Player Features and Ideas Discussion

No, not really.

Constructing a dyson sphere type "machine" to harvest the radiation and matter/charged particles thrown off by a star doesn't strike me as all that efficient or effective a way to "mine" a star. What you really want to do is design a ship capable of descending past the photosphere, and perhaps even deeper, to get at "heavier," and potentially more exotic/rare, elements that haven't been blown off the surface of the star.

Of course ideally you would also want to set up a method of powering a jump bridge, or a small scale intra-system version of one, via the energy surrounding said vessel so that it can pump this "star matter" right out of the star without having to constantly traverse the photosphere. Stephen Baxter's novel "Ring" describes a similar project whereby a probe of sorts is launched into our star in order to observe what is going on to unnaturally shorten its lifespan. This probe is able to survive in this hostile environment due to being able to "transport" much of the surrounding energy/radiation/whatnot to a receiver around, IIRC, Mercury's orbit where it's blasted into space.

Given some of the things that the "people" of New Eden are capable of doing, especially the Jovians, "sun mining" is certainly plausible, but to be honest I wouldn't expect to see it useful for anything short of T4 production, and given that CCP has yet to start rebalancing (or rather pushing out rebalancing patches for) T2 ships and really needs to rebalance T3 cruisers as well I wouldn't expect T4 ships to be released in less than a couple of years.

It was star matter that powered Jamyl Sarum's super weapon that she used to fire on the Minmatar fleet. That fleet was devastated so the substance must be powerful in its own right.

That said, what else could be more appropriate to power the most powerful weapons in the game?

The only thing that would outperform T2 capital weapons would be a T2 doomsday... Maybe it should be used with those?

Star mining has allot ideas already so I was just wondering what you'd do with the stuff you mined.

Any theory on how those drones managed to get the isogen-5? Haven't heard any myself.

Maybe "mining" is not the right word, maybe the star is just the energy source for some other process? So certain things need to be made in close proximity to a certain type star. Refining springs to mind, and to produce fuel for the powercores of the ships. Antimatter for the amarr powercores, extremely radioactive substances that decay extremely fast (way faster than plutonium) for the fission cores, helium-3 for the fusion cores. If just the graviton reactor is removed and replaced by anti-matter reactor, and then the Amarr get singularity reactor in place of their current anti-matter reactor we'd be set. (singularity reactor is a tiny miniature black hole which is then used as a gravity-well that compresses helium-3 until it heats up enough to start the fusion process, this would require far less sofisticated magnetic containment, but would be heavier than the other power cores, giving another reason to Amarr slowness).
We add fuel consumption to normal ships (not hugely expensive for small ships, but for BS and up it gets pricey). Then the new star mining thing would be needed to fly ships, and would be a considerable bottleneck for null sec confrontations.

PS: the graviton reactor must be removed because it can't even in theory generate power as far I know.

Psh, you just don't believe hard enough. Pfft, get it? Believe? It's the Amarrians power source? Ah, I kill me.

Darn, you got to you first.

There are some seriously powerful elements missing from the lore in the game and Isogen-5 I believe is the strongest of all the missing links.

Instead of mining stars, perhaps mine mass ejections. Of course we don't mine coments yet either, so don't hold your breath