Mining a Sphere World

[bbq]

Hmmm, isn't mining a Sphere World kinda like us digging a hole in the basement of our houses for buried treasures? In this case when you dig through the Gravity Platings you are gonna wear a hole in the ground and get empty space beyond. So...I don't understand how we can build mines on our Sphere Worlds. Afterall, there was nothing there before and I made the whole world, so where did those extra minerals come from?

Also, I'm curious to know if any of you think the building cost for a Ring World Placement component should be *different* than a Sphere World Placement? Like, perhaps cheaper in terms of resources?

[Colonel]

I geuss you could say your getting the minerals out of the sun

[geoschmo]

The ring/sphere world component descriptions as gravity plating/generator as if in effect you are collecting all the micellaneous material floating around the system to use for the constructed world. You have to just ignore the fact that there probably isn't enough mass floating around the system to construct such a shell, and disregard that the exsisting planets and asteroids are still there when you are done.

Once you get past those two leaps in logic, it's a small step to think you could then mine that collected material for resources.

[Fyron]

There is always the material in the Oort cloud and Kuiper belt that could be used. Likely not enough to build a Ringworld, but it is something. Also, what is wrong with assuming that solar energy is converted into matter? Replicators anyone? Heck, Crystalline races have facilities that do this explicitly already.

[Phoenix-D]

The problem with using solar energy to make matter is it takes an absolutely ridiclous amount of energy to make a small amount of matter- you're basiclly undoing the matter/antimatter reaction. E = mc^2 is nice for bombs but a pain in the butt when trying to make matter:

m = E/C^2

From a game perspective, you can mine the ring/sphereworlds because if you couldn't they'd be pretty much useless.

[Fyron]

There is a lot of energy coming out of the star...

[douglas]

Stars don't just radiate energy. I did some searching on google, and if I understood the article I found correctly, the sun sends out over 1,000,000,000 kilograms of material every second as solar wind. Harvesting even a tiny fraction of this enormous material output would easily explain where a sphereworld's resources are coming from.

[Kamog]

It's strange how a sphere world counts as a star but it doesn't count as a star. You're not allowed to create any new stars in the system if a sphere world is present, so it's as if there's a star. But if you only have a sphere world and no star in the system, you can't turn you asteroids into planets because there's no star.

One of my planets was destroyed recently but I couldn't rebuild it because I already turned the star in that system into a sphere world. I couldn't do anything about it...

[bbq]

I think the problem with the logic of getting resources from the sun is that if you can do that then all the mineral Ratings for all the planets become sorta meaningless since it becomes the sun's rating, not the planets.

[Fyron]

bbq said:
I think the problem with the logic of getting resources from the sun is that if you can do that then all the mineral Ratings for all the planets become sorta meaningless since it becomes the sun's rating, not the planets.

The planet's value is meaningless for the Crystalline race's solar resource generator. For the RW/SW, it is based directly on the star, so the value could be said to be the value of the energy/materials being projected off of the star. The amount of material from the star that reaches the planets is very low, considering that it is more or less evenly distributed over a spherical area. But a RW/SW is capable of trapping a lot of it, seeing as it is so close to the star and completely encircles it (as a ring or a sphere). With a stretch of the imagination, it works out.