How do you justify that your setting has FTL travel yet they don't have a single Dyson Swarm?

Fusion reactors are simply far more valiable option, as dyson swarms require mineral resources that can be used somewhere else. They would also need to be heavily protected from looters and scavengers and especially in wartime. Planetes can still function under the enemy blockade, but disabling power transfer from swarm by them would cripple entire stellar system.
Dyson swarms work only on paper.

How do you know FTL needs more energy than the generated in a nuclear reactor? If anything, FTL is so cheap in many settings that may as well be free. Of course, FTL is just an excuse. They never do anything with FTL beyond send ships farther and faster. There are no FTL weapons, no FTL reactors, no FTL time-travel etc.

Dyson Swarms are the natural conclusion to space conquest. You will end up with one or multiple even by accident by simply keep building more space stations orbiting the stars.

Because it is really hard for anyone to wrap they mind around a single one. Our galaxy has billions of stars with billions of habitable planets. Yet a single Dyson Sphere have more living space than all those planets combined. Terraforming and colonizing planets is just an inefficient waste of resources.

>Fusion reactors are simply far more valiable option, as dyson swarms require mineral resources that can be used somewhere else

The star is a large Fusion Reactor. The largest.

Also, the material to build them can be lifted from the star. In fact, by doing so you would prolong its lifetime.

It's much more efficient to use a Dyson Swarm that trying to get the energy from the sun from most planets in the solar system, or use Hydrogen for fusion reactors dispersed across the solar system.

Dyson Swarm are really massive, but they are the logical next step once you can reliable send stuff to space cheaply (orbital rings, space elevators, whatever).

The Sun is closer than having to mine the outer-solar system for resources and offers both energy and materials.

Even then, most space operas rarely portrait planets beyond one or two small settlements with the exception of the homeworlds. The population numbers, and scale are far too low. It is already difficult to think about a single modern city let alone multiple Earth-like planets with billions of people.

Why not mining the Sun? It has plenty of minerals that can be extracted by the process known as starlifting. There are more mineral resources inside the Sun than all the planets combined. You can even star-engineering if you are bold enough.

Not only planets, but even starships. At least Warhammer 40k tries to do represent the sheer scale of an interstellar civilization from time to time. A ship that is a 1km is enough to host tens thousands, if not hundreds, yet this is never even mentioned in series like Star Wars.

The trick wasn't finding a way to generate so much power that FTL was possible, the trick was in lowering the energy cost so that FTL was possible on pre-fusion technological scales.

These are two sides of the same coin.

FTL realistically implemented could generate free mass and energy through time-cloning, of necessity.
The narrative purpose of FTL though is lowering the energy (and time, ofc) requirements of star travel to match an oceanic setting.

There's a universe full of planets for freeloaders to settle on.

Your organisation's planets belong to your organisation, and they're only going to settle enough people there to profitably extract whatever resource they want from the planet (and, if you're lucky, enough secondary staff to meet the primary staff's needs in terms of leisure and luxury).

I remember that one story where FTL was so fucking easy that aliens fight with muskets and humans just missed it

Road not taken Turtledove

nigga using an entire sun for energy isn't "green ". it's fuckin badass

Star lifting is superscience even harder for me to imagine than Ftl drive. You also ignored the security concerns i wrote about.

Yeah, love Turtledove's work

Wars in a dayson swarm make really little sense. Too much destructive power and detection technology. Also, how do you stop an entire Dayson Swarm without getting blasted before getting close?

What if civil wars consist of endless boarding actions?

Einstein made a mistake somewhere and FTL is easier than we thought, once someone figured out the proper math. Humanity spreads across the stars but does not yet have anywhere near the population to undertake megaprojects like Dyson sheres, swarms etc. They'll get there one day, just not yet.

It's completely retarded. With that level of technology the aliens couldn't engineer a pressure vessel large enough to fit people in, couldn't build gas tight seals around windows, build telescopes powerful enough to navigate with or maintain a breathable atmosphere inside a spaceship for the weeks of travel described in the story.

The behavior of the aliens is also retarded. They simply show up and attack the first humans that show up without making any attempt to ascertain the situation on the planet even though there is no benefit to doing this even from the position that they believe they are in (technologically superior conquerors arriving on a comparatively primitive world). They don't have the manpower or resources or technological capability (they have no communication equipment or sensors whatsoever) to subjugate an entire planet. The entire scenario is handwaved as sneering imperialist arrogance, but that's what it is, alien conquerors whose job it is to conquer alien planets should not behave incompetently when attempting to conquer an alien planet.

The entire thing is a heap of poorly thought out mental diarrhea.

Not OP, but explaining OP to the thread
A dyson swarm uses 100% real science, We've already technically begun constructing one around the sun (As soon as you have 1 satellite around a star you have the beginnings of a dyson swarm), and the energy benefits are outstanding.
Meanwhile FTL is all future, hypothetical sciences, might not even be possible, and would be highly uneconomical to do without properly utilizing our home system.
The stars are the galaxy's truest resource. If the only thing you're invading systems for are planets, you're an idiot.

