Let's talk scale. Post megastructures

It's nearly impossible to build, even considering it a futuristic scenario with technology that would seem alien to us today.
Way too much resources spent for near zero utility

If anyone really enjoys getting into the specigics of it. How many people would a ringworld like the ones in stellaris have living within the habitat areas(places with water and continents)?

Always gives me a chuckle. I've wondered how long theyd need to be on that ship that people would start carving out nations for themselves.

This is the true reason why space dwarves are way less common than space elves.
Fuck exploring the galaxy, they dig out ALL the raw materials in their star system and get real comfy.

>SS13 in a nutshell

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Most mega-structures become a lot less absurd when you imagine them as swarms of smaller structures that only appear solid when viewed from a distance.

Ring-worlds are impossible, but a ring shaped formation of an entire solar system's mass worth of smaller space habitats, is much more feasible, and can scale to any size you want. Same thing with Dyson spheres. An entire sphere requires impossible materials, but a constellation of solar power satellites can easily scale up to a type II civilization with technology available to us today if we bothered to do it.

I think a proper Type I civilization would disassemble the smaller planets/asteroids and use them to build a bunch of different sub-planetary-scale mega-structures until they reach type II. A bunch of smaller mega structures will be more flexible, but still be more impressive than anybody alive today can imagine.

>somebody fabricates a rotavator and moves it into position to pluck your house off the planet
>sets it back on their property after some orbital adjustments

Furthermore, a kardashev civilization maximizing real estate for Organics will disassemble all the planets to make a ringworld shaped swarm of orbital habitats.

A kardashev civilization that wants to maximize energy collection will build a dyson swarm.

A kardashev that wants to preserve it's heritage will leave planets with atmosphere's intact, but they will probably upgrade them with mega-structures like orbital rings, space elevators, and Lagrange habitats.

Space Elevators however prevent you from having low earth orbit satellites however, so they'll probably use high altitude UAVs for the same purpose instead in that case.

Most kardashev civilizations will probably use a mixture of all these things. At Type I you upgrade your homeworld and disassemble all the asteroids that might threaten it and use them to build more orbital habitats. To get to type II you disassemble the spare planets (in our case mercury and the asteroid belt) to build a Dyson swarm. Then you will have enough energy to do whatever the fuck you want with the other planets, and only a type III will be able to stop you.

One big mega-structure is unimaginative and unrealistic. A real civilization that develops naturally will have a bunch of smaller ones, each self contained worlds unto themselves, possibly with their own cultures, histories, and local politics.

Some mega-structures will contain organic-ecosystems populated by humanoids. Others will have purely machine-ecosystems, but those machine ecosystems will be able to simulate any ecosystem you can imagine in virtual reality. Your homebrewed fantasy setting could be a pirated copy of an MMO that's being run illegally on the spare processing power of a mega-structure built by a long extinct race of aliens but has since been claimed by another race of alien squatters for the explicit purpose of playing space DnD.

youtu.be/LMbI6sk-62E
Here is a great dude on YouTube who talks about mega-structures amongst other things.

To counterpoint the other posters here orbital rings and such aren't really that complicated just big. We have the materials to build them now, just not the quantity of them. orbital rings are super useful and simple, as Mr. Arthur says they are practically the freeway of space
i for one would really love to see such a civilisation depicted.

Ring worlds are not theoretically impossible, though dyson spheres are.

Oh yeah, if you don't have FTL communication, mega-scale-computers are a really fucking dumb idea. Jupiter brains would in fact be a collection of smaller computers that can't actually think faster than any of the individual computers because information has to travel between them at the speed of light. It's even worse for star sized matrioshka brains. Paralelization has limits and computing power does not scale up in volume.

You can fit something much smarter than a human into the same volume/mass as a human brain, but once you get larger than that, you get diminishing rather than accelerating returns. The thinking and remembering part of any super-computer is going to be very tiny compared to it's power supply and coolant.

