How do you weaponize a Dyson Sphere?

Equip an FTL machines of your choice and visit enemy systems with it. Enjoy it as you pull out of orbit every planet in the system.

Make it a parabolic mirror, so that the radiation pressure causes it to accelerate towards whatever you want to not be there any more.

You'd need to make it massive enough to keep the star in place relative to it via gravitational attraction - although then you risk deforming the star and hence possibly reducing the core pressure too low for fusion to continue, but then again you're an interstellar civilisation with the capacity to build a Dyson sphere so I doubt such rudimentary problems of gravitation and fluid dynamics would be an issue for you.

> How do you weaponize a Dyson Sphere?
lmgtfy.com/?q=laser compression of matter to super high densities

Direct all collected sunlight through a small opening. Boom, space laser. Burn a hole right through your enemy's planets.

Use the energy to create a kugelblitz.

Leave a hole, aim hole at whatever you want handled. Look up Isaac Arthur on Youtube.

By using patented "Cyclone Technology©" to rapidly consume all matter in a solar system.

>several earths

More like 600 million earths worth of surface area with a dyspnnsphere built at 1 AU.

Use the energy to power the biggest mass accelerator ever.
And use that to shoot stuff at close to light speed in the general direction of your target.

uz just gotta put dakka on it son.

"several" [hundred million]

Build your Dyson sphere around a red dwarf star that will outlive every main-sequence star that will ever exist. Use it to drive a stellar-scale computational engine. Retreat to arbitrarily-large numbers of simulated universes inside the sphere's computational mainframe. Never have to worry about anything ever again.

If you can build a Dyson sphere, why would you need to weaponize it? You'd have better luck weaponizing the component technologies and scientific principles that went into its construction. This is like asking how you weaponize velcro, instead of weaponizing the rockets you designed it to be used in.

Cover it in phased array optical emitters. Turn the whole thing into one giant laser.

orionsarm.com/eg-article/48fe49fe47202

so you mean a Star-Killer base laser?

you make a TARDIS out of it

orionsarm.com/eg-article/48fe49fe47202

Kek

The Sphere itself? Either move it as a weaponized rogue star or leave a panel open to devour worlds all war-planets/shadow raiders like.

The primary purpose is to maximize the energy usage of a star so just hook it up to a large enough weapons array and go to town

The act of building one kills any planets outside of it, user.

Dyson Spheres ARE weapons.

Just the fact that you built one is enough for it to be a weapon. By building it you basically cover the main source of energy for all life in any habitable planet in the system the star is in.

When that happens, pretty much all photosynthetic life will die right off the bat. Then the animals that feed on those plants die, then the animals that feed on those animals, etc. The temperature on the planet will also drop to basically almost absolute zero due to their being no light whatsoever.

You'd basically kill the planet. The only thing that could possibly survive that are extremophiles living in the bottom of the ocean (as long as it doesn't completely freeze solid, which it still might), or beings that constructed bunkers or vaults to live in, but even then they won't last forever.

It won't happen immediately, but it will happen relatively fast, like over the course of a couple of months probably.

>It won't happen immediately, but it will happen relatively fast, like over the course of a couple of months probably.
That's not including the time it takes to actually construct the sphere, right?

Let's be honest - building a dyson sphere is an incredibly inefficient way of rendering a planet uninhabitable. You could glass the surface of a hundred million worlds with the reaction mass and building material you'd otherwise expend on the sphere.

And let's not forget, a dyson sphere is big and you aren't going to be putting it up overnight. If you have uncontested control of a star's sphere of influence sufficient to erect a dyson sphere, then you're already capable of subjugating any civilization that lives there.

Saying that building a dyson sphere is a good way to kill all life on a planet, is like saying that building a car is a good way to keep yourself cool in the summer.

You wouldn't even have to destroy the star to vaporize planets, just use mirrors and lenses to focus all it's radiant energy onto a laser.

All that power? Laser batteries. Or one huge fuckoff laser.

Now you're on the right track. Take all that abundant energy and convert it into a more portable, high-density form.

Use the dyson sphere to power an embarassingly large array of supercolliders and make shitloads of antimatter. You can't beat antimatter for energy density; it's not very energy efficient to make the stuff, but when you've got the entire energy output of a fucking star efficiency is not something you really give a shit about.

so what if one of the panels was a big magnifying glass could you slowly rotate it and burn planets and stuff?

Yes, and if you build a skyscraper with state of the art HVAC you can keep cool in the summer time.

dont diminish my dreams

Its just a big collection of solar panels
There's no "reverse" button on a solar panel

I wasn't arguing whether it would be an efficient weapon, Dyson Spheres being useful for any efficient weapon is probably false. Even the efficiency of Dyson Spheres period is still argued.

Use the energy to modify space and time around it so it's basically undestructible, and then use its tremendous calculation power to calculate how to use it in the most efficient way to destroy what you want to destroy.

You basically built a god machine, so just ask him what to do

You people have no fucking imagination.

