Idea Dyson sphere

[lowerlowerhk]

When you are in external view and near the surface of a planet, you can zoom out to watch below the planet suface. Can somebody make a inner texture on the planet, and add a light source at the planet core, as to resemble the view of a dyson sphere?

What is Dyson sphere:
Dyson sphere is a mega-spherical shell which contains a sun in order to capture all of its light for energy havasting.

 

[jedidia]

You could just make a spherical vessel and put it at the position of the sun. The planets can't be turned inside out.

still, textures would be absolutely frickin huge if you want to see more than one pixel per a few billion km^2. You'd have to program some kind of mip-mapping, and texture generating and... oh wait, this starts to sounds like Orulex and LibProcTer! maybe you could ask Artlav or CJP for an inverted version, that should do the trick nicely.

 

[garyw]

And for the light source you'd just use the sun. What you would really need is also your own sol.cfg which makes some sense as the resources required to build a Dyson sphere would require most of the mass of the planets in the system anyway.

 

[Linguofreak]

Orbiter tends not to display objects of that kind of size. I recently tried making a planet with a radius of a mere 2 million km, and Orbiter did not display the surface.

 

[Space Dragon]

great Idea but these things if they could be built are huge! like as in earths orbit in diameter huge around a star like the sun thats almost beyond comprehension. Would cool if you could do it though

 

[sunshine135]

A Dyson sphere is really hard to imagine on scale. I have a tough time imagining a ring the size of Earth's orbit- never mind a sphere.

I also wonder if it makes sense. The Sun's energy mostly radiates into space. Wouldn't a Dyson sphere trap all of that energy and make human habitation impossible?

Cheers,

 

[Hielor]

I also wonder if it makes sense. The Sun's energy mostly radiates into space. Wouldn't a Dyson sphere trap all of that energy and make human habitation impossible?

Actually, this is pretty much the point of a Dyson sphere. By capturing all of the energy output of the civilization's star you'd never want for energy, and the energy per unit area on the surface of the Dyson sphere will be the same as the current energy per unit area on the Earth's equator.

 

[tgep]

If you build it as a seperate solar system, and put the sphere around a low mass White dwarf star, and the sphere having the diameter of Mercurys orbit or less ..... then it might just work with orbiter.

 

[docabn]

What would you do with it if you built it? I mean such a structure would be huge. Granted it would be cool, but how big do plan to make this thing how many AUs from the sun? At one AU it would take most of the matter of several solar systems.
How thick should the shell be?
Any theories on how it would be kept in place?
Would you want it to rotate to simulate gravity like a ring world, (but bigger)?

 

[Space Dragon]

Would not having all that matter in one place cause its own gravity well?

 

[docabn]

I’m horrible at math so someone make sure my formula and math is right but
Surface area = 4(pi)r2
R=1.5x1011
Surface area=12.56*1.5x1011
Surface area=1.884x1012 x 3 meters thick=5,652,000,000,000 cubic meters
Or 1,884,000,000,000m3 if we leave it at 1 meter thick
The entire earth is only
V=4/3(pi)r3
V= 4.1867*r3; (r=6378000m)
V=26702773m3
Whatever material is used would have to be incredibly strong to keep the entire structure from collapsing in on its self.
I'm not sure how much mass is in the entire solar system but I suspect that you would barely have enough in the entire system to create a Niven style ring let alone a Dyson sphere.
The actual size of that thing would be mind boggling

 

[RisingFury]

I'm not sure how much mass is in the entire solar system but I suspect that you would barely have enough in the entire system to create a Niven style ring let alone a Dyson sphere.
The actual size of that thing would be mind boggling

Mostly just the Sun.......
Jupiter accounts for about 0.1% of the mass of the Sun and it is the most massive object besides the Sun... all the objects of the solar system combined would probably not make up even 1% of the total mass.

If you take 2*10^30 kg as the mass of the solar system, it'll be pretty accurate.



Oh and inside the Dyson sphere, there would be no change in gravity. That's due to in inverse square law.