True godlike super-intelligence will probably require a computer that exists partly in hyperspace or is made out of wormholes or something like that. Otherwise latency will always be the bottleneck, and there will never be a reason to build a mega scale computer when a handful of smaller ones can do the same thing for cheaper.

Theoretically impractical, the only advantage they have over a swarm of smaller ring shaped habitats is that you won't be able to walk between them. Said habitats can still have the same habitable surface area as earth for a fraction of the total mass.

>How many people can a ringworld hold?

About 30 quadrillion, given a population density roughly comparable to modern Earth, or double that with more intensive housing and population options.

There is no theoretical material that could withstand the rotational momentum and stresses of a ringworld, sadly.

Oh I mean individually have the same habitable surface area as earth, collectively they would have a larger surface area than earth's orbit crammed full of earths until the point where their collective gravity causes problems. If you don't like planets but still like physical bodies, disassemble all your planets to build a ring of rings and you can support a population in the low quadrillions living in unimaginable abundance.

Sadly all the art I have is of non mega-scale habitats. Which are still very cool, but not planet replacements. IIRC culture orbitals have the same surface area as earth.

Which is why you build a ring of smaller rings that only looks solid from a distance. Similar capacity, much more feasible, and most importantly does not have to be built all at once. You can even start with regularly sized habitats while you develop technology to build bigger ones, and disassemble the old ones when the inhabitants move to the next one. You just need to plan expansion around population growth and remember to stop fucking once you run out of planets to disassemble.

>screenshots from Stellaris
buddy...

Can't you just have bridges comprised of elastic material between structures? They don't have to be fixed.

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Maybe. At any rate, mega structures get a lot less absurd when you stop thinking in terms of solidity and start thinking in terms of swarms or tensigrity.

The first space habitats will probably be inflatable and/or held together by cables. These will scale up much better than anything solid. Your atmosphere can serve as all the radiation shielding you need, and any punctures can be fixed in the several hours it will take for all the air to escape.

Cable based structures also give you good excuses for spider shaped construction robots, because spider-mecha are fucking awesome.

Eventually you get to the point where no real cable material can withstand the tension, but once you get that big you just build a bunch of smaller structures in the same orbit. They can even share power and data communications with point to point microwave beams, and collectively act as a giant antenna or microwave laser cannon that scales all the way up to a Dyson Swarm if you keep building enough of them in enough orbits.

kek

Come to think of it. A tensigrity structure might just spin as a side effect to keep the cables properly taught. The hab sections could just be counterweights.

The overall shape of an ideal multi-purpose habitat would be a weird mass of mirrors collectors, antennas, and radiators, with ring shaped spin sections that keep the whole thing fully expanded. In an emergency it closes like a giant flower. The only downside of this is that collapsing the structure will increase rotation speed because angular momentum is preserved. I think the people in the spin sections won't notice any change in gravity, but they will feel more Coriolis force, and that might cause motion sickness.

Also I think the amount of energy required to stop and start the rotation stays the same no matter how expanded the structure is.

Now I'm imagining a type II civilization of magical girls who live in giant space flowers. Probably a species capable of parthenogenesis.

The center of the habitat is a computer core, around that is a solid Bernal sphere, which serves as flywheel, cooling, and radiation shielding for the computer core.

The Bernal sphere's internal surface is water, with a ring of floating islands on which humanoids can live on the equator. If the gravity is too weak or too strong, it can be adjusted slightly by changing the ring's rotation using propellers or something. The water is deeper around the equator because gravity is stronger there, but aquatic creatures won't notice gravity changes. At the poles it's just bare concrete with a pillar supporting the core, and windows through which sunlight is mirrored in. Day/night is controlled by adjusting the mirrors, and life support is handled by aquatic plants.

Outside the sphere is a vast petal shaped arrangement of mirrors, solar panels, radiators, and antennas, all which are controlled by the computer core and function as part of a much larger Dyson swarm. Individually they are roughly equivalent to a single battleship in terms of firepower, but unlike a battleship the habitat is much more fragile and immobile. Collectively the swam can destroy planets from interstellar ranges by focusing the combined energy of the sun on them.

