>!The Ash Twin Project failed to cause the Hearthian sun to go nova, which resulted in their not being enough power for a time loop. It wasn't until the sun went nova on its own that there was enough power.!<
>!One of the ATP's limitations was probably the means by which they harvested the nova's power. You have two towers that collect some form of energy. They're relatively small, and could only collect a very few arc-seconds' worth of energy. A larger collector, like a Dyson sphere, probably could have harvested a much larger percentage of the nova's energy- or even the energy radiated by the sun under normal circumstances. But that wasn't the Nomai's design choice.!<
>!What if Pye and Poke (the two Nomai who visited the Interloper) had thought of using the energy contained in its ghost matter to power the ATP's time loop? Clearly, it had a LOT of energy- enough to wipe out the Nomai race. And that's even after the square-cube law is applied.!<
>!If the Interloper had been "pushed" to a location where the ghost matter could have been enveloped in an energy collector able to capture it in a controlled manner, could the ATP project have been powered by that same energy? The spherical dimension for such a collector would be much much smaller than one required to surround the entire sun, and we've seen that the Nomai were capable of engineering projects that dwarfed the Interloper in terms of size.!<
>!I realize I'm riffing on completely fictional physics, but it's an interesting idea. I feel like the Nomai probably would have considered giving it a go if they had thought of it. They're pretty ambituous/crazy/both when it comes to physics.!<