Hello!

[Drashner1]

I'm a bit confused by this, I didn't realise this was the case for all our wormholes. If the net transport of mass has to be zero then how can we have wormholes in systems designed to export huge amounts of resources, like Himmelsschmiede? And for megastructures requiring multiple solar masses does an Archai have to use grazer's exclusively?

It's something we've gone back and forth on over the years. I remember a discussion between Luke and Adam on this issue, and I'm pretty sure it was agreed that inter-universal WHs definitely have this property.

For intra-universal gates, I've seen an article talking about this in terms of conservation laws. IIRC Adam took the position (in at least one discussion) that this effect didn't happen with WHs, but Luke disagreed. But I don't remember what conclusion, if any, that they came to.

That all said, if this effect does happen with all WHs, it's not an insurmountable problem. Mainly it would require a bit of a change in how we describe/think about this sort of thing. Let's see...

a) For high value items (like manufactured devices, exotic matter components, or whatever you're going to make a star into, you might consider them sufficiently valuable to make onsite, ship through a WH and then feed in raw energy at the 'exit' end to make up the losses.

b) As an alternate to (a), you could have several grazers nearby, perhaps leading to major construction projects, or hubs on the Nexus where the end products could be easily shipped to wherever you want them and incoming traffic could make up part of the losses. You could ship material through the grazers as raw matter and then set up manufacturing systems at the far end, which would convert the raw material to finished products and then ship it out via the Nexus. Or get incorporated into that huge megastructure you mention (we already indicate something like this happens in the Valhalla Clusters article.

c) Instead of using WHs you could ship stuff via flatspace, maybe using space-time catapults. Sure it will take a while to get to the destination, but it's going to take you thousands of years to take the star apart anyway - and after the initial wait for the 'pipeline' to get going, the incoming material/products can arrive on quite a regular schedule (but cancellations with less than a centuries notice will incur a service fee)

Todd