At the very edge of the flower are more habitats which counter rotate against the inner Bernal sphere in order to stabilize the entire habitat. You can build anything you want here, as long as it's heavy enough to counter balance the sphere, and it will have the same gravity but less Coriolis force, and more surface area. You can put anything here than requires more space, like industry, suburbs, farmland, or nature parks. They will also be self contained units accessible only through transport pods. Anything that moves from the inner sphere to the outer habitats will need to be de-spun and then re-spun because they are moving in opposite directions.

In an emergency, the central core saves itself by jettisoning everything else, which also completely stops it's rotation, and possibly kills everyone living inside of it because that stops the gravity. The whole structure is effectively a giant organism that needs to say in motion to not die. If the rotation gets fucked up by structural damage, you have to repair a moving object, and correct the wobble before that happens. A society that builds these kinds of things probably has the ability to backup organic minds anyways though. It's still safer than living on a planet where your life isn't controlled by a benevolent AI that views you as pets to keep it company while it stares at the sun and contemplates efficiency and benevolence.

A ringworld requires a material with a tensile strength greater than the weak nuclear force. A RUNGworld, however…

>that fucking retarded-looking blue and white monstrosity
Is that (and the previous one) some actual autist’s creation? Because out of the context of Star Wars, I find that blue and white one to be something of a guilty pleasure. It’s so fucking retarded looking and yet hits all the right notes for me (with regard to retarded-looking ships).

>tfw you'll never be a spacenoid
My Zeon would've been the right one...

Setting idea i've been sitting on for a few years now

Extinction event on earth in the early 2200's leads to a mass exodus from the solar system in slower-than-light ships, where very basic cryogenic suspension for the population combined with conscious engineers/pilots allows a journey of a few hundred years to take place. A massive flotilla of ~380 ships of various nations goes to one of seventeen planets deemed terraformable. While the terraforming process is conducted on the surface, the majority of the population lives and works in a massive orbital station built from the shells of the colony ships. Two hundred years after arrival, the world below is starting to become livable in more than dome habitats, but a massive population still lives and works in Station Delta.

>My Zeon would've been the right one...
Sure, user.

Imagine trying to keep marbles on top of a old fashioned record player when it's working. To keep them from rolling off you put them on a string, like a pearl necklace.

The faster the record spins, the stronger your string has to be. To spin it as fast as a Ringworld would spin, you'd need a "string" stronger then any theoretically possible material.

Depends a lot on the variables present in the ringworld, Stellaris implies its ringworlds have the space of 4 large planets, while in the original novel it was stated that you could copy-paste all of the earth's surface onto the ringworld and you would still lose it if you looked away.
Still, in stellaris ringworlds are primarily used for mining, while that is directly specified as something ringworlds absolutely CANNOT do in the original novel, so they probably got all their information on ringworlds from Halo.

I want this as a setting, or an anime. Now.

But you wouldn't be "keeping them from rolling off" in this case, their orbits would remain self-sufficient as if the bridges were not there. (The bridges would be sufficiently elastic so as to not snap from errancies in orbit but could not meaningfully hold one habitat to another if they were to drift--thus the orbits need to remain relatively similar so the bridges aren't casually destroyed) The bridges serve only as a pathway from one to the other.
Basically, connecting them without making it a fixed structure of any sort, just little walkways. And only assembled after the independent stations achieved orbital rotation.

Please I hope that's not real

Gundam is exactly what you're looking for.

I agree, I like how there's all that open space as if reducing mass was something they were concerned about when designing a 500 km long spaceship.

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I suppose this could make a fun quest. I might run it if I feel up to the task.

