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Star Trek: Dyson

For TNG, no. They rarely went boldly back somewhere they'd been before. In another series? Maaaaaybe. You just need the right story. If the reason why the sphere was empty had been a mystery, that could have been followed up on, but if I recall it was just something ordinary about the star. There's also something neat about leaving the audience wanting more. All our questions could be answered about it and it could be great or it could be unfulfilling. I like that there's just stuff out in space that's just there.
 
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I think it's fairly certain that when the Dyson Sphere was built the star was stable, and that it's just extremely old. As to what happened to the builders. Well, Star Trek has its fair share of lost, ancient empires. If they existed millions or billions of years ago then all traces of them outside the Dyson Sphere might have decayed or been destroyed already.
Star Trek also seems to operate under the idea that species die out or ascend after a long period of time.
The precursor aliens form the Chase disappeared too, after all.

Maybe the Dyson Sphere was even the reason they disappeared; maybe they worked themselves to death creating it, or worked others to death and the resulting rebellion and/or civil war destroyed them.

Odds are, if the Dyson sphere has been built at a time when the star wasn't unstable yet, it isn't just a few measly millions of years old, but rather hundreds of millions of years, since we'd have to start to think in terms of stellar evolution time scales. Which would make it predate even most 'ancient' races we know about (except perhaps the likes of those seen in TNG's The Chase). If that is true, chances of finding out more about them might be very slim indeed.
 
I'd feel awfully nervous that a mysterious race with that level of tech was somewhere out there, in the galaxy...
 
I'd feel awfully nervous that a mysterious race with that level of tech was somewhere out there, in the galaxy...

Not much you can do about it anyway. And there seem to be a host of capricious god-like races out there, beyond even those builders.
 
True. Maybe Q zapped up the Dyson Sphere a few millennia ago, just as a practical joke.
 
The only logical place to build a Dyson sphere would be a red dwarf star, for several reasons...
1. MUCH smaller habitable zone, so much less material needed.
2. Much longer usability. A star like the sun will be too hot in one or two billion years at most. A red dwarf could remain habitable for a couple trillion.

Also, you'd probably be building rings and cages before you could graduate to a sphere. Even a ring world around a red dwarf would probably have a few hundred class M planets worth of space on it, and could have remained usable for all 13.7 billion years of the universe's current history, and 500 billion more afterward.
In this scenario, there's no need to build another Dyson Sphere.

There's already one built, and it's the Dyson Sphere that the Jenolan crashed onto.

Since the Federation found it, it's basically the "Greatest Find" of the 24th century next to the Bajoran Worm Hole.

I'm sure the UFP scientists are studying it, learning the secrets of how to make our own Neutronium since the Dyson Sphere shell is made of Neutronium.

Figuring out how to Renovate the Dyson Sphere would be a important step, I have an entire thread on this in Trek Tech.

Think of all those Home Garden Network TV shows about "Renovating This Old House".

Think about expanding that to "Renovating This Old Dyson Sphere".

=D

You can literally spend a century or slightly longer to renovate the Dyson Sphere via mass produced automatons.

Fix up the local Star to be stable and cure it of whatever issues it might have via advanced Star Manipulation Tech.

Imagine having a Babylon 5 or DS9 like show, but set on the Dyson Sphere.

Have every Federation Member create a local Biome in their section of the Dyson Sphere with each section representing each Biome type.

I did some basic #'s.

The Dyson Sphere has a diameter of ~200 million km on the inside
- Internal Surface Area ~125,714,285,714,285,715 km² ~= 125.7142 Quadrillion km² to work with.
- External Surface Area ~125,714,290,742,857,193 km² with a 2062 m thick crust ±2 meters variability.

One of my basic Modifications would be to split each Biome section into Standard Internal Equilateral Hexagonal Regions with walls that are Mt. Everest in height used to isolate each Biome region from each other.

Obviously, the Mountain walls would be largely hollow and be made of similar material as the Dyson Sphere Shell. The wall would also house a Dyson Sphere wide network corridor for travel between and around each standardized Hexagonal region.

This way each Hexagonal region would have a large land area to work with for artificial Biome creation.

Given the way a Hexagons naturally tessellate on a Sphere, there will always be 12x Pentagons in your Sphere of tesselated Hexagons. That's just a property of the Geometry of Hexagons on a Sphere.

I would use those 12x Pentagons and create 12x standardized entrance gateways within the Pentagons and use those as standard Gateways to manage traffic In/Out of the Dyson Sphere.

I'd have a smaller Hexagonal regions on the outside of the Dyson Sphere since you can probably park standardized Arcology type modular Planetary Bases from each UFP Member Species.

