Mario Paint is on Nintendo Switch Online!
gemini://constructed.world/artificial_star.png
Not only that, but I discovered the Switch 2 joycons have a mouse mode and that's what those things with lanyards you snap onto the joycons are. Not the most comfortable mouse, but it's nice to have the option. I can see accessories being made or even 3D printed to make it viable as input for an FPS for example.
Oh and yes, the picture is part of the Lonely Galaxy. It's an artificial sun placed at the first Lagrange point of a distant dwarf planet and Focus, the system's star, to give the planet enough insolation to make it livable while also shielding the planet's atmosphere from Focus's solar wind since the planet is always in the magnetotail of the artificial sun The mini sun's own solar wind would be filtered (or perhaps not present IDK).
The shield behind the star is there to collect and reuse or reflect energy that would otherwise be radiated away from the planet, increasing efficiency and preventing a bunch of mini suns from causing light pollution on distant dwarf planets that would be too far away to benefit from the mini sun's output anyway.
The star is colored purple because I originally thought of it as a neutron star because those are tiny, like the size of Manhattan. But they also weigh more than the sun, which is a problem for obvious reasons. So for now it's just a really really big fusion reactor.
I used Pluto (or a pluto-like dwarf planet with no moon) and the sun as examples, and I got about 6881688.874956055 km for the first Lagrange point.
If I wanted the insolation from the mini sun to equal the actual sun on Earth, it would have to put out 810 zettawatts. That’s a lotta watts. As a Kardashev II species, the yinrih would likely consume around 10^26 watts total, so just one of these little guys would consume about 0.81% of their total energy budget.
But we’re not talking about Earth. Yih, the yinrih's homeworld, has a solar constant (Focal constant?) of around 860 W/m^2, so we can shave the power output down to about 511 ZW, or 0.51%. If we wanted it to equal the insolation at Yih’s pole during the summer solstice which is 430 W/m^2, we get 256 ZW, or 0.26% of the energy budget. Now that’s the equator of our dwarf planet getting that amount of pseudo sun, the poles would get much less.
Now the least luminous star is about 5.31*10^22 W, so even the weakest of our possible mini suns would be about 5x brighter than the dimmest known natural star.
As unrealistic as this is, it has tons of lore potential. I LOVE the "big dumb object" trope, and I already have one in the form of a giant mechanical yinrih head of unknown origin orbiting another dwarf planet in the outer solar system. (Locals just call it "the head" but humans take to calling it "Yinrihcron".)
These mini suns would be built, owned, and managed by the Bright Way during the age of decadence, when the Bright Way operated as a for-profit megacorp/multi-industry guild. The stars would make dwarf planets in the outer belt habitable by providing light and a magnetosphere. the BW doesn't own the planets, they're contracted by whatever entity is settling the world, a government or some other corporation or private group. But the mini suns require upkeep, and that requires money. Planetary authorities didn't pay the tithe? Looks like they're losing their sun privileges until their account balance is cleared.
I can see the mini suns being targeted by partisan rebels during the War of Dissolution, which saw the Bright Way's corporate interests destroyed by an uneasy alliance of militant secularists and pious internal reformers. Maybe the technology to build new ones and maintain the ones that exist is lost along with the Bright Way's corporate interests, or rather, the plans are destroyed by the corpos out of spite. Maybe in modern times there are hearthkeepers that specialize in their upkeep and are highly sought after like COBOL programmers. The Partisans would be natural clients for this type of service since Partisan Territory is way out in the outer solar system, and I can see friction arising between PT citizens who hate the Bright way so much they refuse to work with them no matter what and others who just want their sun to work and don't care who fixes it.
Maybe the tech to make them is still around but they're so emblematic of the ancien régime that planetary PT governments refuse to maintain them and build inferior satellite networks to replace them.
So yeah, hardly realistic but bursting with lore potential.
Jan 11 · 4 months ago · 👍 bsj38381