If Dyson spheres are so great a source of power in science fiction, then in D&D...

If Dyson spheres are so great a source of power in science fiction, then in D&D, why are magicians not seriously contemplating the prospect of creating vast megastructures that siphon the infinite heat and light of the Elemental Plane of Fire, the Quasielemental Plane of Radiance, and the Positive Energy Plane to achieve similar heights of power?

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Because that doesn't fit the setting the creators were going for, and there is currently no mechanical way to accomplish such a feat. If you want to have something like that in your world, no one's stopping you.

I'm gonna go ahead and say that such megastructures would be not the work of men but of gods, and said gods have no interest in creating such a mechanical contraption for they already are mighty.

But I may be wrong on my canon.

Also, a pet peeve of mine, but
>similar heights of power
Nay, nigga. Every sun in the universe is the result of a portal spontaneously opening towards the Plane of Fire; harnessing its power would equate to harnessing at _least_ the power of every star in the galaxy. And that's freakingishly high.

Because most settings are not THAT high magic, you retard. When wizards capable of that kind of power exist, they are mostly useless, like Elminster, or se adventurers would have nothing to do.
Now, in Tippyverse this is possible, but Tippyverse is an excercise in powergaming, not a real setting.

>Watson and Doyle, lads and gents

Because the physics of the setting do not necessarily match those of real life.
Just because it would work in one setting does not mean it would work in another.
It may well not be possible to gain usable power (in the manner you're thinking) from the elemental planes of Fire, Radiance, and Positive Energy, regardless of what kind of magical megastructure you build. The rules of existence simply don't work that way.

Because the natives of those plane would probably try and stop them, I can't imagine they would have anything to use that power on, and creating such devices really doesn't mesh well with the themes of the setting.

The reason is simple, mages, magicians, sorcerers, necromancer, etc. all can accomplish accessing immense power in a much smaller way be it through artifacts, ritual, or becoming a siphon of power. That said I think the dwemer of the elder scrolls series did create something similar around the heart of a god. Which is the greatest point I will make, that being that the source of energy in most fantasy universes is around gods and so one simply needs siphon from gods and their artifacts if you want ultimate power.

>It may well not be possible to gain usable power (in the manner you're thinking) from the elemental planes of Fire, Radiance, and Positive Energy,
That's fucking retarded. Fire is still hot in DnD.

Science fiction usually doesn't have gods who can and will fuck your shit up if you try to mess with the status quo on such a large scale.

Neither does DnD. Nothing in the rulebook says gods are interested in preserving the status quo, or that they could do so in any case.

The world is operating on fantasy principles that in part mimic day to day reality, not on our understanding of physics.

Is heat inherently something that's convertible into other forms of useful energy? Lightning probably isn't electricity but some magic elemental thing, and converting heat into anything but mechanical energy isn't something I'm confident in. Even that could be argued against since water is an elemental thing which could have some kind of mechanism to prevent it. You might go to try making a steam engine and find yourself consumed by water elementals. Heat as we understand it depends on an understanding of particle motions that probably isn't true in DnD, where it's probably some kind of extension of the element of fire. Water still boils, but can the resulting gas "push" something? Is it even a gas as we understand it, or some kind of fire/water hybrid? If you converted it to mechanical energy, what would you be able to do with that? You have an endlessly spinning metal pole sticking out of a portal to never ending fires. Now what? What could you do with that which wouldn't be easier with magic. New tech is developed because it makes things easier: how can you make anything easier than what magic can do in DnD?

Those settings don't have infrastructures that necessitate needing that much energy in the first place.

Mostly because of the denizens there.

You said it yourself. D&D has infinite power sources and doesn't care about entropy. The dyson sphere is an idea that comes from maximizing access to energy in a setting where there is entropy.

A solid dyson sphere is not theoretically sound because it requires exotic material to handle the structural strains of orbit. Some sort of dyson field or dyson cluster would be more realistic.

>Is heat inherently something that's convertible into other forms of useful energy
Yes, in fact.

>Water still boils, but can the resulting gas "push" something?
Why would it not? Is there any reason other than your contrarian mindset to suspect that it would function differently? DnD's physics, by all indications, function almost exactly like our reality.

