Imagine how much they have to pay Ring Dynamics for that concession.
Probably in stargate hulls and boson condensate
There’s also, of course, the long term Transcendent contract for more hexterranes and processor fractals.
I suppose the tender moons also help to shepherd wayward cosmic rays and micrometeoroids from impacting their AM stores?
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Yep, that’s exactly what they’re for.
(On a related note, those noting the icosahedral arrangement of the Vertex Portals might think it a little inconvenient that this arrangement puts the ten primary portals above and below the plane of the ecliptic, requiring starships inbound and outbound to perform an expensive plane-change maneuver to dock there.
But the other thing it does is guarantee that the solar-wind vents will never be pointed directly at the antimatter planets. No sense in making the tender moons work extra hard, especially since the solar wind is where almost all the potential in-system particles come from.)
Did they have any sort of smaller ‘partial’ bubble to start with, anywhere? Possibly still at Esilmúr? Because while I’m not surprised at all at such a giga-engineering structure, it does seem like you may need some serious facilities to bootstrap your way up to building it in the first place.
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Probably it started life as a full but permeable bubble, but gradually got more opaque?
If I’m not wrong the Transcend is mainly housed at Corícal Ailék, not Esilmúr.
Honestly, this was the starter bubble. I’m sure they did some experimentation with the technology, probably on a spare gas giant somewhere, just to iron the bugs out before turning it loose on a star, but it’s not something that usefully scales down a whole lot.
Originally, of course, it was just the outer shell (in a lesser state) and the core of the portals that was built. They’ve worked up from there over time.
Wherever there is Transcendent thought, so there is the Transcend.
Uhm, the d12 in my backpack dice set only has 3 facets connecting at each vertex.
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Is it fair to say that because of the efforts of the City of Brass, the entirety of Esilmúr is a convective zone?
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I’m curious. Where would the Empire source hydrogen in masses of that scale from, when it’s time to refuel Esilmúr Actual, and how would you transport it?
If you do it gradually enough, I suppose the individual fuel masses aren’t that huge and you can gate them in via the regular network. You’d need a lot though.
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I’m not confident that it’s possible to make a kaeth drunken, and/or whether they would still be unwieldly in such a state if it existed.
(Linobir, though…)
Joke aside, I imagine that the main problem with scooping a nebula is that even the “dense” ones barely have anything to scoop, but given that the time-to-refueling is probably measured in megayears… they can probably afford going relatively slowly.
(For values of “relatively” that still mean assembling somewhere on the order of a moon’s worth of hydrogen per year. Stars are big.)
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In that case: not all the time everywhere, but yes, mixing envelope material down into the core and pulling heavy elements out (and then all the way out, through controlled CMEs) is an important part of prolonging hydrogen burning in a star.
Brown dwarves and rogue gas giants, mostly.
Slooooooooowly.
But fortunately, you have even more warning about when you need it than you have for the million-year atmospheric replenishment schedule, so you have plenty of time to plan for your top-up to light-sail-gravity-tractor itself across space and into your outer orbits just in time for the scheduled switching of a couple of your particle geysers from blow to suck.
Yes. Bring inflammable spirits, and bring them by the keg.
Not enough to make them any less dangerous.
