I am a huge star wars fan. I know the lore as good as gaunathor knows galcivs. (I have learning to do still) I read the wookiepedia and there is no mention of a containment field of any kind in the description or similar parts. I think that light sabers are impossible in the current design. But its ok it's just 'fantasy'.

DARCA

And here Star Trek is again talking out of it's rear end, as calling plasma gas is about as correct as calling gas another form of liquid.

"The weapons consisted of a blade of pure plasma emitted from a hilt and suspended in a force containment field."

Question does anyone know how to shape a force field.

A force field is a region of space in which an object will experience an applied force, the magnitude and direction of which can be determined from field properties (this is not to say that the only force experienced by the object while within the field will be that due to the field) and certain characteristics of the object. The gravitational field of a mass is a force field. Electric and magnetic fields are force fields. Fluid pressure can be viewed as a force field.

All of the examples that I listed can be shaped, to one degree or another. Gravitational fields can be shaped by changing the distribution of mass in the object or objects creating the field and changing the shape of the mass distribution. Electric and magnetic fields can be shaped by changing the charge or current distribution that creates the field, by changing the shape of the path taken by the current which creates the field, or by changing the shape of the charge distribution. Fluid pressure fields can be shaped by playing with densities, temperatures, and velocities of the fluid in a given region, which will in turn have an effect on the pressure distribution throughout the fluid.

Also, why exactly are we talking about lightsabers and shaping force fields, anyways?

Regarding the power station around a gas giant to make use of the radiation coming off of it: this is rather pointless when there's a significantly better source of radiation which most likely can be made use of at a point more conveniently located close to an inhabitable world, don't you think? If I'm looking to create a power station which works off of absorbing incident radiation, the first place I'm going to turn to is the local star, not the local gas giant. Another thing is that if you're going to use a space station as a power plant, you really need to think about how you're going to get that power from the space station to the point of use. There'd better be a very good economical reason for me to build a power plant around Jupiter if the point of use is on Earth, and it's not going to be that Jupiter is somehow a better location for absorbing radiation. It might be a decent place to put a starship fuel manufacturing plant, especially if some significant portion of the material necessary for manufacturing the fuel can be obtained relatively easily from the gas giant's upper atmosphere or its moons, and it might be a safer (or more acceptable to the populace) location for a large-scale antimatter production facility than something closer to home.

Similarly, any mining prospect is going to have to have an explanation for why it's better to mine a gas giant, which is merely the thing with the most significant gravity well and least hospitable environment, aside from the local star, in the system, as opposed to mining the same resource at some place where it's easier to recover the materials from. Upper atmosphere gas extraction isn't too bad; mining the core of the gas giant, though? Whatever you can find there is going to be cheaper to obtain from just about anywhere else, and if it can't be then there's an enormous economic incentive to come up with a decent way to synthesize whatever it is, because a gas giant has deepest gravity well of anything in the system that isn't a bigger gas giant or the local star, which means it has a higher escape velocity, which means it requires more energy to get things out of it. Beyond that, its interior is an extremely hostile environment, which means that any equipment designed for use there is going to be more expensive than that used for extraction from asteroids and rocky planets/planetoids/moons, and likely has a greater cost for failures, as damage is likely to be crippling and rapidly lead to the destruction of the equipment.

Regarding the species inhabiting the gas giant: I don't really see a point to this. Something which evolves for life on or within a gas giant is unlikely to need anything that comes from a rocky planet, as most likely there are some asteroids or a small moon somewhere which provide more convenient and cheaper access to whatever materials they need, and rocky worlds aren't going to be classed as inhabitable for them any time soon. Similarly, there are far more convenient sources of anything you can find in a gas giant somewhere else in a Sol-like system for species which evolved on rocky worlds to make use of, and unless GCIII includes something like Cloud City from Star Wars, a gas giant really isn't a viable colonization target, either (its moons might be, but anything which inhabits the gas giant is not going to be competing for habitation space with something colonizing its moons, and may even consider this beneficial, as it would no longer need to concern itself with extracting resources from the inhabited moon, as trading with the new residents would most likely be more convenient). Thus, at least the way I see it, species which inhabit gas giants natively have little reason to compete with species that inhabit rocky worlds; at worst, it'd be who gets to collect taxes on the inhabitants, not who gets to live where.

