quote:Originally posted by Topher: I seem to remember someone telling a story once of their ancestors on a colonizing mission to a planet. They were all in stasis. When the ship arrived at the planet, it was inhabitable so they turned around and went back. The details escape me at the moment, however.
Yes, because colonising an inhabitable planet would be too easy. Give me Io any day!
posted
A cloaked planet must cloak it's gravitation field, so how does it stay orbating the star? plus the hole in the stella wind must be filled somehow. Maybe they're betting people don't check for these things if they don't know the planet isn't there (no class M planets in this system to see people, move along)
the Dyson sphere, nice idea, not really very useful. Ok, lots of real estate, door entry system tricky but effective, however lethal solar flares from sun in center? Do you want to go around all the time in a lead hat wearing sun factor 1000?
Getting this back on track: You wouldn't be able to see planets around a star when another star or sufficiently dense nebular or dust cloud is it the way. An explanation for starships would be that high res imaging doesn't work to well at warp or though a deflector field, which would seem necessary most of the time
-------------------- Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil...prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon...
posted
Well, a Dyson sphere (or swarm) is really all about efficient solar power.
Apparently if you turn the surface into a really big array of lasers, it can also double as a mindbogglingly powerful superweapon, cf. this here discussion.
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effective in a lightspeed limited universe, but you will have a number of years to do something about it in the star trek universe. However as a powerplant, it's more a matter of logistics. For example, a huge new reactor in the wilds of Scotland isn't going to do much for a lightbulb in New South Wales Australia.
Would make someone a great starbase, but if you can't process the material of the sphere's hull, I doubt there's any other matter available for ship building in a 10 light year radius. Even if you could process the surface, you still need a infrastructure to do the building (Half the planet is made of iron, but cars aren't exactly cheap)
-------------------- Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil...prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon...
posted
A couple of observations at the end of a long, hot and tiring day:
1) Was Terra Nova really spotted from Earth? A probe flyby seems just as likely, considering that really long range robots like Friendship One were being launched at the time. Also, Earth's insistence that Terra Nova was the only inhabitable (and free?) planet within 20 ly could be more justifiably ignored if it was the result of relatively scattershot probe studies than if it was derived from telescope observations.
2) Not all star systems that are named need be "charted". There's no need for the Ceti Alpha system to be charted as of "Space Seed" or as of ST2:TWoK, for example. In "Space Seed", Kirk may simply have ordered the ship to the nearest uncharted but named system, looked briefly around, observed the harsh but habitable fifth planet there, and then called Khan to hear his sentence, without bothering to check out extraneous stuff like planets VI-XXIII. And in TWoK, as suggested above, we can evoke the conspiracy clause: little in the way of log entries need have been made in "Space Seed", and UFP knowledge on the Ceti Alpha system need not have increased.
We also know explicitly that some named systems, like Cheron from TOS "LTBYLB", lie in uncharted space. It's only natural that the Feds would know some if not most systems by "reputation" only.
3) Apparently, basic charting was a major task for the Enterprise in TOS. In "The Corbomite Maneuver", the crew even takes simple starscape photos! This suggests that telescope observations aren't of much worth in the TOS era, or at least require "parallax enhancement" from starship observations.
So why isn't telescopy practical in Trek? The distances involved may be the key - current and foreseeable methods of planetary detection only work to a couple of hundred lightyears, and basic optics set limits for observation of planetary conditions at long ranges. Our TOS and TNG heroes may simply be dealing with such distant systems that remote charting of planetary types has not been viable. Things like the Argus Array may be unable to observe anything but active subspace emitters in realtime; the idea of tapping into spysat signals is a valid one for TNG "Parallels".
Finally, our heroes may have learned the hard way not to trust archive data on star systems. When Sulu reports the presence of X planets of Y types in the system, he may just be confirming what the archives of long range observations already know, rather than sprouting novel information, despite the appearances. Judging by "Doomsday Machine" or "One of Our Planets...", it does sound like a good idea not to trust planetary counts more than a few weeks old!
quote:the Dyson sphere, nice idea, not really very useful.
I think Larry Niven's "Ringworld" idea makes a lot more sense. Instead of an absurdly large sphere, the structure is a band that surrounds the star. High walls on either side of the ring, along with its spin, keep the atmosphere plastered to the ring's inside surface. Although I'm not sure if its explicitly mentioned in the series, one book's cover illustration shows a series of panels orbiting the star just above the ring's habitable surface, presumably circling the star at a slightly different velocity than the ring is spinning, providing a kind of night for intermittant segments of the Ringworld.