>If you converted it to mechanical energy, what would you be able to do with that? You have an endlessly spinning metal pole sticking out of a portal to never ending fires. Now what?
You must be a grade-A dunce to not see the potential in that.

>b-but wizards are already gods!
Maybe so, but it doesn't make this scenario any less exploitable.

>Implying the setting isn't already a dyson sphere of a superadvanced society that eventually fell into ruin,and the post apocalypse dyson sphere IS the fantasy setting, and magic is just accessing the bullshittech laced within every inch of the dyson sphere.

Maybe the elemental planes themselves are such a contraption, designed to siphon off such barely containable power for all eternity?

A megastructure is a pretty specific idea that probably won't be thought of in most fantasy settings. Something huge to gather huge magical energy would be, but most of these settings do not have electricity as we know it. There isn't a generator in the tavern basement, lights are all oil lamps or literal magic, communication is all manual or magic, ect.

To generate usable power from heat, you need a differential. Hard to get that when everything is fire.

dude

>its not in the manual reeeeeee

A: Assumption the D&D verse you are in uses a star-system like This-World does.

B: Assuming a theoretical scientific model from This-World are not laughably insufficient or underachieving in the magical realms.

C: The plane of Fire, Radiance, and positive aren't things you can build "Around" they are entire worlds. That's like saying you are building a Dyson Sphere around the universe (not the Known universe, THE Universe). You can't.

C 1- "Normal Fire" from the Elemental plane is fine. Elemental Fire can burn through anything eventually if not immediately and there are no known ways to stop it's burn. Yes stuff even burns fire elemental themselves, Divine beings, and laughs at spells that use are fire resistance. If not in the rules, this has been fluff from 2e right on through to 4e, dunno about 5e. No Planar book yet.
C 2- Positive Energy... After maybe a week or so your MegaStructure will wake up and walk away on it's own. Good luck with this one.
C 3 - Radiance, yep no issues here. You can build megastructure in a D&D verse to siphon power. Because you know... They already have.

D: See pic. They've already done it, people didn't like the setting. The Dyson-Disc(?) known as Umbra is an abandoned Mind Flayer world. It is as large as one averaged sized solar system.

>The plane of Fire, Radiance, and positive aren't things you can build "Around" they are entire worlds.

Then build inside them, dumbass.

>Elemental Fire can burn through anything eventually if not immediately and there are no known ways to stop it's burn.

This is false, it's just 3d10 fire damage a round.

Magic users don't need megastructures on the scale of dyson spheres to gather energy. I'd think they would have a temple with architecture arranged in specific patterns that has magic runs carved all over or use some focusing artifact to harness massive amounts of power.

They are? Seriously, I don't understand why you think they don't.

>why isn't this hard sci-fi concept used in a fantasy setting?
>why didn't a bunch of english majors think about the implications of energy transference and capture in their universe?
>why am I such a retard?
Gee, good questions OP

Well supposing we drop the "harnessing power" bit, the reason they don't build megastructures is probably the same as why we don't build mega structures: it's not worth the effort most of the time, and the rest of the time we don't consider the megastructures we DO build as megastructures because their scale is so large we only really consider their impact on our lives rather than consider the consequences of all the cables and towers we've run all over the planet.

sounds like my BBEG has a new evil plan to harness the infinite energy of the multiverse that goes horribly wrong and merges and Materiel plane and the elemental plane of fire.

thanks for next weeks campaign OP.

You can even make it a slow process, temperatures rising over months and years to leave questions as to the source/cause. Volcanoes erupt that have been dormant for decades, summer weather appearing in the arctic reaches, and as the shift begins to accelerate at its climax, the moon changes color to reflect the new firelands appearing all over the world, glowing bright orange/red rather than it's usual cool silver-blue.

Be prepared with Jonny Cash, Billy Joel, Bloodhound Gang, Scooter, and maybe Dragonforce if you're into that.

