The Nightstar Zoo

I'm presuming the artifact either made a copy of their minds or just snatched the whole crew before autopiloting the ship to it's demise.

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If you need to use a squeegee, they're probably at least Laz-4

With that kind of instant disorientation, I suspect they were teleported. How it happened without any obvious equipment is an open question, but I stand by it.

I'm going with "copied the crew's minds to a virtual environment" for an explanation. Naturally, it will take the crew themselves awhile to realize that.

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The MacNut
Artist and writer of The Vanguard, a space opera superhero comic.

Ennesby said that 4118-6 contains a red dwarf star. It should therefore have a total output power equal to that of the star. Some portion of that output might hypothetically be light beams or something, but a lot of it will inevitably be thermal radiation. Its surface temperature will be lower than that of the star, because the heat is spread over a larger surface, but it should still be rather hot. The stellar envelope was said to be as large as Sol: larger than the dwarf star, but not all that much larger. It's still very small compared to our solar system – or a buuthandi for that matter. It should radiate intensively in the infrared range.

The only way I can think of that it could be "liquid hydrogen cold" is if it can break the second law of thermodynamics.

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Armed with my right and left bear arms and the Coat of Arms.

I think you're conflating a few strips, plot lines, and locations.

[EDIT]
Nevermind. I had to refresh myself of a few things. Carry on with your speculation.
[/EDIT]

Looks like both crews are in the same place though, and are about to have a friendly brawl.

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If you need to use a squeegee, they're probably at least Laz-4

Ah. I think I remember a line that fits.

"All crew have been saved; No survivors."

My speculation is that this object was built as haven for a species that wanted to preserve themselves through the regular galactic extinction events. Rather than try to build habitats like the Oafa did theirs was just a giant virtual environment with an AI overseer.

It may very well have worked exactly as intended, but now it's detected new biologicals and has decided to preserve them the same way, and is willing to do so forcibly. It's copied their minds and uses their original bodies as puppets to carry out its further agenda.

I'm in favor of virtual copying rather than teleportation because of the fact that this place seems to be an exact duplicate of a place that the crew already know about. That's not impossible for a really advanced AI with the resources of a stellar envelope, but it would be a lot easier to do virtually.

If you have equipment that can easily and efficiently (and, most important, cost-efficiently) extract all of that thermal energy, the outside can be liquid hydrogen cold with no problem. Indeed, you could have the inner surface layer extract all the light and heat, the outer surface layer being very cold, and maybe run power from themocouples, as well as from the solar ourput.

Or maybe it's just "rule of cool." But wild mass guessing is so much fun!

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I used to be Junius Gallio, until I messed up retyping my password in the Great Password Reset. Nice to be back.

" I gotta stop doing mathematics while sober."

Right, and as I said, such equipment would violate the second law of thermodynamics.


A thermocouple is one of the ways that energy can be extracted by allowing heat to flow from a hot place to a cold place. Like all the other ways it can only extract some of the energy. The rest ends up as heat in the cold place, raising its temperature.

A portion of the energy in high-temperature heat can be converted into a low-entropy form of energy such as electricity, provided that the rest of the high-temperature heat gets converted into low-temperature heat, which has higher entropy, so that the entropy increases in the system as a whole, satisfying the second law of thermodynamics. But low-temperature heat can be low-temperature only if it's dissipated into a large volume, and the higher the energy turnover is, the larger that volume must be.

If the envelope has radiators covering parts of its surface, radiating its waste heat into space, and massive amounts of insulation combined with heat pumps to keep other parts of the surface cold, then I suppose it could be possible to achieve "liquid hydrogen" temperatures (which probably means between 14 and 20 kelvins) on parts of the surface, but its designers would have needed a really good reason to design it that way.

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Armed with my right and left bear arms and the Coat of Arms.

Given Schlockverse tech, it's actually feasible.


Example:
Take a large volume of gas.
Expand it such that the temperature drops below ambient.
Use as cold sink and pump all your heat into it, until it equalizes temperature.
Terraport gas to remote location.
Compress gas as it radiates away its heat.
Terraport back home to undergo another cycle.


This is probably the _worst_ way you could do it, but it might be the simplest conceptually. Proof that you can effectively terraport energy away from a structure. And if this IS another race hiding from galactic destruction, it's even quite a reasonable thing to do. Dyson spheres are identifiable by their radiation signature. If you want to remain undetected, you're better off just hiding your star completely by displacing its energy output somewhere else.

A valid point. With access to hyperspace, it MIGHT be possible to radiate waste heat into hyperspace, so as to avoid it showing up in sidereal space.
If the point is to stay hidden, this may be preferable.
Otherwise, ...
Think of a waterwheel. You can only tap a waterfall for power if you let the water eventually fall.

Ohh ...

Dump waste heat into hyperspace.
Have worlds be destroyed when hyperspace "burps" and fries your planets.

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Or: Wage war on someone by gate-cloning lots of hot waste on them.

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I hope Para never plays with Tenzy. The result would be terrifying.
Para and Petey need to have some dialog together. Just because.

We've seen before that you can tie large amounts if mass up in a...I think the term was toroidal singularity...within a star. What if the enclosure is actively transmitting most of the heat BACK INTO the star, extending its lifespan indefinitely? If the vast majority of the heat energy is used not to power the systems, but to create mass, which is injected back into the star, couldn't you essentially 'recharge' it? It's a lossy system, of course, but it doesn't have to be perfect - it just has to make this small, relatively cool star last far longer than it would if it simply radiated all of its energy out into space.

I can't imagine a red dwarf star having the same kind of lifespan of a Main Sequence star like Sol. If this IS an attempt to avoid the mass extinction events, then they'd probably want a system that would last, without external contact, for an EXCEPTIONALLY long time. Given the mastery of gravitics and hyperspace tech we've seen from these ancients, it should be a piece of cake to set up a 'water cycle' sort of system where they harvest photons and other massive particles for mass and energy, then inject it back into the star, after taking what's needed to power the rest of the systems.

EDIT: okay so I just looked it up and red dwarf stars can actually theoretically live longer than the current projected age of the universe, living for up to ten TRILLION years. So....yyyeah. ....doesn't negate my idea though!

I'm afraid it rather does. Because the reason red dwarfs last so long is that they burn cooler than larger stars. Reflecting the star's heat back into it will make it use itself up faster.

Meanwhile - am I the only one to notice that Howard Taylor seems to really like inventing long-armed, strong-legged sapient species whose natural habitat appears to be a swamp?
This is at least the third one so far, counting Pranger's species and that of the idiot aristocrat Tagon was supposed to kidnap.

Add to that the Enireth, residents of Philkra.

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Weapon: Meal, Ready to Explode.

I think he figures it's a probable scenario of a planet, and a probable design for a species. I'm inclined to agree.