Well the fact that it is a literally enclosed sun guarantees that some sort of protection or energy collectors on a massive scale are in use, after all our magnetic field deflects most of the nasty crap the sun throws out so we do not cook and a enclosed shell cannot exactly do that.Mike DiCenso wrote:You only have to understand that is that the shields were being powered by auxilary sources as a result of the Dyson Sphere tractor beams overloading the main power systems, leaving the ship in a severely damaged state. This is something that Wong does not adequately address, except to brush them off with pseudo-scientific sound BS crap like "oh well, the star must not have been normal output because the inner surface of the Dyson Sphere was not roasting at 100,000 million km". However, this does not take into account anything else as confounding variables, such as the extremely advanced nature of the Sphere itself, and how it might be providing protection to the surface, or the fact that we don't really get a good look at the inner surface of the Sphere since it is not important to anything. Sure we see what appear to be bodies of water... which would be incomprehensibly gigantic by any Earthly standard given that the surface area of the Dyson Sphere is worth hundreds of millions of planets! So even if the oceans boiling off, it would take a very long time to do so. Millions of years, in fact to get rid of that much water!
So, what it boils down to is that you have to realize that with the other aforementioned variables, any steady-state calculations are incredibly conservative.
-Mike
Personally i would say that the civilisation would make the shell so the surface was as close as the collectors ect could easily manage while allowing comfort to the population as any larger is really rather pointless (OK a dyson shell is already pointless according to science due to the requirements exceeding the benifits but meh).