Show me an official D&D sourcebook that explicity describes a way to convert heat and light directly into spell slots and/or crafting XP, besides DM fiat and ancient forgotten magic with no actual mechanics available to PCs.
At best, you could theoretically build megastructures full of farmland to raise livestock for blood sacrifice, but solar panels are useless to an epic-level wizard.

Spelljammer.

Learn to read.

Because they're incapable of getting rid of the enormous amount of waste heat that would produce.

>people didn't like the setting
YOU LIE. YOU LIE LIKE A DOG.

Actually, WotC didn't like the settign or they couldn't get people to sign over the rights (much like the Fiend Folio, which has mosnters they do not have access to because the creatores didn't sign over their rights).

Players liked it enough to upload a 3.5 version to the web, and the PF version sold out the fiorst day at GenCon despite the rules systems sucking so bad. That's how much Spelljammers is liked.

Nobody did extraplanar shit with Spelljammer that much.

>PF version sold out the fiorst day at GenCon despite the rules systems sucking so bad. That's how much Spelljammers is liked.
Well sorta. People didn't like it at the time, the tail-80s & 90s. However I do agree people like it NOW. Public opinions change. I'm interested to try it at least, I hear they changed a lot of base rules.

>This is false, it's just 3d10 fire damage a round.
Damage changes between editions, mate. Your 3d10 in 3.5 is only 5-Fire Points in 4e. Also regardless of damage Elemental-Fire is unresistable, thus even if it only does Half a Point of damage per week it'll eventually wear away a structure. But after typing this I Immediately wonder how the City of Brass hasn't fallen apart yet. It can survive on the Normal-Fire sea sure, but what happened when it runs into a Elemental Pocket? They never seem to write about that.

So you're saying this water elemental is some sort of machine spirit that needs to be appeased?

Sorcery and efreet magic, user.

>Also regardless of damage Elemental-Fire is unresistable
Horse shit.

I imagine a magical power plant with numerous permanent portals to the Elemental Plane of Fire on the bottom of shafts, with portals to the Elemental Plane of Void on top.

The superheated gas pours through the shafts and turns the turbines before being sucked out the top into the Void.

>void
Negative Energy Plane?
Quasielemental Plane of Vacuum?

>The superheated gas pours through the shafts and turns the turbines before being sucked out the top into the Void.

Why not just use wind from the Elemental Plane of Air? Or a waterfall from the Elemental Plane of Water?

If you open a portal, does it just pour out the element constantly?

You could have a mixing chamber with portals to planes of Fire and Water, and just siphon off the steam power.

Hell, is there an elemental plane of steam?

Yeah that second one
Honestly though I think basically any of the Elemental planes with different ambient temperatures would work equally well

Fuck it, they all work

Generating electricity in the Forgotten Realms universe is free money

The only things I can think of, even as a person who doesn't play DnD, is there must be some kind of cost involved in keeping these portals open?

And I assume creatures sometimes come through as well?

I would like to remind you of the Suloise Empire.

What Suloise Empire you ask?

The great technological empire in the forgotten Realms that is now the Sea of Dust, user. THAT Suloise Empire.

Consider it your warning.

Literal actual brainlet.

dumb hl3 memeposter

>Quasielemental Plane of Vacuum?
Void is another name for Vacuum. He means Vacuum.
>If you open a portal, does it just pour out the element constantly?
It can yes.
>Hell, is there an elemental plane of steam?
Yes.

However more to the point there is an Elemental plane of Lightning, so I don't really see why we need any of this thread.

Portal. Lightning. Lightning rod. Done.
Rod gets zapped a thousand times a second. You just need to make sure you have a strong enough Rod not to melt. If one rod isn't powerful enough to power whatever you need. Make another portal and another rod.

>Generating electricity in the Forgotten Realms universe is free money
Except on Lantan, where they've been generating electricity for years, and have been trying to push it on to other FR cities.

I thought the Suloise were a greyhawk empire of advance blah blah that was destroyed.

Or is this one of those cheeky demi-cross over spots that many of the older setting have?

Creatures would be the primary concern.

If generating electricity is that easy, it won't be valuable once technology reaches the point where everyone uses it. Owning a power plant is meaningless when every other person has a perfectly stable, unlimited, fuel-free generator in their basement.