I've brought this up before and it was ignored: Where is your reference that gas giants give off useful amounts of energy compared to a star?

The best source I've found lists Jupiter's energy balance at about twice incoming solar radiation - that is, Jupiter gives off roughly twice the energy it receives from the sun, due to fossil heat, radioactive decay, magnetic field interactions, etc. Of that, half is merely releasing the energy it received from the sun in the first place, so if you cut off incoming light (which a sphere would) you'd get about the same energy hitting the outside of the sphere as you would the inside. In total it would be a pretty good amount of energy, but not much more than putting a sphere around Mercury. Hell, if we used Mercury we wouldn't even have to build a sphere, we could just coat the planet in solar panels and call it done.

I like the idea of launching missiles into it and leaving a fun nuked out crater to live in. Every idea is so logical and requires technology and planning. I want to see a awesome explosion, and at the least make money from it or get a resource that makes invasion transports to build faster. LOL, I'm serious.

Again, why? If WIllythemailboy's energy balance statement is correct, then a power station around Jupiter is going to need to be roughly 12.5 times larger than one around Earth in order to absorb the same amount of energy, because the intensity of solar radiation at Earth's orbital radius is roughly 25 times greater than that at Jupiter's orbital radius, and this is assuming that all the radiation coming off of Jupiter is in a useful form while none of the radiation coming off of Earth is. So exactly why should I bother building a power station out there, unless the point of use is close by and it's more economical to ship over the shorter distance than from the better location for energy absorption.

Besides this, in order for a Dyson sphere/swarm around Jupiter to absorb anything approaching the amount of energy that a star gives off, Jupiter would have to give off energy approaching the level given off by a star, because the fraction of the shell around the sun that Jupiter takes up is insignificant, and thus the solar flux through that portion of the shell makes up an insignificant fraction of the total solar output.

If you're capable of manufacturing a Dyson sphere/swarm, then you are almost certainly capable of manufacturing life-sustaining environments in regions of that Dyson sphere/swarm, and just by surface area any Dyson sphere/swarm has the potential to hold sufficient inhabitable area to greatly exceed the inhabitable surface area of any realistic inhabitable system. Environmentalist concerns about causing mass extinctions due to an inability to provide a large enough habitat for a sufficiently diverse sample of a large enough fraction of the lost ecosystems to sustain the species found therein are a reasonable argument against making a Dyson sphere/shell around a star. Rendering the system uninhabitable is not.

Any significant fraction of a full shell around a star is going to take massive amounts of materials, regardless of whether you build it at the star's surface or beyond the Oort Cloud. And while a full shell around a planet will require significantly less material, it will still require a significant amount of material - a 1m thick solid shell around Jupiter built at Jupiter's nominal diameter and made out of steel will require roughly 1% of the mass of the Moon in order to build. Relative to what it'd take to build a similar shell around the Sun, this is insignificant. But relative to the scale of what's been done in GCII, it's enormous - the largest mobile structures in GCII are the Terror Stars, which weigh in at ~1.3 million metric tons, or 1.3X10^9 kg, according to the intelligence report screen for the vessel. The shell described above to surround Jupiter is about 1.2X10^20 kg, using the density of steel as 8050 kg/m^3; building this therefore requires at minimum a similar effort to that required to build 92.3 billion Terror Stars. Also note that Terror Stars are similar in scale to other space stations - so while you might want to compare the mass of a fully upgraded military starbase to the mass of the shell, it's not going to change the effort required by any terribly significant amount. Even if there's a factor of 1000 difference, 92 million starbases is still far in excess of anything that any playable faction in GCII has ever demonstrated itself capable of.

Well the reason I what you called ignored your statement is because you brought up that a planet doesn't release light it releases infered  radiation. The reason I didn't answer this is that your technically right in that a planet relwases infared, but infared is light, and that is what made me right actually we were both right on that. Maybe cause I'm not a scientists, but I don't understand why we can't use infared light as energy. So there is my answer if you want to continue the same conversation. 