Outside of it, it'll be as if the mass of the Dyson sphere would be at the barycenter.

 

[T.Neo]

A solid Dyson Sphere would be impossible to construct without unobtainium (AFAIK).

Any plausible design would either involve a ring(s) of panels orbiting the sun at different altitudes and inclinations, or a series of "statites" supported by the radiation pressure of the solar wind.

 

[RisingFury]

A solid Dyson Sphere would be impossible to construct without unobtainium (AFAIK).

Any plausible design would either involve a ring(s) of panels orbiting the sun at different altitudes and inclinations, or a series of "statites" supported by the radiation pressure of the solar wind.

Naw... it'd be possible to construct it. You'd just have to construct it from the equator up and down, symmetrically, to prevent sheering...

 

[Salamander]

i would say the radius of a dyson sphere would be much larger than earth orbit. any given place on earth only gets 1/2 of sun radiation or even less on average (day/night cycle) while the rest of the sky is basicly dark.
now the sphere would change all that. depending on albedo every point in the sky reflects part of it's share of radiation, and the rest would tend to heat it up till it radiates infra red.

i don't know how to calculate it, but i would expect the sphere to be at least 2 AU in radius.

 

[cjp]

You could just make a spherical vessel and put it at the position of the sun. The planets can't be turned inside out.

still, textures would be absolutely frickin huge if you want to see more than one pixel per a few billion km^2. You'd have to program some kind of mip-mapping, and texture generating and... oh wait, this starts to sounds like Orulex and LibProcTer! maybe you could ask Artlav or CJP for an inverted version, that should do the trick nicely.

Actually, at one point I accidentally had an 'inverted' version of earth, with the continents and oceans on the inside . I fixed it, but it should be easy to 'unfix' it.

libProcTer is quite scale independent, but OrbiterProcTer (the Orbiter version of ProcTer) isn't really designed for these scales. It proves that planetary-scale vessels are possible, but I have no idea whether a 'Dyson sphere' scale will give problems in Orbiter. You can test this even without a special DLL, by simply making a simple mesh of that size and combine it with a generic vessel DLL.

If it doesn't work, I can think of a way to work around the size limitation, but OrbiterProcTer doesn't use it, and AFAIK neither does Orulex. It simply isn't needed when working with normal planets.

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The idea of a Dyson sphere is not to keep all heat inside: the idea is to keep useful heat inside, until it is fully used. It radiates away all the heat it receives, but it does so at a temperature which is not much more than the cosmic background radiation. So, on the inside the radiation is UV, visible light and infrared, and on the outside it is far infrared and microwave radiation.

 

[Hielor]

What would you do with it if you built it? I mean such a structure would be huge. Granted it would be cool, but how big do plan to make this thing how many AUs from the sun? At one AU it would take most of the matter of several solar systems.
How thick should the shell be?
Any theories on how it would be kept in place?
Would you want it to rotate to simulate gravity like a ring world, (but bigger)?

A problem with rotating it for gravity would be that the "gravity" experienced by any point on the sphere would decrease (and be at the wrong angle!) as you got futher "north" until the extremes at the poles, at which point the "gravity" would be very light and parallel to the surface of the sphere (ie, not particularly useful for keeping things on the ground)

 

[Artlav]

It's not quite possible to make in Orbiter. I tried to make a Ringworld before, the scale gets problematic on many levels - FPU precision, tesselation problems, visibility problems.
With a Dyson sphere, it will be even worse.

 

[willy88]

Wouldn't a Dyson sphere be made out of millions of satellites, not a solid shell?

 

[Hielor]

Wouldn't a Dyson sphere be made out of millions of satellites, not a solid shell?

How would that work? They'd all be in different orbital planes, so it would be impossible to keep them in a sphere shape without crashing into each other.

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

---------- Post added at 11:06 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:58 PM ----------

Yeah, and i just read that and it's talking about satellites. Go me. In common usage though, a "dyson sphere" is solid.