04-26-2021, 01:18 AM
I think it doesn't require an accretion disc. Visibly, it's going to be an egg-shaped star with its narrow end pointing toward a very small chunk of the starfield that has a noticeable fisheye-lens effect, where stars are seen as short arcs centered on the singularity that's bending the light before it reaches the observer. And that, I think, is enough to show. Look at Scott Manley's wormhole images for a good idea of what a black hole without accretion disc looks like.
In the context of OA, however, I think it would be regarded as an opportunity to do some particularly cheap, easy, efficient starlifting. What you have here is a star subject to intense tidal effects that keep its plasma continually on the verge of escaping anyway; it's not hard to imagine people (most likely radiation-hardened vecs or AI, not biologicals) getting there and noticing that an occasional pulse of electromagnetic energy at a moment when it creates constructive interference with turbulence propagating through the corona of the star, gets them many times the starlifting mass output that would normally be available from such a paltry contribution of energy.
So it's.... what, 1500LY? So, someplace that, in-story, people would reach about 3K years from now? At that date I don't think it's going to be the very first starlifting project, but it would certainly be notable as the first highly-efficient starlifting project taking advantage of tidal energy generated by a black hole.
In the context of OA, however, I think it would be regarded as an opportunity to do some particularly cheap, easy, efficient starlifting. What you have here is a star subject to intense tidal effects that keep its plasma continually on the verge of escaping anyway; it's not hard to imagine people (most likely radiation-hardened vecs or AI, not biologicals) getting there and noticing that an occasional pulse of electromagnetic energy at a moment when it creates constructive interference with turbulence propagating through the corona of the star, gets them many times the starlifting mass output that would normally be available from such a paltry contribution of energy.
So it's.... what, 1500LY? So, someplace that, in-story, people would reach about 3K years from now? At that date I don't think it's going to be the very first starlifting project, but it would certainly be notable as the first highly-efficient starlifting project taking advantage of tidal energy generated by a black hole.