Posts tagged megastructures
The shell variant of a Dyson sphere consists of an artificially-made shell of material about 1 AU in radius encircling a star. The sphere captures most of the star's energy and stores it for future...
This is a follow up question to Sky of Earth and Seas of Sky I have a medieval fantasy setting where people live in a vast expanse of giant caves contained in a sort of giant Stanford torus. This...
This was an idea for a flashback as I pick up my story around 100 trillions years from now at the point where star formation is ceasing and the red dwarf and stellar remnant era begins. Now living ...
Background A McKendree cylinder is a spinning space habitat in the style of an O'Neill cylinder (below), but orders of magnitude larger. McKendree habitats are hundreds of kilometres in diameter a...
I want to build a seastead in international waters that starts small. It has to be in the Atlantic, preferably in the northern hemisphere close to either the american or european continent. Due t...
The advanced civilization in my story is trying to reach as many galaxies as possible in the next few billions years before the expansion of space has sent those galaxies permanently out of reach w...
Suppose we walled off a 1000 km square. These walls would be made of unobtanium (so they don't break), and have no cracks or holes that go all the way through. They are also around 15 kilometres hi...
Roughly how long could an 'Oumuamua type object get if created naturally or if created artificially using fused rock? What would be the limiting factor governing the length of such objects? Oumaum...
In this universe, Earth had a couple orbital rings during the construction of the colony ships that were sent to Alpha Centauri. Humanity has achieved fusion power and efficient space flight (1g ac...
Background I am trying to find a design for a cylindrical habitat that would allow the enclosed cylinder to radiate heat out to space as does the Earth without using mirrors and windows. Problem ...
Background A McKendree cylinder is a rotating cylindrical space habitat comparable to the more well known O'Neill model. It was proposed by NASA engineer Thomas McKendree in 2000 as an update of O...
There is a concern that's been brought up only recently--steel and concrete buildings are environmentally wasteful. In further clarification, they waste away too much greenhouse gases. And consid...
If it were possible to build a giant geodesic dome tens of miles in diameter, what effect would it have on nearby weather? If built in an arid climate like the Sahara or Australia, would it be li...
In the story I'm writing, three humans with stone-age technology and no knowledge of space accidentally awaken thousands of cryogenically preserved humans. These humans immediately get to work on...
Things like Dyson spheres need a whole lot of raw material, which is rather difficult to come by, since the elements needed for good structural steel are scattered fairly thinly into the universe u...
Let's consider an O'Neill cylinder with a radius of 3.2km and length of 20km. In the classic O'Neill design, we have three large axis-aligned windows in the shell, alternating between purlins of ha...
The illustrations of O'Neill cylinders I have come across with so far allow unrestricted view through the whole tube. Some are more playful with topography but still, there is a visible end. Are t...
A moon-sized asteroid approaches Earth in the near future, where space tourism has become normal. The Earth has a few satellite structures above Mars conducting research, as well as successful terr...
One of my ongoing projects is what I think of as the "constructed worlds gallery", a series of Megastructures as settings for stories and games, including things like the "Flying Pie-plate" a world...
I have been trying to figure out a way of explaining how an advanced society some time in the past built an artificial planet with a black hole at its core and the effects that would have on the pe...
Assume the entirety of Earth (all the land) is covered in a city. What would the climate be like in different parts of it? I.e., what would it be like on the coast, or inland? I imagine it would b...
A common, matter-efficient science-fiction habitat is a hollow cylinder or ring in space that is spun to simulate the pull of gravity on its interior surface. These habitats have been imagined as s...
If a circular structure could be built that would wrap around the entire earth, but was of a larger radius, would it 'float' above the earths surface or would it somehow fall onto the surface at so...
In the wake of this, my answer to this question about where to put a Dyson Sphere an apparent issue came up. And it needs some good resolution: What are we going to do with all that heat the syste...
Based on this question about an impossible barbell planet, how hot would the bar be if it extended from halfway in the Earth's mantle to an altitude of 2r of Earth's radius? The diameter of the bar...