>Everybody has generators in their basement utilizing 9th level magic
Even if electricity itself didn't produce money it's still producing value in this fantasy economy by allowing electrical products to work.

Do you know how many high level wizards there are in most D&D settings? And how little they get along? Fengolio's power plant is going to be undercut by Anthraxsar The Usurper's same day home installation service, which will in turn be undercut by D'thrk'str''sr The Third's power plant. At the level they're at, their own labor costs are their only overhead, and petty wizard grudges run long and deep.

>Positive Energy... After maybe a week or so your MegaStructure will wake up and walk away on it's own. Good luck with this one.

New plot hook. Thanks user.

Because energy concerns are largely a modern phenomenon. Fantasy wizards grow up in medieval societies where power distribution amounts to chopping and selling wood. Charcoal is high fucking tech. The blacksmith is a member of an organization fanatically dedicated to protecting its trade secrets and so on.

Even if a wizard did want to harness the sun, there's no guarantee that he would get anything other than light and heat instead of magic or whatever the fuck. Heat he wouldn't have any use for except to march a burning wall of devastation across the globe.

The best use for fantasy elemental plane megastructures would be to collect and refine the elemental energy itself then, since that would be more magically useful that something modern like electricity.

what is even a dyson sphere ?

These desu.
I plan on introducing the concept later but doing stuff like making a steam engine that runs off heat from the plane of fire or mining ore from the plane of earth is hamstrung by the fact that making permanent portals is expensive, destructive planar forces like world shattering tectonic events or blistering firestorms are not really bound by 'geography' in many cases, and anything that finds the portal could conceivably fit through it regardless of their intentions, not to mention the potentially dangerous side effects of exposure to the more hostile energy types, like a negative energy cascade withering everyone in a 10 km radius before bringing them back as undead.
Elementals are also likely to hate meatbags that think they can steal their home's essence without consequence, even if the gods don't care to a point.

If you put a solar panel in space and had it orbit the sun, it would gather energy constantly and at high efficiency. A dyson swarm is a hypothetical structure where you build so many solar panels that almost no light from the sun actually escapes out into the universe. A dyson sphere is when all those solar panels are connected into a single structure.

damned that does sound pretty awesome
there is actually a adeptus mechanicus forge world that is just that, Lucius

A solid structure built around the sun to harness its total energy output. Multiple variations of the sphere exist, from what is essentially a balloon full of solar panels as mentioned here to being a thick ball that uses all the sun's energy to power an immense supercomputer.

I dimly remember there were books, though 3rd party, about harnessing elementals in this way. They already do not tire and don't need to eat or be paid. Wizards was just binding them with spells and using as parts of different magitech.

>That image


While we're at it, doesn't a Dyson Sphere suffer from the paradox that you need the amount of resources produced by a Dyson Sphere to make a Dyson Sphere?

There's nothing paradoxical about it. It'll just take a very long time - centuries at least, but more likely millennia. And obviously you wouldn't start making one right away, you'd start with a Dyson Swarm or Dyson Ring and gradually expand it.

The way that most fiction gets around that is that you just suck matter right out of the star and use it to construct your sphere.

Not really.

Like with any major space project, the hard part is getting the material out of a gravity well.

Once you have the ability to start harnessing extra-planetary materials to continue construction, things get much easier.

And it's not like an entire building has to be built at once. A truly massive engineering project like a dyson-sphere/swarm would be broken down into millions of steps. The first of which would likely just be a base-station on a stable orbit, from which additional structures might be bolted onto or launched from.

youtube.com/watch?v=HlmKejRSVd8

It should be running the galaxy. Despite all the arbitrary excesses of the 40k universe, they are still insignificant compared to even the more basic dyson swarms in terms of energy output, potential population, and direct applications. That forgeworld could be turned into a giant thruster for effective intergalactic travel, or possibly even a warp drive, to take the fight straight to the gods in the name of the omnissiah. The Void Dragon isn't the Omnissiah. That forgeworld is.

