IMO, the scenario of this episode has a major flaw. The ship Scotty commandeded was not an explorer. It was a civilian transport. So it should not travel beyond federation space, but only in well-known territories. So, how could the Dyson Sphere remain unnoticed for so many decades? Federation starships have sensors that can detect other starships light-years away. The dyson sphere would be easy from dozens of lightyears away to detect even using present-day telescopes at the very least, astronomers would detect the gravitanionnal influence of the star (on nearby stars) and realize there is a problem since they see no star at that position. --rami
- magic? hehe
We are here to build an encyclopedia. We're not here to critique the writers or the logic of how things work. This conversation shouldn't even be here. --Alan del Beccio 17:49, 22 January 2006 (UTC)
- I don't fully agree. While rami goes about it in the wrong way, his/her points are still valid. If he had persented it as facts instead of questions it would be fine. 1) A cililian transport seems to have been out of known Federation space. 2) The Dyson Sphere was not detected by sensors, dispite the fact that starships are. 3) The gravitational influence of the star didn't alert Federation scientist to the location of the Sphere. Jaf 18:39, 22 January 2006 (UTC)Jaf
Flawed entry process
The reference to the Enterprise's careening out of control as evidence of a flawed entry process doesn't seem quite right. In general, a ship entering the sphere would be able to manoeuvre out of the way of the star - but it's stated that the Enterprise's propulsion systems were damaged by the incompatible tractor beam. -Montrealais 04:20, 13 March 2006 (UTC)
Dyson Sphere (novel)
A TNG novel was written wherein the Enterprise-D crew returned to investigate the sphere and found it to be inhabited by several groups. They were aided in their studies by a starfleet crew of...hortas. A very odd book, a super-massive wormhole is created to essentially fire a star at the dyson shpere as one would a cannon, forcing the crews to work against the clock to save the (eternal, as the star can't 'set') day
- Yes, please see here: Dyson Sphere (novel). --Jörg 15:10, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
Nitpick
- A sphere of 1.33 AUs in diameter would be immense. The shots of the Enterprise in close orbit with a visible horizon just behind it, as though it is orbiting any other planet, are impossible (although parallax may account for this). The surface would appear to be perfectly flat for millions of miles. Another issue of scale occurs when the Enterprise triggers the automated entry system. It is flung toward the central star at nearly light speed (given that the estimated time to impact the star was reported to be approximately equal to the time light takes to travel 1 AU). Surely no species capable of building a Dyson Sphere would design such a flawed entry process, unless perhaps it was intended to be a method of disposing of unauthorized entrants. It is worth noting that the materials needed to enclose every single point in space that far away from a star would require the entire mass of many, many, many planets - probably all of the non-stellar matter in the system would have to be converted into sphere components.
This entire section sounds like nitpicks anyway. Removed. — Morder 20:46, 1 September 2008 (UTC)
- Again, magic :)
- I wonder, could a shell be created that would be, say, one or two atomic diameters thick, if we assume the original matter was equivalent to the total mass of the inner planets (and asteroid belt) of Earth's (present) solar system? Granted, this would require some way to make such a layer in the first place. I'm going to go with the (again, magic) the "hypothesis" of either some kind of impossibly-strong electromagnetic interaction (thus leaving the atomic nuclei alone) or manipulation of the strong force somehow (not leaving the nuclei alone).
- Of course (?), if anything like that were actually true, one would think that whatever civilization made it (a couple million years ahead of Humans) wouldn't need the Dyson sphere in the first place. Perhaps it was something that the Q did on some "way to omnipotentency" (kind of like Ascension if the Stargate-verse)? I'm going to assume that the "buildings" that can be seen on the sphere's surface are either holographic projections of some kind, or some weird parallax effect. Jswitte (talk) 16:20, April 11, 2015 (UTC)
Removed
For the interior of a Dyson sphere to be habitable to most humanoid lifeforms, the radius of the sphere must be such that habitable temperatures (5 – 30 °C) are maintained. The radius would therefore depend on the size and the energy output of the star around which the sphere would be constructed; if a Dyson sphere were to be constructed around the Earth's sun, the radius would have to be approximately one astronomical unit. At such a radius, the interior surface area would be about 2.8 ×1017 km2 (1.1 ×1017 mi2), or 550 million times the entire surface area of the planet Earth. Such a surface area could easily support the lives of many quadrillions (1 ×1015) of beings.
Unsurprisingly, due to the almost immeasurable amounts of effort, resources and time required to construct such an immense structure, only one Dyson sphere has ever been discovered.
This information is not from the episode. I do not know where it belongs in the article, so I moved it here.--Memphis77 (talk) 06:18, September 16, 2016 (UTC)