Star Trek Online‘s next expansion, Agents of Yesterday (AoY), goes where we’ve all gone before, into The Past. It’s 50 years since The Original Series (TOS) first aired, and STO’s paying tribute by adding a new faction and episodes squarely set in the “Wild West” period of the Star Trek universe.
Starship Porn: Pioneer, the new starter ship, combines bits of the original Connie, NX-01, and Reliant. It’s best viewed from behind, but I’ll leave that as an in-game pleasure for you”shuttle bay” aficionados out there.
When the new episodes arrived on the test server in their current “diamond in the rough” state, I swore I’d do the tutorial and no more. That was easy at first because a bug half-way through prevented completing the tutorial. But that got fixed, so last night I thought I’d finish the tutorial, quietly put AoY back in its virtual box, and get to bed early. So of course I stayed up late and finished all the new episodes. Ugh, it’s the same kind of post-binge-eating guilt that leaves me feeling both satisfied and ashamed.
STO producer and shamelessly hard-core TOS fan Maria Rosseau talked with Trek.fm about the loving attention to detail–and sometimes lack of detail–it took to get the look and feel right [TREK NEWS AND VIEWS 103: PUTTING THE TOS IN STO]. AoY doesn’t attempt to improve on or reimagine TOS through the eyes of STO or all the Trek that followed it; that’s created some controversy in the STO community among players who can’t look beneath the veneer of TOS being a late-sixties TV program that sometimes viewed the future through groovy-colored glasses. I’ll gladly take another dose of go-go boots and space hippies and 23rd Century Gorn fashion over this year’s dreadful installment from that talentless hack. Set phasers to groovy and full speed ahead!
I got the references to first and third trilogies immediately, but the middle one had me stumped. Even though I play LOTRO as much as STO, I couldn’t see the forest for the treants!
In response to a question on STO’s sub-reddit, I started wondering about the mass of the dyson spheres in Star Trek Online. I love doing these paper-and-pencil what-ifs, and the sphere is one of my favorite zones in STO for look and feel. Here was my response to the original poster’s question about how the Solanae sphere jumping a few light years out from Iconia would affect the Iconia system …
There are too many unknowns to come up with a good guess at the sphere shell’s mass, but I assume it’s a fraction of its central star’s mass and wouldn’t contribute much beyond normal stellar-scale gravitational pull. So it’s no different than any other normal star a few light years away, having minimal gravitational impact.
An interesting consequence of the sphere jumping is having a clear way measure the speed of gravitational wave propagation. Barring some kind of Trekverse subspace effect, that’s theoretically at the speed of light, so it will take Iconia two years to feel even that tiny gravitational shift after the sphere jumped to two light years away.
If the sphere were constructed from the star’s original planets and we use our solar system as a base, then it’s no more than roughly 1/750th the mass of its star (based on planetary mass but not including asteroids and Oort cloud.) However, we do have some observations about the sphere to consider. And now, some math-based guessing …
Enterprise-D going “down the hatch” of the Jenolan sphere airlock in the TNG episode “Relics”.
Watching the Enterprise fly through the Jenolan sphere’s airlock in Relics, it looks like the sphere is several kilometers thick since the airlock’s inner and outer doors appear to be flush with the inner and outer surfaces. The gash in the Solonae sphere’s Wasteland zone looks much deeper, at least tens of kilometers thick. In either case, it’s thickness is much smaller than its radius, so we can approximate the shell’s volume as 4 * pi * r2 * t, where r radius (1.5E11 m, i.e., 1 AU) >> t thickness (1E4 to 1E5 m, i.e., 10 – 100 km).
That means it’s between 2.3E26 and 2.3E27 cubic meters (m3). The gash looks starship-like inside, and starships–like witches–float, e.g., Nandi at Risa. It may not be solid but may use superdense matter like neutronium for it shell, so let’s wildly guess at effective densities between water (1000 kg/m3) and iron (8000 kg/m3). To get a range, let’s use a lighter, thinner shell (1/2 as dense as water, i.e. like like a naval ship’s displacement) versus a thicker solid iron shell to get 1.2E28 kg to 1.8E31 kg.
For scale, the sun’s mass is roughly 2E30 kg which means our range is 1/100 to 10 times the mass of a Sol-type star. So, I could see the sphere’s mass being roughly the same magnitude as its star given a superdense impenetrable shell much like the doomsday device and vast energies from capturing the stellar output for force fields, integrity fields, artificial gravity, and active stabilization. It’s still measurable in normal stellar masses and not, say, galactic core black hole masses. Two solar masses over two light years is still not out of the ordinary gravitationally, but it points to the possibility that the sphere was constructed not from the mass of a solitary star’s planets but from one of the stars in a binary system.
Furthermore, if the shell were constructed only from the planetary mass around a Sol-type star, then its effective density is pretty low to absurdly low. With our solar system’s total planetary mass of roughly 3E27 kg and that volume between 2.3E26 and 2.3E27 m^3, the shell’s density would be 1.1 to 11 kg/m^3 or about 1/100 to 1/1000 the density of water. For reference, styrofoam is 40 kg/m^3 or about 1/25 the density of water. While anything is possible, the Solanae dyson sphere *shell* being 4 to 40 times less dense than sytrofoam is more than my brain can handle.
I wish they’d used a ringworld instead of a dyson sphere so my Kzinti–er, Ferasan–Captain would feel more at home exploring it.