You're talking about a structure that is physically larger than our sun by a factor of two hundred.

You're talking about a structure that, if it were 20 cm thick, would mass 1.82 × 10^26 kilograms - that's 182,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms since I'd expect none of you faggots to be able to read scientific notation.

You're talking about a structure that can capture close to one hundred percent of a star's energy output. The Earth captures 4.5292×10^-10 percent (that's 0.000000045292%) of the Sun's energy, and that's enough that it can permanently blind you from seven hundred thousand kilometers away.

Not only that, you're talking about harnessing that output in a way that can be used to do something useful. Our sun puts out more energy per second than the entire human race consumes per year - BY A FACTOR OF TWO BILLION.

And all you cunts can come up with is "lol lets use it like a big laser".

No imagination. No sense of scale. No sense of wonder. I cannot imagine what life must be like for someone so dull.

You say to me not to diminish your dreams. I say to you that you aren't dreaming big enough.

>Even the efficiency of Dyson Spheres period is still argued.

Scale, user, scale. A Dyson Sphere is the ultimate expression of the economics of scale. It doesn't matter how efficient it is, it can be one percent efficient and still capture enough energy in a second to power all of human civilization for millenia.

what more damage could you do than a supernova then with just one star?

desu I'm not sure how you could even utilise a fraction of a star's power. A mastery of tech at that scale is just beyond my imagination.

Dysentery spheres are a retarded idea ... you know what I'm not going to correct that... they are increadiblt costly to the point of absurdity it's far more practical to capture gasses from the sun to use for fission.

I just realized that an especially sadistic and practical alien species could torture an entire planet to death by building a Dyson Sphere while the planet's natives has no choice but to watch as their sun is slowly being covered by cold hard metal.

The aliens gets all of the solar energy while they get to kill off an entire planet's worth of life. Kill two birds with one stone, that kind of stuff.

Energy and mass are equivalent, what's to stop a super advanced race projecting a hot spot onto a planet glassing everything there. Or pumping so much energy into an area to create a black hole.

Well what's your fucking plan genius, I see you shit talking but I don't see you coming up with any weapons.

>use energy to create and stabilize ring of exotic matter
>use it as an absurdly efficient alcubierre drive
>do this
>but with the added bonus of stretching if not ripping spacetime fabric

We're using a fraction of the Sun's output right now. It's called solar power, look it up.

>You're talking about a structure that can capture close to one hundred percent of a star's energy output. The Earth captures 4.5292×10^-10 percent (that's 0.000000045292%) of the Sun's energy, and that's enough that it can permanently blind you from seven hundred thousand kilometers away.

Uh, if the sun was that close, we'd have worse things to worry about than going blind...

No sense of scale you say?

Why bother converting anything, though?
Just use superconductor magnets to channel the star's plasma. Now you have a fuckoff huge plasma beam that spews radiation.
Or you can just focus gamma rays wherever.

Use the economic boost to support a huge fleet and make something like schindelghiest 4

The radiation pressure would be massive and eject it from the sun.

going to go with "because plasma doesn't work that way"

Easy.
1. Make your dyson sphere out of computronium.
2. Make it host an AGI.
3. Task the AGI with defeating your enemies.

I'm pretty sure its plan will involve nano- or femtomachines and result in the universe becoming uninhabitable.

I feel once you get to the point where you can throw planets at each other anything beyond that is just pure spite.

Trick your enemies into building one and laugh as they waste heaps of resources in trying to construct an impossible construct

Economic MAD. Encourage it to be used an industrial base and freely allow usage of the power. Soon becomes an important economic hub. Orbital shipyards, massive supercomputers, farms and factories all attracted by low tax rates, regulation and free power.

Become so economically intertwined with enemies and wider communities that any attack would massively disrupt the system economy. Would cause an economic crash which would destabilize all colonized space and kill billions.

Well done, user. Well done indeed.

>focus gamma rays

turn your enemies into Hulks

It's going to need communication, and energy transportation. Lasers are a common, efficient means for freespace comms.

Simply redirect one of those communications lasers at the target. Even a tiny fraction of solar energy makes most scifi warship weapon look like popguns.

Build a fleet of them.

How DOES it work, then, o master of stellar dynamics, electromagnetism, and nuclear physics?
Why, with superconductors and a nigh-unlimited source of energy, can we not blast fusing hydrogen at things from a dyson sphere?

The dyson sphere itself is a weapon. Add a drive to one side, magnetically confine the sun, and boost it into a system from afar. One you arrive, even a nearby-ish pass will fuck up a system.

Mirrors.

>Why, with superconductors and a nigh-unlimited source of energy, can we not blast fusing hydrogen at things from a dyson sphere?
Because of a little thing called the inverse-square law.

hmm, good point

...

That'll just heat the mirrors until they've reached thermal equilibrium with the surface of the star. Then the sphere will start losing heat to black body radiation.

I'm not actually sure how you could induce a nova on a star externally. Stars go nova when they deplete the light elements in their cores and can no longer sustain fusion.

