Hopefully none of you physics geniuses will pay too much attention some of the very unlikely extrapolations of physics in the tech tree (What? Of course you can make weapons from non-baryonic particles!).

bwfcnut wrote:
Ah I hadn't thought of a synchrotron, although wouldn't that generate significant amounts of synchrotron radiation? And true, with fusion, but then we're getting into the realms of constructing a star and waiting for it to go supernova for heavier than Iron elements, or manually inducing it in a process similar to type Ia, but that would require an object of a calibre of a white dwarf again something that would have to be built. It just doesn't seem feasible to me to build a planet out of energy due to the ridiculous amounts of energy required to make the required material, and the almost impossibility of capturing and storing material and constructing it in the first place.

You could use the synchrotron as a photon source for the pair production. Interesting recycling idea.

bwfcnut wrote:
Yeah, I think I said a few pages back in my initial post that this was the only way I could think of constructing a planet, but then we come to a multitude more problems such as collecting the objects together and waiting for them to gravitate towards one another, merge and settle as a stable planet. This normally takes millions of years in system formation. Plus you'd possibly have to discriminate about what elements are present in the object to actually have a molten core to help generate heat for the planet by fission, akin to Earth's core.

Correct. I've got to admit that I only read the second page, so if I put something on the table again, that was already discussed, I apologize.

Slowhands wrote:
Hopefully none of you physics geniuses will pay too much attention some of the very unlikely extrapolations of physics in the tech tree (What? Of course you can make weapons from non-baryonic particles!).

Why shouldn't you be able to? Just one thing: If you ever managed to shoot dark matter into anything, the interaction cross section would be negligible, so it wouldn't be very effective.

But you might still find something nonbaryonic we don't know of yet and cannot exclude that is useful for weaponry, so you've got the free design space of PeV- to Planck-scale.

Nosferatiel wrote:
You could use the synchrotron as a photon source for the pair production. Interesting recycling idea.

Hm, interesting idea as you said.

Nosferatiel wrote:
Correct. I've got to admit that I only read the second page, so if I put something on the table again, that was already discussed, I apologize.

Ha no worries, I was more agreeing with you than saying it had already been mentioned

Note to self:"don't try to outsmart people on this forum"



love the amount of discussion this awoke tho.



And yeah in the end I agree with bwfcnut and Nosferatiel about the planet building being too far fetched, but I'd really love to see those Space Stations!

bwfcnut wrote:
Not really because almost all of those are grounded in some form of physical theory, some of which I have studied at university. I admit some are far fetched but not unbelievably so. Planet building is just ridiculous. Do you have any idea just how much matter there is in even the smallest planet? Where would it all come from since it's typically "mined"? Asteroids probably wouldn't cut it due the need of some form of molten core driven by nuclear fission, which requires (relatively speak) fairly rare fissile materials. And naturally forming a planet takes millions of years. What about the gravitational effect of this new planet on the otherwise stable system? There's just too many variables that make it more or less unviable to this physicist.





I'm all for endgame tech, sure, but I do think it should at least have some basis in something that is theoretically possible.

I'm no physicist, but I do know that an advanced type 3 civilization would be able to do quite a few things that scientists from our puny type 0 civilization would scoff at.

so Matrioshka brains, Dyson spheres, and artificial stars and planets may all be well within the reach of such a civilization, and the reason we think its impossible is because our current understanding of science is far inferior to theirs.

Zamjr86 wrote:
I'm no physicist, but I do know that an advanced type 3 civilization would be able to do quite a few things that scientists from our puny type 0 civilization would scoff at.

so Matrioshka brains, Dyson spheres, and artificial stars and planets may all be well within the reach of such a civilization, and the reason we think its impossible is because our current understanding of science is far inferior to theirs.

Very true, I never disputed otherwise, but our base physics is currently pretty damned accurate for literally almost everything we experience, and it explains a helluva a lot from the cosmological scale all the way down to subatomic particle level. Obviously it's far from being completely correct, but I cannot foresee any great groundshattering discovery that will cause a complete ovehaul of physics as we know it; the main unsolved problems I can think of in physics will just require tweaking of our current models. The models are just too damned accurate to be completely wrong, so I'd say that we have a good idea of what is possible and impossible. Obviously I can't say with 100% certainty, no one can, but this is what I've picked up on through my degree. As for the planet thing, as was discussed, there's just no viable way to obtain the vast amounts of material needed to build one (and this is ignoring the gravitational effect it would have on a planetary system that it is added to, along with conservation laws assuming "construction" from energy and elementary particles). In my opinion this sort of tech would feel very shoe-horned in with the reason of "it might happen", whereas the vast majority of stuff ingame already has some form of real life physical theory behind it.



Have a read through Nosferatiel's and my own comments to see what we mean. Besides the civilization scale you're on about is as hypothetical as Drake's equation, it should be taken with a pinch of salt.

true enough, but in a sci fi game you can expect extravagant megastuctures. for an advanced civilization it may very well be possible, however unlikely. more cool stuff = more fun, this is a game, not a scientific simulation.

Then while your at it we may as well just let people use sonic guns, or flamethowers!



No, there has to be a line in the sand where we cant just ignore what actually makes sence.



Building planets would require massive gravity generators and the mass of a planet, and i havent even seen any evidance stating that the games current races even use artificial gravity, let alone one that could build an entire world!



By the time you could do such a thing, you wouldent want to. Just live in space and harvest all of these easy to access metals from asteroids and grow your food indoors.

