The only impressive thing I saw just the sheer amount of matter. A Venus orbit sphere ~1500 meters thick is like 250,000 Earths. Over 100 Jupiters. They probably had to haul most of that from other star systems.
All so they could use solar cells for power.
Which they then had to abandon because the star was set to explode.
...probably not your sharpest of aliens. This is the most brute force solution to energy possible. Probably robots that just mindless build it over millions of years.
If they were that advanced they would have their own power sources.
And this is Star Trek, a no name poor guy had the access to build three man sized missiles capable of blowing up a star system (generations). And the reboot gave us red matter, a drop of that blew up a sun too. The Federation doesn't need a Dyson sphere.
Edit - Google says our sun outputs a total of 3.8×10^26J/sec. Per TNG's technical manual, the Enterprise's engines output 1.2×10^18J/sec just to maintain Warp 9. It's only one one-hundred-millionth the sun's value but consider how large of a solar panel it's take to replicate a warp coil which is about the size of a semi truck. DS9/Voy also introduced faster ships too.
Dilithium isn't a power source, it's used to regular the antimatter reaction. When magically rendered inert, ships don't stop flying. They blow up (plot arc in Discovery).
The theta-matrix compositor which can recrystallize dilithium even appears in the episode Relics that's the center of this topic.
The only impressive thing I saw just the sheer amount of matter. A Venus orbit sphere ~1500 meters thick is like 250,000 Earths. Over 100 Jupiters. They probably had to haul most of that from other star systems.
All so they could use solar cells for power.
Which they then had to abandon because the star was set to explode.
...probably not your sharpest of aliens. This is the most brute force solution to energy possible. Probably robots that just mindless build it over millions of years.
Could be they got so advanced that they saw that sort of problem as a small thing not worth thinking too hard about.
If they were that advanced they would have their own power sources.
And this is Star Trek, a no name poor guy had the access to build three man sized missiles capable of blowing up a star system (generations). And the reboot gave us red matter, a drop of that blew up a sun too. The Federation doesn't need a Dyson sphere.
Edit - Google says our sun outputs a total of 3.8×10^26J/sec. Per TNG's technical manual, the Enterprise's engines output 1.2×10^18J/sec just to maintain Warp 9. It's only one one-hundred-millionth the sun's value but consider how large of a solar panel it's take to replicate a warp coil which is about the size of a semi truck. DS9/Voy also introduced faster ships too.
But a warp coil requires dilithium and can't be replicated. The Romulans went around their dilithium shortage by using miniature black holes.
Dilithium isn't a power source, it's used to regular the antimatter reaction. When magically rendered inert, ships don't stop flying. They blow up (plot arc in Discovery).
The theta-matrix compositor which can recrystallize dilithium even appears in the episode Relics that's the center of this topic.