There's even more problems than those. For example how exactly the aliens even know what stars actually are or assuming that they guess that stars are the same thing that their homeworld orbits how they're supposed to go about space exploration without knowing how far away the stars are, afterall that's mid 1800s astronomy.

Do they just point a ship at the brightest star and hope for the best? Because for us that would be Sirius, which I guess would be fine at only about 8 lightyears, but the second brightest is Canopus, which is 310 lightyears away, I hope they packed enough provisions for that.

Easy. FTL engine is trivial to build compared to dyson sward and only needs something like a powerful nuke to kickstart it, once running, it gets the necessary power from some inexhaustible external source such as harvesting zero point energy.

We don't need to have a large population to do such a project. With nanotechnology, fabrication of a swarm would be as easy as pie.
Step 1 Lauch nano machines at Mercury
Step 2 Program them to fabricate individual out of the mined metal
Step 3 Lauch them at the sun using a mass driver

Such nanotechnology is less realistic than FTL.

No smaller selfreplicating unit than a procaryotic cell is possible.

It would take about 50 years to dismantle Mercury.

>in the past 2 weeks the words Dyson Spheres and Dyson Swarms have appeared on Veeky Forums 300x more than usual

why?

>Dyson Swarm?
Cause Dyson swarms are a severely insufficient form of energy production compared to easier obtainable methods in my setting.

Dunno, It seems Sci-fi threads have been more common of late.
Not than I'm complaining, mind, I like hard science too. It's only I like more options than only drones for anything space and FTl.

elaborate please?

>with billions of habitable planets
only if you reprocess the entire planet into space stations, which gets us back to point 1.

>A dyson swarm uses 100% real science
>Meanwhile FTL is all future, hypothetical sciences

And that's why my setting doesn't have a single Dyson swarm. It's like asking 'How do you justify that your setting cyberpunk setting doesn't have pig-iron swords?'

How do you justify that your setting has FTL travel and yet no time travel?

Legit interested. Do you ignore Relativity completely?

You misunderstand the point.

They fight with muskets but they are still advanced. They just don't have advanced weaponry because it's pointless when you can FTL a pebble into a planet and wipe out a city.

If you don't strip-mine whole stars and planets, you are not ambitious enough.

My setting uses alcubierre drives that provide no inertial motion.

>Einstein made a mistake somewhere
Except he didn't. The paper is painstakingly accurate and holds up to this day.

>No smaller selfreplicating unit than a procaryotic cell is possible.
proofs

It only takes one black swan, user. Empirical evidence cannot prove truth, only provide sufficiently convincing support.

Pretty much. My preferred piece of technobabble for it is
>all [jump points] share a single reference frame, in spite of the differences in relative velocity.
Just enough legitimate science to get the average person to accept it, while also giving the warning oh "here be handwaves" to people who know why that doesn't actually fix anything.

So, given that the passage of time is not universal, do you get frames of reference where information gets back in time (according to their point of view) while in other looks like normal/compressed time?

That's good enough for games, but as an engineer I am physically disgusted by your post.

In that case their weapons are FTL pebbles which can wipe out cities, which is considerably more powerful than a musket. In fact, it's considerably more powerful than anything we have as well. In what way isn't this considered having powerful weaponry?

We've been down this path before, relativity doesn't grant true time travel, only the illusion of time travel to third parties in certain inertial frames. You can seriously fuck with people's perception of time and causality, but working things out mathematically demonstrates that there is no causality breach. We have been able to teleport particles faster than light on earth and all that I've said has been confirmed, it looks wonky, but it's all fine.

We have FTL because we have miniaturized power generators or can control physics to the point that starships the size of our modern planes and boats can travel faster than the speed of light.

A dyson swarm would require tremendous material expenditure and construction time, would have to be constantly maintained as various satellites break down, has to "beam back" it's energy, creating waste and causing a massive chokepoint in the power grid, and doesn't do anything for any of our colonists or civilization beyond the solar system. And you know, we don't even need it, because we can produce enough energy on our own.

In an FTL society self-sufficiency takes on a new meaning, where an interstellar economy can function, and mass can move faster than energy. It is actually faster to bring a new power plant to the colonies around pluto than to beam them the energy at...the speed of light. And if we talk interstellar, that beam of light will take years and years, losing intensity and efficiency, while we can get the new power plant installed and operating on a colony world light years away in a few days or weeks.

No FTL. Instead it's all colony ships. The problem arises tho that early generation colony/sleeper ships are so slow that by the time they arrive at a planet, it's often colonised by people from later generations using better technology who overtook the prior generations so the conflicts tend to occur between 2-3 generations of colonists from different eras with vastly different cultures, languages and tech levels.

Some of them are from an era where cyborgs became the human norm and in some cases, total body replacement became standard to create a pure technocracy. In others, biological manipulation occurs to replace the cyborgs after MUH HUMANITY kicks in so there's armies of biological super soldiers running around and colonies are ultra anal about genetic strands and tropes.

