Sayonara

Which thread is it?

Taktiq, do not refer to other members in the debate as "Kiwi", even if it is the wrong person you quoted.

Well, then the answer is obvious isn't it? Sell much smaller guns to those people who want less death from their weapon.

nstansbury, I would suggest that if you are following the scientific method then there is no reason why you should not post about your work in the appropriate science sub-forum.

Well, this is the thing isn't it. From the quoted/linked article, "one hour a day of car usage is the average in America". If that's true then the demand from mainstream vehicles might not actually be that great. How many times a week do you charge the average car, based on 7 hours of use? I'm not saying you're wrong, just that there should still be a question mark over claims like that. Let's assume a high consumption scenario, just for the sake of argument. Even if demand for power from recharging cars effectively obliterates the off-peak period, any supplier who provides a discount tariff for that period might lose cents per unit but that would be offset by market share. It's just good business sense.

What makes you so sure that the automotive industry will determine the marketability of energy concern tariffs? Storage heaters didn't obliterate cheap night-time tariffs when they became popular to exploit the lower rate, so why should battery chargers? Having a lower tariff at an off-peak time (and it will still be off-peak, because of comparative demands) is competitive business practice.

To be fair, we (unfortunately) don't often get insightful original works posted here, so it's not like we are passing up opportunities to be nice left, right, and centre.

That was more in response to CaptainPanic (2nd paragraph of post #11) than a general reply to the thread: "With 1-10 minute recharging I doubt that commuters will recharge their vehicles at night (unless there's a financial encouragement). Thousands will recharge it in the morning, causing an even larger peak in the electricity consumption." /me resists the urge to state how many cars you could charge each second with a Dyson Sphere.

A straight line is by definition the shortest possible route between two points, so no route can be shorter. This means that if you have a straight line which is longer than a non-straight line between the same two points, then something has to be "false" about the straight line. For example: it leaves Point A, goes through a wormhole, and approaches point B from the other side of the room. In which case it is not what you would call "the" straight line between the two points, but it is certainly "a" straight line which is longer than any number of non-straight lines between A and B. Whether or not you have negative distance involved depends on how you measure the scenario - it's a matter of differing perspective rather than a difference in what you are actually measuring. You can't, for instance, have an anti-metre; however you can have -1m, which is simply one metre away from where you start measuring, in the opposite direction to what you consider to be "forwards". That would be the displacement, or translation, which is just the difference between points in a co-ordinate system, so the signage (positive/negative) is arbitrary. But whatever system you use has to be consistent.

The number of pages of threads in a forum is subjective, much like the number of pages of posts in a thread, because it depends on each member's viewing options.

Not only have we discussed this before, but this is the second thread by Sureshbanshal to be started on this topic and then closed.

Why would you want to charge your battery at peak hours when you can use the off-peak tariff to charge your car overnight for pennies?

To be fair, he says that his posts are different to everyone else's because they are backed up by references. The inference I draw from this comment is that he does not believe the references others have given backed up their posts.

Eat remix, gun debaters! You have to imagine Lance is rapping as you read this. The bits in italics are sung by a chorus of three backing singers who all look like Lance but are wearing dresses and beehive wigs. Lyrics & Music © SkepticLance and the Gun Control Cru.

Voodoochile, when your thread is deleted as spam it is not polite to come back shortly afterwards and post exactly the same thing. We actually do know what we do and do not need on our forums, thanks all the same. If you are going to claim to have a scientific proof then you are going to have to do better than "when you see perfect light you will know what im talking about. trust me. that will support my assertions". There is a process to follow which involves (amongst other things) using logic and maths, to demonstrate your claim. Might I suggest that you reconsider your aims here. I'd recommend that you stop posting defamatory and borderline racist material all over the web as you are opening yourself up to a libel case, which you won't win. If you want legal advice for financial or ownership issues, it should come from a professional whom you have engaged yourself. It should not come from web forums.

Yes, the shell is a problematic structure alright when considered as a habitat. But this thread is about Kardashev scale civilisations, which involves energy utilisation, so a shell still has its uses here. You don't necessarily have to have everyone living on it or in it!

It would be in the box labelled "black hole creation chamber".

Alternatively, at a push, you could harvest the entire power of the star's radiation, which would be just under 4x1026 watts at the surface of the shell. If you had some way of buffering this energy for later use, you would be able to release it to provide plenty of thrust when necessary.

In any case, Einstein was banned from here for being unconventional, and he didn't whine about it.

People who can't differentiate between an obese person and an obese population are not Pixar's fault.

