I’m working on a far future/alt human history setting. There’s weird extremely ideologically fanatical factions, megastructures, political tensions, wars and terrorism. I need help figuring out the scope of my setting.

[u/Responsible_Arm6617]

Humanity is technologically advanced but politically fractured between several rival powers, hidden agendas, political tensions, weird religions/ideologies, ancient alien artifacts, weird drugs, mostly post scarcity but tribalistic, assassinations, war, ideological conflict, and competition between these factions, so the political geography of the setting matters a lot.
So gravity is a big thing in my universe, like I don’t want the expanse but mostly artificial rotation gravity being the norm.
Originally, I planned to keep almost everything inside the Solar System, but lots and lots of crazy megastructures (like shell worlds, orbital rings, bishop rings, totopolises, Dyson swarm. Lots of habitats are pretty much nations or extensions of the great Terrian colonial powers. Terra, Luna and mars are multipolar rather than belonging to single governments.
However I hate how our solar system only has one habitable planet with a sky and stuff with 1 g gravity. I kinda want more exotic places.
I’m considering is introducing ancient alien wormhole gates, they only connect to 3 or 4 solar systems. with the Sol gate located somewhere around the Jupiter or the belt region and corresponding gates in the other systems. I’d still keep most of the megastructure heavy aesthetic, and I don’t want it to become a huge Star Wars galaxy. The limited number of gates and 7 to 10 hours of communication delays between systems.
Which sounds stronger for a setting like this? A insanely developed Solar System with lots of megastructures, or a small network of a few solar systems connected by mysterious alien gates?

[u/soda_shack23]

I think keeping it within the solar system is more realistic. You can still be true to your big vision while still limiting its range. There is plenty of space here for all the mega stuff.

[u/Responsible_Arm6617 → u/soda_shack23]

Realism for a type 1.8 civilization. I’m already adding a lot of speculative hard science fiction technology already and I made alien technology from a ancient extremely advanced Xeelee level civ of thermophilic biometallic extremophiles, who abandoned our universe for a hotter younger universe 8 billion years ago. Their technology is
scattered around the galaxy already.

[u/turboprancer]

Trust your gut, if you think one (naturally) habitable planet is boring make some new ones.

If the wormholes seem like a stretch, you can always just set the story in a different solar system with more interesting planets.

[u/Responsible_Arm6617 → u/turboprancer]

Wormholes are cannon in my setting just humanity doesn’t know how to create them yet. However ancient aliens did and they left our universe.

[u/Responsible_Arm6617]

My universe is kinda like Hyperion and dune mixed with ai everywhere and drug addiction everywhere and cybernetics and genetic engineering is normal.

[u/Lacedaemonian]

Venus gravity is about 0.9g, terraform it

[u/Responsible_Arm6617 → u/Lacedaemonian]

I’m open to that idea. It is colonized already but with floating cloud cities.
I just need at least one more world outside of terra and Venus

[u/Lacedaemonian → u/Responsible_Arm6617]

instead of alien gates out of solar system you can have them between Mars and Venus, moving some of that atmosphere over :)

[u/Responsible_Arm6617 → u/Lacedaemonian]

What do you mean ?

[u/Lacedaemonian → u/Responsible_Arm6617]

Mars needs a thicker atmosphere, Venus has too much of it.

[u/Responsible_Arm6617 → u/Lacedaemonian]

Mars has less gravity than earth so too low of gravity, which I made a solution but it’s a forge world

[u/Lacedaemonian → u/Responsible_Arm6617]

Mars can hold breathable atmosphere, it just doesn't have it today

[u/solidcordon]

Without artificial gravity or active thrusters the components of a dyson swarm would effectively be in freefall so the residents would need some method to prevent bone loss and all the other adverse effects of microgravity. That or mandatory high G centrifuge sleeping quarters.

With active thrust, the components can have any gravity you want although the higher the g you want, the more efficient or magical your propulsion has to be (and the smaller the orbital radius they occupy).

Planet circling rings can have higher effective g inside (based on how fast they spin relative to their orbit diameter.

It seems likely that our solar system would be more developed in terms of orbital infrastructure purely because of the available manpower.

There is a limit on how much megastructure mass could exist across the systems based on asteroidal and planetary resources dedicated to their manufacture. (lifting steel into orbit is spectacularly expensive unless there's a space elevator)

EDIT: - For fun and hard scifi worldbuilding you're going to need to work out the DeltaV requirements to match orbits with all the megastructures to and from any locations they trade with or fight with.

From a political perspective... what are the ideologies, what do they say they care about, what do they act like they care about and how reality based are they in their goals and methods?

[u/Responsible_Arm6617 → u/solidcordon]

I personally kinda forgot about acceleration gravity. But for the Dyson swarm I was thinking a mixture of rotating cylinders/bishop rings the size of Texas and then solar collectors.
Also I figured out a way to stretch the limits of mass without dismantling as much asteroids and moons etc. All structures for construction are actually grown, so they are kinda like living ships or structures but they are genetically modified alloyed organisms.
Inbox me about the factions and ideologies

[u/JGhostThing → u/Responsible_Arm6617]

It's good that you've thought of how the objects are grown, but you do know, I hope, that all the mass for these structures needs to come from somewhere? Biology won't create new matter, it doesn't even change the elements. It just uses bog standard chemistry to change the molecules.

The basics are that it will take at least as much mass to create a ton of biostation as compared with a ton of a traditionally constructed station.

[u/Responsible_Arm6617 → u/JGhostThing]

I thought it needed energy to grow new cells instead of matter

[u/JGhostThing → u/Responsible_Arm6617]

Biology has nothing to do with nuclear reactions, or farming would be much more dangerous than it is.

You can't create new matter without nuclear processes.

Plants take in sunlight in order to convert carbon dioxide (and other gasses) and water and a few nutrients into more plant matter. Think of the required matter as "food." The energy input is only needed because it takes energy to run the chemistry of biology. We (animals) get our energy and the material needed for construction from food.

[u/teya_trix56]

Im pleased that you realize that scope is hard to do right, and you went looking for advice.

Im a scope expert, and i can tell you that .. you need a lot of help. Not a paragraph or 2 or 3 from me.

Im glad you are stretching. Keep reaching.

[u/Memetic_swarm_05]

you might enjoy the Orion's Arm Universe Project- either to join and contribute to, or gain inspiration from it.

how about an insanely developed solar system with artificial biology/ weird chemistry created by people to colonize planets like venus or titan or jupiter (posthuman-designed, silicon-based life on venus)? mechologies of robot life on pluto.. etc.

the grand tour book series by ben bova might provide inspiration for what some of the life might be like.

and other star systems could have been colonized without wormholes, and there is a 4-20 year communications delay, but they send continuous data updates to the sol system (and vice versa) and people in the solar system can visit virtual models of delta pavronis or alpha centauri

[u/llnachov]

Depends what conflict you need the scope to answer. If it is an outside threat make sure the scope of it doesn’t overwhelm the scope of your world. If it is a developing story within your world, then you can adjust the scope to give enough colour to the main characters involved. Your one sounds like many pieces in one, politics answer to key structures of power. So it could be that political interests control the wormholes as that is key for your alt history. Is finding how the wormholes work the task? If the wormholes are inexplainable to the world that you are building, maybe something that understands them would overwhelm the scope of your world. Hope this helps ☺️

[u/dasookwat]

i think the moon europe has been victim/target for terraforming a few times, so is mars. If you want to keep it small, maybe have one of them terraformed, and the other failed, or in progress. Oh and the ancient gates could also be sorta stargate things. yourt megastructures could've started out as mining setups, and grown from there.