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Megastructure
Blue bishop ring
Image from Steve Bowers
A Bishop Ring, a rotating hoop held together with carbon nanotube cables
An exceedingly large construct, typically measuring tens to thousands or even millions of kilometres along its greatest dimension. Megastructures may serve any of several puposes, not all of them mutually exclusive: archailect node, orbital for vec or biont habitation, computronium node for virch or ai life, large ISO, and work of art are some of the possibilities.

Cableville
Image from Steve Bowers
Cableville, a topoolis that encircles its star
There are numerous different types of megastructure; some are used as habitats by modosophonts, others are used to support data processing in vast computronium nodes.


Banks Orbital
Image from Steve Bowers
Banks orbitals are vast rotating habitats that rotate once every standard day
Some megastructures entirely enclose their star; these include Dyson Swarms and Matrioshka Brains.
Quint Matrioshka
Image from Steve Bowers
A Matrioshka Brain, with several concentric layers of power collectors each sensitive to a different wavelength
Fractal Dyson
Image from Steve Bowers
When complete this fractal Dyson sphere will collect sunlight in a series of ever-smaller versions of itself
 
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Appears in Topics
ConstructionISOtechMegascale Engineering
 
Development Notes
Text by M. Alan Kazlev
Initially published on 08 December 2001.

 
 
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