Speaking of terraforming mirrors, one thing that's eluded my understanding of the sector verse is the total lack of near-solar orbit Mirror arrays.
I mean, sure, you've got the sector verse's neat array of power creating devices - but all of them consume precious and valuable resources to output their tremendous energies to fuel the many ongoing endeavors of a space-faring society.
Whereas with mirrors, it's just a flat and (on human scales) infinite sustained function of the total surface area of mirrors you have in orbit, and their distance from the star. (inverse-square law)
Also, mirrors in space are INCREDIBLY easy to make - melt one nickel-iron asteroid, vaporizing the volatiles in the process - same for one siliceous asteroid. After you've got a ball of molten metal and glass, you use controlled vaporization via collimated light to act as a rocket motor and spin them up - the rotational forces pulling them out into discs (carefully controlled, of course, to maintain even thickness) and then you join the two still-molten discs together to create a modern metal-backed mirror with an IMMENSE surface area.
Two one-km asteroids (final melt diameter) becomes a mirror with a surface area of 104,000km^2 at 5cm thickness.
At a distance of 57 x 10^9m, (mercury orbit) and with equivalent luminosity of our sun, that provides 9116.4 w/m^2.
The end result is for every 2km^3 of asteroid combined into a mirror, and de-orbited to mercury distance (you can, of course, go even closer for more intensity) you get a 9.1 gigawatts of energy per square kilometer of mirror - that's 0.76th of the power of the space shuttle on launch, or half of the peak electric power of the Three Gorges Dam.
Thus, the total energy received by that one addition to the mirror system is 9.481 x 10^20 watts. That is, 5400 times the energy received by the Earth from the sun (which is 173,000 terrawatts (173 pettawatts)).
This is a PHENOMENAL amount of energy to play around with - and all it requires is small station keeping thrusters attached to the mirrors to keep photon pressure from pushing them off course and out of alignment. The entire self-replicating operation could be overseen by a simple program using positional tracking data of the mirrors to melt more asteroids to create more mirrors to melt more asteroids (using optical and other sensor data to properly turn the rocks into mirrors).
Incidentally you also get more minerals and metals daily than that which has been used by all of human civilization up to this point.