Dyson Swarms (A1-0)

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A large Dyson Swarm around Xinvolnu, a star in the Old Core of the Galactyan Empire.

A Dyson Ring Swarm around a young star in Quadrant 3. In this picture, the various orbital elements have been highlighted in red for better diplay.

The Dyson Swarms consist of a shell of solar collectors or habitats around a star, so that all, or at least a significant amount, of the star's output energy will hit a receiving surface where it can be used.

Dyson Swarms collect vast amounts of energy, which can be used to support many small habitats, or a number of larger habitats or inhabited megastructures. Often, however, the energy is used to support computation, and most Archailects use Dyson swarms or shells as parts of their processing substrate.

Structure

Dyson Swarms are circum-stellar swarms comprised of at least 10.000 orbital energy collector elements (although most have hundreds of thousands if not millions of elements) in progressively inclined orbits that create a volume saturated with collectors and habitats around the star, typically a million kilometers thick. Dyson swarms vary in distances from their primary star, as well as having a varied individual habitat or structure density.

As far as reasonably comfortable (baseline friendly standards) habitats are concerned, most of the swarm might be a distance between 108 and 228 million kilometers around a standard star. Since part of the purpose of all this is to maximize interception of sunlight, most Dyson Swarms destined to habitation tend to be on the smaller side of this range. The average distance between the two extremes is roughly 1/3 of an AU or about 31 million miles.

However, since most Dyson Swarms (with a few notable exceptions) are purely used for power generation and/or computation, they tend to be much, much closer to their primary star, oftentimes orbiting at distances of 0.1 AU or less.

The energy collected by Dyson Swarms is then beamed out towards the rest of the star system's worlds and habitats. This energy can either be transmitted directly to the Optical Phased Arrays located on the planets and habitats, or it can be first passed through intermediary reception OPAs that then beam it out. The Dyson Swarm's energy distribution to worlds and habitats in handled by autonomous systems.

Ring Swarms (Jenkin's Swarms)

A partial dyson swarm in which the component orbitals and other megastructures follow conventional orbits, each with a slightly different ascending node and pericenter, and form a ring, or rings, around their primary star. The orbits of each element can be adjusted so that the swarm forms a torus; several swarm tori can be arranged at right angles to each other to efficiently collect energy from the star. This configuration gives longer term stability by ensuring that none of the elements will ever come close to each other, while still allowing most of the star's output energy to be captured.

Simple animation portraying large orbital collectors moving around their primary star.

Belt Swarms

The smallest dyson configuration, in which only a thin band of orbital collectors, typically located on the same plane as the primary star's equator, orbits and collects the energy from the star. Even with a very high density of orbital collectors, the amount of energy collected by this dyson configuration is only a small fraction of the star's total output energy, so Belt Swarms are typically found in the youngest reaches of colonized space, whose star systems are more sparsely populated and thus require much less energy. Due to their total volume being much smaller and having much simpler orbits compared to other configurations, the orbital elements are typically much, much larger consisting of incredibly thin photovoltaic sails hundreds of thousands of kilometers in size. Because of this, they do block out most of not all of the starlight in their orbital band, and so they are often inclined at angles of 15° or more to allow for starlight to hit the various worlds in their system. Another solution is to simply reflect regulated amounts of starlight on the planets and habitats in question, although this solution tends to become less effective when habitats and other structures are not clustered together around worlds or in Lagrange Points.

Nicoll-Dyson Beams

The power of a collimated beam is limited by the focus of the beam when it reaches a distant target. One way to improve this focus is to increase the effective aperture of the emitter. A very large object, such as a Dyson Swarm, represents a very large effective aperture if used to emit such a beam. Dyson Swarms collect considerable amounts of energy from the stars they contain. If some of that energy can be stored, then directed towards a target in a different planetary system, considerable damage can result. In practice, the outermost elements of the swarm, or the outer surface of a dynamically supported Dyson Shell, become a phased array emitter. This allows a powerful beam to be focused on a distant target in another planetary system.

Starlifting Swarms

Swarms may be used to provide power for starlifting projects; the energy collected is used to power massive superconducting magnet rings, which stimulate the star to expel matter in the form of controlled polar jets. The energy required for starlifting is extracted from the stars' light by a toroidal swarm of satellites in mutually inclined orbits; the energy is used to magnetically constrain the star so that it expells matter from the poles. By removing the outer layers the pressure on the core is relieved, extending this star's life.