Early gen humans got weird levels of STC tech that got lost in the trans human wars, deleted by anti-cyborg activists and basically becoming lost tech due to the efforts to produce them so their ships are extremely valuable but once the ship touches down and the colonists/tech deploys, they become insanely hard to keep in check as they basically turn their colony ship into a full on city in the space of a week and have full colony expansion grade production and have armies of unhackable drones as the earlier AI was more robust than later generations since they just stuck human minds and copies of them in everything.

Early colonists see the other two 'generations' as completely alien species and act accordingly ala 'fuck this shit'. Technocrats want the STC style systems because it'd vastly improve their tech base just by having it, but generally they don't and the biologicals want the human genetics and bio-information from extinct bloodlines to see if there's possible overseen improvements they can apply/return to actual human forms as it's effectively a holy crusade.

joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html

>engineer doesn't understand the philosophical basis and limitations of empiricism because he's too busy sucking cock
Color me surprised

FTL is only popular because people can't wrap their head around the numbers.
The solar system alone has enough space, building material and fuel for millions of large cities, if not billions.
And each of those cities could at any point decide to stack up on fuel and relocate to the next star system, taking all of its production facilities and industrial base along with it.

You can't probe this isn't right.

Fpbp

>philosophical basis
How's mickey dee's working out for you, user?

>FTL
I don't play science fantasy settings.

It sucked shit when I was a sophomore in high school, but not that bad for a teen job.
On a related note, understanding basic logic and the philosophy of science doesn't make you some jobless philosopher.
t. Statistician

You are currently living in a peekaboo universe that collapses into quantum abstraction the moment you are not looking at it.

I don't justify SHIT

Soft sci-fi for life, yo

/thread

They realized that FTL travel gave them the power to fuck off to their own corner of the galaxy if they didn't want to deal with anybody else's shit. Civilization is scattered and minuscule throughout the galaxy.

...

> party is a group of space truckers
> transport space freight in giant V8 space trucks
> gas giants act as literal gas stations/truck stops
> planets literally get used up, got to find new planets for fuel
> truck stops filled with AYY LMAOs, criminals, hookers with three or even four titties
Fucking fund that shit

Why is that your setting doesnt feauture space cyber-pirate scientist/engineer Tywin Lannister with an electrically charged cock boarding space trucks?

You just know that big oil is gonna push for using oil in spaceships when they get commerciable enough. Doesn't even do anything noticeable and might actually do much worse. They'll sue anyone who doesn't comply.

Not that user, but the point of the story was hypotizing that technological advancement is not a straight line, and that aliens were extremely advanced in some cases while being extremely backwards in others. They didn't have weapon technology because all of their effort went to things correlated to their space travel. They weren't comparable to the human advancement of a certain century, because in certain things they were 1300 while in others they were 3000+.

It's a short story of speculative fiction. Basically a Marvel what if. You have to not look at it too close to enjoy it.

>Star lifting is superscience even harder for me to imagine than Ftl drive.
It's basic electromagnetism, scaled up.

Rednecks in space is my fetish

cus a Dyson Sphere is cooler and more gothic then your bitch ass Swarm

>truncated icosohedron
>sphere

>Dyson swarm
>fill the space with so much garbage that you would need all the materia from several planetary systems to build one

>FTL
>just keep going faster

Gee I wonder.

I really like this trope. Especially if they're self-replicating.
>We don't know how it works, we just keep feeding them more steel and uranium until another one pops out.

That's not the point of that story at all. That isn't what the aliens do, they are never described as having ever done that. The problem is that they would not be capable of interstellar travel with the level of technology they are described as having, even with magic FTL drives because the level of engineering technology required to exploit that FTL technology would be beyond them.

>I'm a rocket rancher
>You mean engineer
>No son, I rise these reactors like if they were my children. I feed them the best metal in the sector. Look at this beauty. It's the son of USS Acheron's reactor. Now that was a true stallion. It's a pity it got destroyed in the battle for Gamma VIII

>scrapherds and antimatter husbandry

You're a special kind of retarded.

Significant mining of planets, that is, converting significant portions of their mass into raw material, is (currently) outlawed. Smaller stellar objects are fine, but you are not allowed to turn Mercury into stellar condos any more than you are allowed to turn the Grand Canyon into Earth's largest Walmart. Dyson Swarms are still a perfectly attainable goal, and thanks to the mineral wealth of the Kuiper belt and Oort Cloud, the Sol system will have them within the next few hundred years. Star lifting, similarly, is entirely possible but is seen as a long-term but completely reachable goal.

An FTL method of travel meanwhile has been discovered (an Alcubierre drive derivative) and has allowed humanity to begin its explorations of the cosmos, but even with FTL haven't traveled all that far from home. The furthest outpost is on a planet in the Copernicus (55 Cancri) system 41 light-years away. So far there haven't been any interactions with other spacefaring civilizations.

Why would people cluster around a single star when they can travel to any one they want?

Youtube guy isaac arthur.

Starfinder has them.

It -sounds- like Starcraft, but if you want AYY LMAOs you'll have to fight them. Literally every competitive game of Starcraft with Terrans is a case of "Redneck space truckers are here to take our shit again!"