I have no idea how much thrust you could generate to be honest, but we could do some rough calculations which would give an approximate range. Adjustments to correct variances in a 1AU radius will not have to result in immediate changes so we can afford to be lazy with our accelerations. [edit]Turns out that if you start building your portal stations at the pole and place them at 100km intervals along a circumference, then base the other circumferences off a 100km spacing along the equator, and each portal has a 100m2 aperture (which is conservative!), your energy interception due to those portals is about 3 exajoules per second (3x1018 joules). Not sure how that translates into light pressure, but it's a whopping great energy boost for whatever storage cells you are using when the sails aren't being pushed.[/edit] I would advocate channelling energy outside the shell to interact with sails, rather than using the inner surface, for two reasons. It doesn't use up as much valuable shell surface, which can be put to better use. Also, because the light passing through portal stations can be reflected about the place in any way we see fit, the sail area supplied by a single portal could be many times larger than the respective area of shell which is occupied by that portal. Maybe we should have a "Dyson Mechanics" thread, since this topic often seems to usurp the point of other threads.

Alan, If you don't want people to disagree with the things you say, I suggest that you cancel your Internet account. You are not finding objection here because you are somehow being persecuted, and you are not the first person arrogant enough to make themselves out to be a latter-day Galileo, Einstein, or Newton, as a means of drawing attention away from their ideas having no structural substance. If what you say has any merit, then by definition it must fit in with the "present facts" of physics. Get over yourself and demonstrate your arguments, or stop wasting everyone's time. Because modern physics has no interest in whether or not you can juggle your balls.

You are quite welcome. But remember why you raised this point; you were exploring the vulnerability of the shell to disasters natural and man-made. Although you stated that a swarm could evade natural disasters such as solar flares, you omitted to mention how they would be affected by an H-bomb attack such as that which might threaten the sphere. In the case of a weapon with the explosive power I used above, the death toll in a swarm habitat would be about the same. However the death rate and damage rate would both be 100%, on account of the habitat being utterly destroyed. This is a much more serious loss to the civilisation if that habitat contained unique social elements. "More thrust than I can imagine" is not totally impossible according to currently understood science, though, is it? I shall demonstrate below. You don't need any reaction mass. You have portal stations at regular intervals across the surface of the shell, in a grid pattern. These stations channel radiation from the star out through the shell, up a tower which supports a solar sail. There is constant "outward pressure" on the sails, and this can be directionally biased as required by temporarily closing the relevant pattern of portals.

Your argument here is actually enough to convince me. Although I have not checked your figures, I am inclined to agree that with sufficient warning (an important caveat) components in a swarm could move out of the way of an impending flare. Because of their arrangement it would not even be necessary for all habitats to constantly monitor the sun at all times - they can inform each other of worrying telemetry. OTOH, I think it is quite likely that either the shell or swarm civilisation might be able to deflect the matter from such an ejection with some degree of confidence and ease (and probably style too). That would do significantly less damage than an air-burst. If the bomb is on or in the sphere, the area of total devastation will be many times smaller. In fact, much of the precious radiation of doom will be directed out of any breaches into the void of space, and inward towards the star (although there is an unknown quantity here, because the gravitation system being employed on the shell could affect the explosive pattern). No it would not. You are talking about a structure with a surface area of over 2.5x1017 square kilometres. The most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated was dropped with a detonation altitude of 4km and resulted in a mushroom cloud of about 30-40km across, and a fireball of 4.5km radius. This was the single most powerful device ever used in all of human history, yet much of its power was wasted as radiation spilling into space. Even assuming an effective airblast radius of 1000km, if such a device were used against a Dyson shell the affected zone would be 0.00000000125% of the total surface area. An expensive way of inflicting a pinprick wound. What happened to using the physics of the present? You cannot have your cake and eat it. Antimatter bombs are nowhere near as probable as "lots of thrusters". Bullpoop. We are discussing a civilisation which is capable of grinding up the entire solar system, and recycling it into a vast megastructure the very idea of which - shell or swarm - would turn the master-engineers of a thousand planets pale. Yet on the one hand you state that such a civilisation "would likely have" antimatter bombs, despite the obvious physical problems that come with that technology, yet you poo-poo the idea that this civilisation will know how to apply the principles of thrust, or indeed that they might have had a good long think about that before they started to build the structure that we have already pre-supposed. Your goalposts must be spaced equally with everyone else's, Lance, and they should stay firmly rooted in the ground. For the record, it was not me but Reaper who said "Even if we do assume that this hypothetical civilization has found a way to mass produce antimatter bombs..." etc. As a side note, I think you are on dangerous ground if you are going to start poo-pooing Arthur C Clarke on the basis that he wrote sci fi. To be honest I don't know why we are still discussing the shell wrt these arguments. There are much better objections, for example the strength argument I mentioned earlier. If you do the calculations you will see that they turn out to be ludicrous (although there may eventually be a way around this, since you have enough empty space in the shell to build a "webwork" of support structures). I think that for the purposes of this thread we should write off the sphere and assume a swarm for Kardashev-II, and then we can all move on with the topic.

Ball Balancing problem moved here: http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?t=34038