>building a dyson sphere is an incredibly inefficient way of rendering a planet uninhabitable

But it sends a fucking message doesn't it?

>peacefully meet new aliens
>they're dicks and attack you
>destroy their spess ships
>destroy their planet based launching pads and orbital defense weapons
>erect blockade
>do not invade
>spend the next century building a dyson sphere while they watch their sun slowly grow dark, unable to do anything about it

This is why you no tred on snek

ancaps are the Great Filter.

>ancap
?

The only race cruel and ruthless enough I can imagine doing something like this would be some sort of von nuemann machine race

How do some AI just fucking explode tech wise? Like I was sitting on a 20 planet empire with a 20 cruiser 30 destroyer 40 corvet fleet at around 20k power. I decided to eat half of a small 4 planet empire to round out my borders for that nice spherical blob and this fucker was at "overwhelming" I didn't even have space station level 6 yet. I was still at level 2 kinetics and he was throwing around Extradimensional Weaponry level 4 kenetics level 4 lasers. His shields were literally so powerful I couldn't kill his transport ships. After I somehow mulched his fleet he sent 13 corvets at me and the game was telling me it was a 9k power fleet. I mulched it only through pure numbers. He managed to kill 12 of my cruisers 6 destroyers and 2 corvets. 13 corvets vs 90 fucking ships and they came out with a better kdr.

I don't have advanced starts on and this faggot only had 4 planets. He was buddy buddy with another empire who was also classified as "overwhelming" but he only had 2 planets. I had 4 really good tech planets pumping out research and they far outstripped me.

Its got to be something from the updates because this never happened at release. An empires size was a good rule of thumb for their tech level.

Excellent.

You sure it wasn't a fallen empire?

Is Utopia worth playing? I already own it but I cant work up the energy to get into a game.

You playing on hard? This happens to me regularly on hard. They will just be 2 to 10 times your power if on equal footing.

>Shhh I thought I was on /v/ for a second. But yeah they were just normal empires. I would of noticed 4 or 5 40k doom stacks in my face if they were. Unless they somehow got the fallen empire to give them a research boost or something which may be a thing now I don't see how in the hell they got so far.

Normal. I've played two games since the update and since I haven't played since launch I wanted it to be "fair" so I could learn all the new shit they shoved in.

I havnt played much utopia. On the last patch with no advanced starts and its not a fallen empire there is no way that they should have had anything like that.

On the bright side, researching the resulting debris should have advanced your weapons by a huge amount.

You have a +10% extra research cost per planet for having more planets. That's why bigger empires have to dedicate whole sectors to research.

Which is why I'm asking Its happened in two games so it has to be some change I am not aware of maybe an event? There are three fallen empires two way the fuck up top both of which are prickly fucks that don't want you existing near them and own a good deal of land. Then there is a small as fuck fallen empire that is the xenophile one but they have like one system.

Oh yeah that's how I figures out they had all that shit. They even had jump drives. The next time I ware them the wrecks should give me the full tech. Thats always fine in the end but I want to know how it got to that point to start with. I want to be able to properly evaluate my enemies and know how the system works.

Even factoring that in they simply had to much. I could understand if they hardlined their main weapons tech and maybe just shield tech but it was across the board. They had EVERYTHING including jumpdrives.

The two planets I took weren't much of anything really one was a farm world and one was a mix of energy and minerals. Only one research building between the two. So unless the other two I have yet to get to are nothing but research which I doubt and even then I don't think they could simply have just so many late game techs.

Use it to power an accelerator all the way around and throw random shit at whatever you want gone.

>Shhh I thought I was on /v/ for a second.
You can be forgiven for making that mistake, seeing as Veeky Forums has two active threads about the new Dawn of War videogame.

Weigh it and position it so the gravity from the mass of the dyson sphere counteracts it?

The shell would be less massive than the star. Also, Shell Theorem.

Probably they were in a war with a fallen empire before and stole their tech.

Most interesting use for Dyson Sphere's I've ever seen was in Linda Nagata's Nanotech Succession series where humanity uses them to hide the light of the star from view so aliens will pass by them on their endless planet glassing spree throughout the galaxy.

When stars start coming back because the spheres are falling apart or being dismantled for some reason, the implication is that the main human civilization is FUUUUUUUUCKED at this point.

Thats pretty simple, all you have to do is introduce Iron into the stars core, it will then go supernova as it tries and fails to fuse the Iron into heavier elements.

How do you get enough iron into the core of a star?

I don't know, perhaps you heat Iron to it's plasma state and throw it at the star it should theoretically sink deeper in because it's denser than anything else in the star, maybe? Really though, all I know is that Iron is what causes Supernovae, if you don't believe me, look it up.

...

sorry for the stupidity, but what game are you talking about?

Stellaris. It's in his original post, in the image, or do you not read filenames?

I rushed inside the thread to read the replies, didn't even look at OPs picture

Thanks tho

No problem.

So you just compensate with more of your unlimited power.

This is fun