The players are citizens of a space habitat in a Utopian Karadasev civilization and have to defend it against a Berserker swarm outbreak. Space combat would take place using Diaspora's space combat rules, and while the players start out controling a very powerful unit, they will have to defend themselves against endless swarms of weaker units. Moreover, the quest format would make them vulnerable to infighting (each anonymous poster would represent a different citizen's request to the central AI) while the enemy will always be a single minded force of destruction trying to turn every available piece of matter into more of itself.

Mostly war-gaming with slice of life shenanigans if the players are successful at defending their ultra-tech utopia from enemies within and without.

Its interesting- everyone keeps talking about how these structures are impossible in physics, yet spatial distortion to accomplish FTL travel ( warp, hyperspace, ect) is fairly common in some of these settings. If you can fold space to move a ship, why not just fold some extra living space into the station?
this could also "fix" some of the mass issues that pointed out. if it's in hyperspace, it might not be subject to the same gravitational pull.

I also like lovecraftian settings/progentor races in my sci-fi, and hyperspace technology that interwoven and precise being far beyond our impressive, but crude ship FTL drives. We think we build megastructures with our 100km long jump point stabilizers, but imagine what happens when the explorers crack into a several million mile wide tetrahedron that has several billion miles of pic related inside.

I like it.

What does station delta look like? did we melt down all of the ships into a super sleek, optimized station? Did we just weld a bunch of airlocks together and say "fuck it, a functional space hulk"? Can we still see the shapes/hulls of the old ships in the superstructure?

Isn't that basically the plot of that TV show, the One Hundred?

What if we just take some cosmic string, spin it into a giant ring and then turn it really fast?

Yeah, if it's a space opera setting with FTL, force fields, and gravity control, I expect more exotic megastructures not less.

Pocket dimension habs, supercomputers made out of clusters of wormholes to negate lightspeed lag, megastructures held together by force fields, ships with gravity decks facing more than one fucking direction because space is not a fucking ocean.

the cultureverse is one of the few settings that considers the scale implications of space opera tech. Megastructures are a dime a dozen. If your race can't build them, you can usually ask the elder races to let you house sit one of theirs.

Bottom line, space is big and space facing civilizations build big shit. Hard Sci Fi settings will have Dyson swarms. Soft Sci Fi settings will have even wierder shit. And either can partly simulate the other in virtual reality once they get enough processing power.

the galaxy outmassing city of Blame! is somewhat explicable when you remember its held up by regular gravity furnaces and builders pour out extra dimensional material or make it from base principles.

One of my favorite aspects of Culture ships it that they can build up extra thrusters enroute, and more mass as well.

Go full digital. It's the future! Much more efficient than having bodies. You could easily have a digital population that outnumbers the number of atoms in the universe.

IIRC, in the culture-verse making more mass is something people only do in emergencies because it's less efficient than just mining asteroids or recycling old stuff.

Another thing about mega-engineering that a lot of people don't realize is, that even in a hard sci-fi, a type II or higher can extract mass from a star, enough to start building new planets or smaller stars. Doing so actually extends the star's life, potentially by trillions of years because smaller stars last longer. The city in blame is a purposefully dystopian nightmare scenario of mindless automation given control of mega-engineering tech and expanding faster than it can be controlled. The same technology can also be used to create abundance beyond what your mortal minds can comprehend. Just need to make sure information entropy (life) doesn't outpace thermal entropy (death)

Fabrication from base principles is also something you can do while moving, and at any acceleration, so its what you want in the particular situation I mentioned.

If you like Mega Structures you will like this Youtube Channel OP.

youtube.com/watch?v=HlmKejRSVd8&list=PLIIOUpOge0LtW77TNvgrWWu5OC3EOwqxQ

I don't think you even have to be type II to construct a dyson swarm, just really fucking motivated.

Guess what you’re getting in the next movie, motherfucker! It’s literally going to be an ESB rewrite, and IX will be a Jedi rewrite.

In that case you'd need constant energy input to maintain orbit. You'd also have a 'ringworld' in micro-gravity.. And some strong questions about why not just make 3 million earths worth of habitats in stable orbits instead.

Show me that Nicoll-Dyson Laser