I put together a thing for a Starfinder session where this one civilization needed a stupid amount of power in order to save their planet from a coming catastrophe. I based it on a laser propulsion method with black holes:
In short, you shoot a laser at a black hole, and it whips around and picks up energy (blue shifting it). When it comes back at you, you get more energy than you put into the original beam (the extra coming from the black hole itself, of course). The original proposal was for propulsion, but you should be able to do it for power, as well.
I guess the only thing missing was making it heat up water to turn a turbine.
When writing the “turning the star into a fucking bomb” bit I was actually thinking about the black hole bomb same process as you describe but instead of extracting the energy or momentum it gets fed back into the system forming a runaway feedback loop leading to super nova level explosion. I doubted that a fellow science nerd on lemmy would see this comment and notice the slight error, but I could also see a real scenario where you completely cover a star with mirrors to the point its own energy is radiated back into itself forming a similar feedback loop causing it to explode.
You can also use a variation on this effect to move star systems around. Surround a start with mirrors but instead focusing the light back to the star you make it focus it to a single point on the star. That single point becomes highly excited and erupts plasma at that location.
Because this is an extremely energetic plasma eruption and it’s only on one side you get movement in the opposite direction. The stars gravity field will pull the rest of the system with it.
You could only move it in the direction of the stars poles as unless you got really clever with timed pulsing (and I feel like that would be unreliable), you would vaporize any planets in the system.
I put together a thing for a Starfinder session where this one civilization needed a stupid amount of power in order to save their planet from a coming catastrophe. I based it on a laser propulsion method with black holes:
https://www.livescience.com/65005-black-hole-halo-drive-laser.html
In short, you shoot a laser at a black hole, and it whips around and picks up energy (blue shifting it). When it comes back at you, you get more energy than you put into the original beam (the extra coming from the black hole itself, of course). The original proposal was for propulsion, but you should be able to do it for power, as well.
I guess the only thing missing was making it heat up water to turn a turbine.
When writing the “turning the star into a fucking bomb” bit I was actually thinking about the black hole bomb same process as you describe but instead of extracting the energy or momentum it gets fed back into the system forming a runaway feedback loop leading to super nova level explosion. I doubted that a fellow science nerd on lemmy would see this comment and notice the slight error, but I could also see a real scenario where you completely cover a star with mirrors to the point its own energy is radiated back into itself forming a similar feedback loop causing it to explode.
You can also use a variation on this effect to move star systems around. Surround a start with mirrors but instead focusing the light back to the star you make it focus it to a single point on the star. That single point becomes highly excited and erupts plasma at that location.
Because this is an extremely energetic plasma eruption and it’s only on one side you get movement in the opposite direction. The stars gravity field will pull the rest of the system with it.
You could only move it in the direction of the stars poles as unless you got really clever with timed pulsing (and I feel like that would be unreliable), you would vaporize any planets in the system.