In my previous two questions regarding temperature regulation and Rotations I set up the idea of creating a multi-layered shell world consisting of planetary crusts stuffed inside one another creat...
In a galaxy far far away, during a fit of inspiration for a super massive marvel of technology, the Imperator dedicates an astounding 10% of energy and materials from his civilization's dyson spher...
Suppose you had a tower-like mega-structure, rooted all the way into near-infinite geo-thermal energy of the Earth's crust, connected to the ocean such that water is not a limiting factor to the su...
A common, matter-efficient science-fiction habitat is a hollow cylinder or ring in space that is spun to simulate the pull of gravity on its interior surface. These habitats have been imagined as s...
There is a solid glass sphere that is 1 mile in diameter. It is completely covered in dirt and rock, except for one small room that is built adjacent to the sphere. One of the four walls of this ...
Is there a way to design a river system in an O'Neill/McKendree-style cylindrical habitat to passively feed into itself in an endless loop, from one end of the habitat to the other and back again? ...
I've heard several schools of thought. From a hard science standpoint, could there be gravity on the habitable surface of a Dyson Swarm plate? I keep thinking no. But if the outer shell were to b...
While there are approaches to make a habitable Dyson sphere that are technically reasonable, I am curious about what the climate would be like. For simplicity, consider a scenario where a thick she...
I've been trying to create a water planet with certain aspects. I wanted it to have a breathable atmosphere and to be a microgravity environment. I'm developing humanoid characters that can breathe...
If there was a supermassive structure built on earth (30km tall, 10km wide/deep tower with slightly slanted faces), what sort of effects would this cause on the surrounding areas? Specifically, wha...
Ok I have a moon, or cored out moon, that is a generation ship. I really do: I built it by mining out one of the rock/ice moons around my solar systems gas giants (not earth's solar system). Its...
The classic example of a cylindrical space habitat, Clarke's Rama, has a 10 km-wide ring of water at the middle. Most depictions of this O'Neill-style of habitat do something similar, placing a lar...
If a Galaxy-wide Civilization like Star Wars were to build a Jupiter brain or Matrioksha brain, would it probably cost more to build then the Death Star? In Star Wars the Darth Star was over a tri...
Cloud Nine is the name given by Buckminster Fuller to his proposed tensegrity sphere airborne habitats. The principle is simple and the physics seem to be sound. For a sphere, as its radius is ...
If a star had a Dyson ring of some kind around it, such that to the naked eye the star wouldn't dim at all, how long would it take a civilization to reasonably see and understand the Dyson swarm, a...
The idea of an elevator reaching to the near cosmos is very tantalizing when trying to think of ways off planet. A major draw back to this idea is that a long, thin tower into the atmosphere seem l...
I need to know if it'd be possible for a underground ring-like structure of immense proportions and alien design to go unnoticed by modern day sonar, radar, and geological surveying. For an idea ...
Imagine there is a micro-city built on the ocean floor in the pacific ocean covered with a durable dome with a 1 mile radius to keep water out. At this moment let us assume that the dome holds up b...
Suppose you want to mine material from, and eventually completely disassemble, a neutron star. Presumably, you would be extracting heavy elements from the crust, and expecting the neutron-degenerat...
This is a follow-up to Neutron Star mining. Assuming that problem can be solved, it would eventually degenerate to something similar to this case. And if it can't, white dwarfs seem like the next b...
Hybrid dirigible airplane with an extremely large surface area on the top and bottom. Talking at least 100 km2. It would likely be several modular pieces put together, given its size. It would n...
A Dyson sphere is a spherical megastructure built around a star with the goal of capturing all of the energy output of the encased star and making that energy available to the controllers of the me...
I'm currently working on a number of artificial space megastructures. Recently, I've been trying to work out a couple of things to do with alderson disks: What a person on the surface would see (...
I understand that the wind is caused by a differential in atmospheric pressure, but say that a city built in an extremely flat landscape is constantly threatened/harassed by the wind and wind-relat...
I thought of two questions regarding ringworld structures in solar systems with results I can't assume, so I will try to describe each (assume stability): If a (toroidal) ringworld were massive e...