Imagine the kind of Intergalactic UFP you can make by colonizing the Dyson Sphere.

The Internal Hexagons would have a wall length of 1,000 km per side.
For reference:
- Earth has a ~Surface Area of 510,065,623 km²
- The British Isles have a Land Surface Area ~= 315,159 km².

This would lead to each Hexagonal Zone have a Land Area to work with of ~= 2,598,076.211 km²
-> That’s equivalent to ~0.5094% surface area of Earth

This creates an estimated amount of (48,387,451,130) standardized 1,000 km per side long Large internal Hexagonal Habitat Zones.

That should be plenty of area to play with for each Biome that you would want to recreate.

That's not counting the outside smaller Hexagonal Zones used for Surface mounted Arcology bases.
 
Maybe the builders simply left the galaxy. Hell, given what little we know of the T'Kon empire, it could have been them. Or the Iconians. Both possibilities only deal with a couple hundred thousand years instead of millions of years, but I wonder if the Sphere is only about as old as the Iconian or T'Kon is. Given how easily Scotty and LaForge were able to open up the hatch, I'm thinking it's not as ancient as we think.

I always liked the idea of the Dyson Sphere. A lot of stories can be mined from it. I can see a series like this following some of the steps STARGATE ATLANTIS took while exploring the city. A lot of stuff to discover as they inhabit more and more of the city.
 
The only logical place to build a Dyson sphere would be a red dwarf star, for several reasons...
1. MUCH smaller habitable zone, so much less material needed.
2. Much longer usability. A star like the sun will be too hot in one or two billion years at most. A red dwarf could remain habitable for a couple trillion.

Also, you'd probably be building rings and cages before you could graduate to a sphere. Even a ring world around a red dwarf would probably have a few hundred class M planets worth of space on it, and could have remained usable for all 13.7 billion years of the universe's current history, and 500 billion more afterward.

If you've got enough material to build one around a red dwarf, material obviously isn't a problem. But as to the larger point it could be a great series in the vein of "The Starlost", but not, well, bad.
 
They can't use that particular dyson sphere because sun go boom.

I'm not sure you'd want to hold an entire series on a Dyson sphere, although it could work the same way DS9 worked if it's near other stuff going on. But you could definitely have one with a recurring role in Trek lore.
 
I'd feel awfully nervous that a mysterious race with that level of tech was somewhere out there, in the galaxy...

Eh, the UFP could easily make its own Dyson Sphere if it wanted from existing technology and resources.
Sure, it wouldn't be Neutronium based material, but a Dyson Sphere doesn't have to be made of Neutronium to begin with - just a strong enough composite material - and UFP already has Tritanium and Duranium for one thing which it can produce in copious amounts.
Heck, they could set up industrial grade replicator or two, hook it up to the desired star they want to encompass and exponentially produce sections.

And if you want to go the route of less resistance, a Dyson Swarm would be more practical... gives you pretty much all the benefits of an actual sphere... and with the technology they have, would they NEED an actual solid sphere?

At any rate, building a Dyson Swarm is not a big issue... we can do it (if we wanted to). We can't do an actual Sphere, but a Swarm is eminently more doable... the UFP on the other hand, already had what it needed to make a sphere by the 24th century... and they could have started off with a Swarm in the 22nd.

Now, if that species was out in the galaxy, that would be NICE... but why would you be nervous about it?
Not every species has nefarious intent.
 
The ticking clock in that episode was they had to escape before the sun went supernova.
We don't need to borrow from the show "24" for that.

It's not necessary IMO.

Eh, the UFP could easily make its own Dyson Sphere if it wanted from existing technology and resources.
Sure, it wouldn't be Neutronium based material, but a Dyson Sphere doesn't have to be made of Neutronium to begin with - just a strong enough composite material - and UFP already has Tritanium and Duranium for one thing which it can produce in copious amounts.
Heck, they could set up industrial grade replicator or two, hook it up to the desired star they want to encompass and exponentially produce sections.

And if you want to go the route of less resistance, a Dyson Swarm would be more practical... gives you pretty much all the benefits of an actual sphere... and with the technology they have, would they NEED an actual solid sphere?

At any rate, building a Dyson Swarm is not a big issue... we can do it (if we wanted to). We can't do an actual Sphere, but a Swarm is eminently more doable... the UFP on the other hand, already had what it needed to make a sphere by the 24th century... and they could have started off with a Swarm in the 22nd.

Now, if that species was out in the galaxy, that would be NICE... but why would you be nervous about it?
Not every species has nefarious intent.
Instead of doing all that work making a new Dyson Sphere/Swarm/etc.

How about renovating and learning from the one that exists?

What would you do with it?
 
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