seach for orbital rings.

>one comet crashes through
>entire thing blows apart
Neat.

That's the advantage of a ringworld. The open-sided ring means you can fire lasers at incoming anything.

> Not clearing the local system of stray comets

What is the point where a megastructure becomes so big, we will need deeper understandings of physics or even new laws of physics to grasp what or how it was built?

A mega structure encompassing an entire solar system? Multipe stars? A galaxy? A supercluster?

Where is the point where the "roll 1d6 for san loss" joke begins?

a universe

Tapping other universes for power, or colonising them for living space while we exploit resources of others?

by that stage cant you just generate space and manage time?

That's a tad big, don't you think?

surely size is relative

What about subatomic universes?

>building dyson spheres
>watch out for commets