I can think of one way to make a dyson sphere that would be to turn a very large nebula into a small star and using the rest of the mass to make the giant structure might be enough materiel there...

Tonberry wrote:
I can think of one way to make a dyson sphere that would be to turn a very large nebula into a small star and using the rest of the mass to make the giant structure might be enough materiel there...

You know how big even small stars are? and to have a dyson sphere large enough to not scould the surface?!!



And are not most nebule just that, clouds of gas? where you getting the elements bigger then iron?



Building a star is even more crazy!!!

depends if the nebula came from say a super giant blue star it would be enormous and you made say a red dwarf you would have plenty of matter left over.

Also matter conversion is would be fairly simple at a high enough level of technology (atomic rearrangement)

also using a device capable of pulling enough gas together could theoretically make a star

Igncom1 wrote:
You know how big even small stars are? and to have a dyson sphere large enough to not scould the surface?!!



And are not most nebule just that, clouds of gas? where you getting the elements bigger then iron?



Building a star is even more crazy!!!

also yes a small star can have about as little mass as 75 jupiters whilst a large one may contain as much as 150 times our sun theres a big difference between the 2

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_mass

face it, megastructures are a staple of these games, and only add to the fun and wow factor. leaving them out makes no sense. true, some limit must exist, but dyson spheres and the like are staples of the genre.

Tonberry wrote:
depends if the nebula came from say a super giant blue star it would be enormous and you made say a red dwarf you would have plenty of matter left over.

Also matter conversion is would be fairly simple at a high enough level of technology (atomic rearrangement)

also using a device capable of pulling enough gas together could theoretically make a star

But.....you need elements below (But including) iron to make a fusion reaction work properly to sustain a star....otherwise you would just get...like a ball of gas....or you could produce like a...White Dwarf star?



I dunno, im not too sure on my evolution of stars and their processes, but it seems unfeasable.

Igncom1 wrote:
But.....you need elements below (But including) iron to make a fusion reaction work properly to sustain a star....otherwise you would just get...like a ball of gas....or you could produce like a...White Dwarf star?



I dunno, im not too sure on my evolution of stars and their processes, but it seems unfeasable.

only 1 element is required for fusion and thats hydrogen the rest are produced as by products

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion

well that would start the process

Tonberry wrote:
depends if the nebula came from say a super giant blue star it would be enormous and you made say a red dwarf you would have plenty of matter left over.

Also matter conversion is would be fairly simple at a high enough level of technology (atomic rearrangement)

also using a device capable of pulling enough gas together could theoretically make a star





also yes a small star can have about as little mass as 75 jupiters whilst a large one may contain as much as 150 times our sun theres a big difference between the 2

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_mass

Seriously, have you just skipped the entire conversation me, Nosferatiel and a few other people had? I mean I know it was fairly in depth but to just assume matter conversion is as simple as "atomic rearrangement"? We've already gone through how it takes a ridiculous amount of energy to even play around at the atomic level. And do you know how much matter is in even the smallest star? Jupiter is roughly 320 times heavier than Earth, and it is still almost 80 times too light to even turn into a brown dwarf. It also takes massive amounts of gravitational force to even get close to fusion and stellar ignition in nebulae. You can't just waft a nebula together and hope a star forms. By and large nebulae are less dense than the most extreme high vacuums we can make on Earth. They have to gravitate together and form bok globules, high density areas of gas, before they can even form a protostar. There's more to it than just collapsing together and igniting.

Zamjr86 wrote:
face it, megastructures are a staple of these games, and only add to the fun and wow factor. leaving them out makes no sense. true, some limit must exist, but dyson spheres and the like are staples of the genre.

As I said I have no problem with megastructures or end-game tech, I'd welcome the addition. I'd just rather they were grounded in something that is viable, rather than something that isn't "but might happen in the future".

Igncom1 wrote:
Building planets would require massive gravity generators and the mass of a planet, and i havent even seen any evidance stating that the games current races even use artificial gravity, let alone one that could build an entire world!

Some of the high level weapons in the game are based on destructive gravitonic manipulations. One of the constructions available in the game is explicitly a network of graviton shielded laboratories (artificially gravity-less laboratories). High gravity worlds can have excess gravitons shunted off. At least one of the armors (hyperdense plating) refers to using gravitics to induce pressures comparable to planetary core or even star-heart environments.



This establishes clearly that 1) extreme gravity production is possible, and 2) controlled gravity reduction is possible. It does not establish that 3) controlled gravity production is possible... but I might be missing something here.

How about i put it this way if nature could do it then there should be a way for us to as well.

Platescale wrote:
Some of the high level weapons in the game are based on destructive gravitonic manipulations. One of the constructions available in the game is explicitly a network of graviton shielded laboratories (artificially gravity-less laboratories). High gravity worlds can have excess gravitons shunted off. At least one of the armors (hyperdense plating) refers to using gravitics to induce pressures comparable to planetary core or even star-heart environments.



This establishes clearly that 1) extreme gravity production is possible, and 2) controlled gravity reduction is possible. It does not establish that 3) controlled gravity production is possible... but I might be missing something here.

Then fair enough on the small scale stuff,



But still, building a planet?

Tonberry wrote:
How about i put it this way if nature could do it then there should be a way for us to as well.

There may well be, but nature also takes hundreds of thousands to millions of years to do what most people are proposing. Conversely, it could also be argued that nature can travel at the speed of light (c) with photons, something we will probably never be able to do due to it requiring infinite energy for objects with rest mass.