Timeline for How can I justify a Type III civilization using planetary jump drives instead of FTL starships for galactic commerce and travel?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
8 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jul 10, 2020 at 23:42 | comment | added | BBeast | (Correction, I meant a Dyson Sphere rather than a Dyson Swarm.) | |
| Jul 10, 2020 at 12:14 | comment | added | BBeast | @nick012000 This is true (it's the idea behind a Dyson swarm, after all); if you disassemble a planet you can make a lot of stuff from the remains, and a Type III civilisation has the power to do that. But if you're fleeing a powerful enemy then you'd generally want to take your homeworld without blowing it up and rebuilding it first. | |
| Jul 9, 2020 at 16:53 | comment | added | nick012000 | @BBeast More efficient use of space/matter, perhaps. A planet is an awful lot of solid rock, while a ship of the same size could have multiple decks. | |
| Jul 9, 2020 at 4:53 | comment | added | BBeast | @Ángel In a (rather contrived) sense, you could consider these planets as 'natural' spaceships, but only to the extent that a rocket motor strapped to an asteroid turns that asteroid into a spaceship. But, of course, why would you ever build a planet-sized spaceship when you can just use a pre-existing planet? | |
| Jul 9, 2020 at 1:05 | comment | added | ApproachingDarknessFish | @Ángel The question is explicit that planets are used instead of spacecraft. This would make no sense if ambiguity was introduced by allowing the categories of "planet" and "spacecraft" to overlap. | |
| Jul 9, 2020 at 0:59 | comment | added | Ángel | What makes you think that these planets aren't just planet-sized spacecrafts? | |
| Jul 9, 2020 at 0:19 | comment | added | BBeast | A Type III civilisation in its totality might be able to wield the power of a galaxy, but I would posit that even they would not be able to deliver all that energy to a single point. Even if they somehow had a way to channel all that energy to a single jump drive, it sounds like every member planet wants their own jump drive, which means each jump drive can take at most the power of one star. When ripping holes in space time, this isn't a lot of energy. As for risk, that can be made as low as necessary for the story. But +1 for war as an explanation. | |
| Jul 8, 2020 at 23:38 | history | answered | ApproachingDarknessFish | CC BY-SA 4.0 |