-------------------- "Having is not so pleasing a thing, after all, as wanting. It is not logical, but it is often true."
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quote:Originally posted by Sol System: Well, you see, the thing about a cloaked planet, that is, its distinguishing feature is, it's cloaked.
Yes, but (as Tricky pointed out) it's gravity would obviously affect everything else in the solar system- including that star.
This "wobble" is how astronemers are finding all these newly discovered planets today, so I'd think the brains in trek would have the technique down.
The Dyson Sphere notion is fun but wildly impractical- literally millions of worlds would have to be destroyed to make even a paper-thin sphere around a star at the relative orbit of earth (the so called "life zone"). That's assinine....the biggest case of overkill imagineable. Turning it into a weapon is even worse- why build a Death Star when a torpedo-sized weapon will kill everything on a given planet?
If solar power is your thing, why not just set up your solar collectors near the star in question and have them broadcast the energy to the other planets or structures in that system. Feck, even the Cardassians can broadcast energy, so I'm sure whatever race built the Dyson Sphere could as well.
[ July 15, 2005, 06:54 PM: Message edited by: Jason Abbadon ]
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posted
OK. . . first of all, you could build a fine Dyson sphere simply out of the material you get after disassembling Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars.
Second of all, Niven's Ringworld as originally described is inherently unstable.
And thirdly, a "real" Dyson sphere probably wouldn't be a singular rigid object. Hence swarm, or cloud, or what have you.
posted
Er...how do you figure? the sphere's surface area is "millions of earths" if it's built at the orbit of earth. You could encapsulate the star with a smaller sphere, but not build anything like the one shown on Trek.
quote:The original proposal simply assumed there would be enough solar collectors around the star to absorb the starlight, not that they would form a continuous shell. Rather, the shell would consist of independently orbiting structures, around a million kilometres thick and containing more than 1e5 objects. But various science fiction authors seem to have misinterpreted the concept to mean a solid shell enclosing the star, usually having an inhabitable surface on the inside, and this idea was so compelling that it has been the main use of the term in science fiction
A cloud notion is allright, but the hard shell version (Trek's) with room for trillions of inhabitants still seems...pointless. Unless you suddenly had an extreme population explosion or the star was some holy place to the residents or something...you could build astory from there, buy the episode was never referred to again and it serves more as an "alien/artifact of the week" and not much else.
There's still no reason such a massive object was never detected though....even stuff like the Argus Array should have spotted it.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
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posted
And mabye you should read my post- I'm talking about the one in the Trek episode- far thicker than the 3 meter example in the article. That example would use everything in our solar system...and I dont buy that, frankly.
Besides, we're far from the topic. I wonder if there is not an entire agency dedicated to unmanned exploration and possibly unmanned First Contact. That could be risky though- it would be like sending out a map to potential threats with the Federation indicated as a big red "X".
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
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quote: I wonder if there is not an entire agency dedicated to unmanned exploration
You mean a Space Probe Agency?
Certainly it seems that manned exploration alone would not cover sufficient ground, judging by TOS where exploring ships were implied to be few and shown to be far between. And sometimes our heroes do plunge into adventures by checking out things found by a probe ("Tin Man").
Perhaps such probes are only necessary for exploration "beyond the rim of known", even when there's still lots of uncovered volume inside that rim. Once the Feds perform a cursory manned survey of Sector X, they can probably gather the "missing pieces" by interviewing the locals, studying their star charts and sensor logs. They'll save themselves the effort of detailed charting that way. But to find the said locals, the Feds have to send out the probes and the exploration ships first.
posted
Yes...a Space Probe Agency- but in the DS9 era. Something operated from "Deep Space" stations on the Federation's frontiers. It could certainly serve as the launchpad for new storlines- starships following up on intresting phenomina, retrieving lost probes or even investigating tactical information sent back by the probes (Borg early warning anyone?).
Hmmm....really, I'd love to see a starship use long range probes to explore several adjoining systems at a time- if nothing else, it would serve as an early warning system for approaching ships (or the occasional energy wave o' doom). The Titan (in the first book) kinda does this with it's sensors but tha's more of an enhancment thing and not to inscrease sensor range.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
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