Greetings, people of OA

[Rho Ophiuchi]

1. New thread: 
"general setting discussion" is probably best if you want to start a new thread,  or encyclopedia Galactica articles once you have a few more ideas developed. 

2. sophont labor: 
yes the modosophonts could do the uninteresting tasks while the S2 does the 'interesting' tasks... or the vots/ software helpers that comprise most of the 'cheap labor' or post scarcity society could preform most of the very boring labor while modosophonts do the small bit that they choose and are capable of doing and the s2 does the "most interesting" parts and coordinates all of it... 

or the modosophonts can do most of the labor of starlifting very inefficiently , though I don't recommend that route. 

 that '5 billion' figure is a rough estimate for the amount of cognitive labor an entity could preform compared to humans, just to give folks a sense of scale. so it doesn't quite measure pure human ability, exactly. 5 billion ants.. or dogs.. are cognitively incapable of building a computer, for example. So maybe S2s are actually 5 billion times 'better' at a task, or often they just do 5 billion times more work in a given time

 you could have a small society of a thousand or 10,000 second sephirotic transapients living in the system (the nature of individuals might blur), or multiple S3's , if you want "more labor done but with as low cognitive ability as possible" so to speak
technically modosophonts and upward can alter their minds to find most tasks interesting if they choose... but you can still say they find certain tasks less worthy of doing/ boring/ too repetitive. 

3. population: 
Population-wise, depends on the clade. could number in the billions. virtuals would be highest in number. personally, I don't like writing hard population statistics in articles but a fully developed star system with megastructures could have population in the hundreds of billions, or hundreds of trillions sometimes?. I like keeping those numbers down below 1- 10 billion because that 'sounds more sparse' . but that's just me. 

the fastest transportation tech of the time would be engeneration- essentially emailing minds from one star to the next (at light speed) and growing/building the bodies onsite (if the facilities are set up). 

 but here's the expansion of some propulsion methods over time 
'Terragen Expansion'
https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4b6788b9bdbdf
some drive performance statistics (might be outdated?)
https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/49f6ffc730720

Hello Dfleymmes1134,

Thank you again for your help and time! Regarding the thread, with this advice, I will start a file on my computer to edit as needed, and ask relevant questions in the General setting discussion section (likely starting with the planning of all of the different types of sophonts to inhabit the different environments of the system). When I have enough stuff (in a long time, probably), I will see about trying to get it published.

I like the idea of having the modosophonts preforming actual intelligent labour, mainly because I would like for it to be non-autotopian-scarcity (basically where you are more or less supposed to take a few hours out of your day to do remote debugging on node 4F6709 (hex) of the starlifting array, or administer exams, or designing cities, or something similar), but where the S2 managed everything really important - the modosophonts do what they can, and save the S2 the tedium of having to do all of the rest. It certainly could, but it is too busy doing nebulous S2 things to really want to. The S2 then lets the modosophonts do whatever they want, as long as they do not challenge it. And probably no angelnet systems.

With the information about population, I am thinking about merging this idea partially with my idea from before about a society built around long lifespans - the S2 and the modosophonts basically share the common goal of living a really, really long time. The S2 thus wants to be just smart enough to know how to disassemble the star and build small conversion reactors, and the modosophonts do not want to grow too numerous, or too energy-intensive that they burn through their fuel too quickly. However, the system would still be in the "disassembly of star in progress" phase, so the modosophonts live as numerously as they can on the planets and some limited habitats, but all of the megastructures in the system are dedicated to the acquisition or storage of material.

Sincerely,
Rho Ophiuchi