>Fire is still hot in DnD.
That doesn't mean the underlying mechanics are the same. You think they're breathing oxygen? Nigga that's elemental air. It's a completely different substance that just has similar behaviors to how air works in our world.

Elminster actively works to restrict technology and technological evolution as a Harper.

What are Harpers?

Me and my party is overseeing creating a giant, intercontinental railway, powered by a steam engine made via two Gates to the elemental planes of water and fire. We're having output problems, though- there's no good place to dump excess steam and the wizard's divining says we're going to fuck over the atmosphere in a century or two. Floods, constant rainstorms, etc. Too much steam.

...

What a dick.

Sounds like Numenera.

Now I wanna know the context of this.

Kakumeiki Valvrave, or Valvrave the Liberator. Immortal, body-swaping space vampires piloting giant super-mechs whose limit break (when they overheat to 666) is to literally commit seppuku, wiping out entire enemy fleets in the process. And that's just the first two episodes. It was a heck of a ridiculous show, an absolute blast to watch as it aired with /a/, but really, really bad when you get down to it.
The 'Dyson Spheres' in the show aren't true Dyson Spheres, they're modular habitat spheres sitting in Lagrange points with tiny artificial suns in the center

Well I'm sold simply on the gonzo factor.

Why are the Harpers a thing?

well the lucian priesthood did goes into civil war against mars, probably because they actually think that the local techpriest have actuallly no idea who/why/how this shit was made

there is also a forgeworld that can travel through warp, i don't remenber the name, but it's a cluster of stations around a gas-giant if i remenber correctly

i hope we will have more fluff with the new admech codex

Is it true that earth is a duson sphere?

No.

Sounds like a perfectly functioning capitalist society to me

Earth is a discworld.

I think it is. How can you prove its not
Stupid turtles all the way down meme. I bet you read tolkien

It doesn't have to be built all at once. A very, very small section would still be an enormous amount of power, and you can just keep adding bits piecemeal. Realistically, a civilization that did that would end up with maybe a quarter of a Dyson ring before they hit some catastrophic event that wiped them out thousands to tens of thousands of years after they start the project, but even a 1/100th of a Dyson project is enough to solve any energy crisis you could think of, other than it's own continuation.

Why do D&D societies need less energy just because lol magic?

> nothing in the rule book says you can't
> nothing in the rule book says you can

This goes on for some time.

Why do they need more energy? To power their medieval goat farms? They aren't technologically advanced enough to even consider harnessing electricity in any form, and since you can't convert heat, light, or kinetic motion into magic (but absolutely can convert magic into any of those things and more), the only kind of energy they'd potentially want a lot of is magic energy, because anything less is just inneficient.

>Every sun in the universe is the result of a portal spontaneously opening towards the Plane of Fire
Stealing this for my homebrew user. Shit sounds awesome

>plane of fire
>there's only one sun, which is the name for our star
>stars aren't made of fire, but somehow the plane of fire creates them
>not the plane of creation smashing atoms together so hard that it tears holes into other planes
>not magical nuclear fusion
Are you superdense?

If you're not just shitposting then you misunderstand, they still need energy, if anything they probably need more than the vaguely medieval societies most settings are inspired by. It's just that a significant portion of mundane energy needs can be met with magical energy instead. Transport, communication, construction, light, heat, even food.

Stars literally are connected to the elemental plane of fire in D&D.
In spelljammer they even mention magical fire-resistant iron that forms from asteroids orbiting stars far enough away to not be destroyed but close enough to absorb elemental energy and dwarves even purposefully position asteroids for later mining.

Wrong, Spelljammer says they can be Radiance or Positive Energy portals.

Because there are easier ways to do that?

>Wall of Fire
>Permanency

Done, infinite source of heat and energy.
Seriously, there is even a section in the Stronghold Builder's handbook which details exactly this thing.

>Not having the god of fire steal the stars to create his own plane

Yeah this.
Planescape said similar, 3.5 said Stars were positive energy, 4e they were the a mix of fire & positive, which is otherwise known as Radiant. (4e most often said stars were gates to the far realm, and never addressed the contradiction.).

Plane of Radiance also births stars inside itself, it's one of the planar hazards.

...