Actually not necessary useful amounts of energy compared to a star, but how many habitable systems do you want to ruin considering there aren't to many uninhabitable  systems compared to habitable systems on the game. The question I think should be asked if this is more efficient than a normal power plant. Not more efficient than a star unless you don't mind wasting inhabitable planets to build this. This really depends on game play. Now as far as my reference on my ideas where they came from as far as planets giving off energy. That comes from a solar system formation class I took last year.

Good argument except that I probably would rather use this for colonizing the planet instead of using it for energy, but mercury is a class zero planet, so it would be up to the developers to decide which planet is which.

Easily compensated by either making the structure partial, leaving plane on which planets traverse alone, or making the structure further out.[/quote]the game. I would say that if someone is building a Dyson sphere around your sun it would be an act of war!

Hope this reasonably responds to your question that you asked a long time ago. Sorry! Oh I want to leave this with what I'm suggesting is to have both options on

That is why I also mention the Dyson swarm, circle, I usually don't mention the bubble option because I can't fathom it. Spme thing else I can't fathom

 is why it has to be an Au in size.

Did you mean interstellar travel and Hyperspace.

 

Probably, but there is none thing better to do.

Honestly we are talking about a lot of materials. How much materials is irrelovent because I don't know where to get that much material. Maybe you could use a replicator. I'm not going to spend the time to calculate how much material we need. I'm not sure. Do you think I have any reason to argue with you about  calculations. i know that Jupiter is about 80,000 kilometers in diameter.

My reading of a Dyson swarm in wikipedia was that the swarm was one circular orbit of satalites around the sun. Not a spherical orbit of satalites around the sun. Here we are talking about two different things. My idea is a far cry from 90% of the energy. Is my idea called something else.

I kind of like the idea of satalites around earth, but how can do this idea about absorbing the light released by the planet without absorbing the light from the sun going to earth.

No, as you stated " The reason for this is the energy requirements for space travel".

Society which can build any kind of dyson sphere anywhere in it's solar system is not going to give crap about location as means of travelling inside their solar system are at such point that it is irrelevant.

This has nothing to do with interestellar but within stellar confines. If you can build Dyson sphere, you can go anywhere you please within your solar system without really thinking of it.

 

Here is one idea, I think is best if I describe it as a tech-tree rather than a science theory, sorry for the large wall of text.

Medium planet terraforming for mining: “After understanding the basic of Habitat Improvement we devise a way to terraforming the surface of a medium size category cero planet for mining; small planets are not worth the effort and bigger ones are too dangerous”

Cybernetic miner: “Robotic miners might survive the hazardous environments of planets category cero, this open a new era for spatial mining”
(At this point you can establish up to 2 mines in medium size planets that yield some bc, nothing game-breaking but with enough planets the income will have a nice boost)

Exotic Life studies: “The study of exotic life (extremophiles) can provide some insights for new technologies, for example, some creatures can survive incredible pressures while maintaining an acceptable size”
(Planetary mining 5% ~ 10%)

Large planet terraforming for mining: “Applying what is known from Exotic Life studies to cybernetic miners we improved their survivability in extreme conditions, making possible for them to mine large planets, even some gas planets. Giant planets are out of reach, for now”
(At this point you can establish up to 3 mines in large size planets that yield some bc)

Advance materials + armour/defence theory + Large planet terraforming for mining = Reinforced cybernetic miners: “We found a way to improve our miners, who said that warmongers are just for fights?”
(Planetary mining 5% ~ 10%)

1rst tier of missile defence, laser defence and bullet/gun defence + Reinforced cybernetic miners = Giant planet terraforming for mining: “We found a better use for the basic defence for our warships. Yes, it might be expensive, but the rare materials in giant planets are worth the effort”
(At this point you can establish up to 4 mines in giant size planets that yield some bc)

- at one point one scientist asked, “what we can do with those pesky small planets?”, other answered, “blast them and make them asteroids, easy enough, right?”