Posts tagged space
My first time here, hope this is a useful question. Mostly about orbital mechanics and vacuum. So the crew of a general-purpose interstellar spacecraft have stumbled across a paradise planet. Afte...
I have a world where humans have developed interplanetary space travel that allow them to travel to other planets. There is an issue though- the speed is slow, sublight; as an example it will take ...
Suppose you could pump a load of energy into an asteroid at a safe distance. As energy gets added to the object, does it make sense that this could be done in a way to get the asteroid to different...
Assuming that the only fancy available technology is FTL drives (to get there) plus anything needed to protect and sustain a crew during the journey from Earth to Sagittarius A (whether it takes a ...
I read a blog post explaining why interstellar travel is terribly impractical. The short answer is that stars are far away and travelling that far takes a very long time and ridiculous amounts of e...
In my universe, spaceships use a device that can generate a bubble of gravity that is homogeneous and unidirectional. You can manipulate the direction and intensity of gravity in any way you want. ...
A secret society of inventors has been hiding for years. Finally, they have designed their Mars base in the year 2019! Unfortunately, they "borrowed" most of their supplies. If they were to build a...
In Kim Stanley Robinson's new novel Red Moon the first few pages describe a method of Earth-to-Moon transportation that I had not encountered before. The idea is to use a magnetically levitated and...
Let's say there are billions of asteroids in the galaxy, varying in size from baseballs to hunks of rock almost big enough to be dwarf planets. If someone wanted to set up a habitable location on o...
What would be the ideal spots to build/start a colony on Mars? I am looking for. . . Good location; a particular well placed crater, lots of caves nearby, etc. . . Good mix of resources; Ice, ir...
Using current technology, what could I do to optimize the odds of being located by time-traveling humans a thousand years from now? The accuracy must be such that they could "transport" me out of ...
Force field technology has come a long way. The latest energy-efficient engines can guarantee stable energy output in any situation, making force fields extremely reliable and very cost effective c...
In the relatively realistic (hopefully), near future, scifi book I am writing I am at a point where I am describing the observation deck of a large ship belonging to a wealthy "business man" (see s...
I am trying to design spacecraft with realistic mass estimates, so that I can "accurately" design fuel requirements and calculate potential speed. Obviously the mass of a ship is going to vary wid...
Mars has been colonized, close to a million people are now living above (and below) the martian soil, every few months a ship from Earth arrives with more resource for expansion and more settlers, ...
In near future a large spaceship is built. It is nuclear powered, has a crew of two dozen, and is propelled by an advanced ion drive like VASIMR. The Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Roc...
Setting is 20 minutes into future - everything is as we know it, or as we can reasonably predict, except the zero-tau capsules. Capsule is a thin mesh of Unobtanium connected to a portable Handwav...
I'm creating a sci-fi world similar to ours roughly 50 years in the future. Unobtanium, a futuristic metal and fuel source, was discovered in 2020. Its broad utility led to rapid advances across al...
Would it be possible to make a sharpie or a dry-erase marker that would work in a vacuum? Would they already work? To that end could you make a dry erase board or some such?
What is surface to weight ratio needed to help slow the decent onto Mars? Assembled and inflated in space could a blimp be big enough to include everything needed to jump start a colony and land...
So in my story, a spaceship populated with about 250 people has reached its destination, an Earth-like planet. It's uninhabited, and consider the weather is just typical, sunny-day with a slight br...
I've been reading the book Nomad, and in it a binary pair of black holes is cruising into the solar system, and threatens to slingshot the earth out into deep space That's got me thinking,...
So my story is set in the TRAPPIST-1-system and a rogue planet enters the system. When it's still far off, a scientist discovers that one of the numbers is slightly off. (She has some tables that p...
Antenna farm as seen on the USS Sulaco from Aliens (1986) We often see menacing sharp communication spikes and clusters on spacecraft in movies, shows, games, and etc. It makes the ship look...
The question stems from watching a scene from ID2 and seeing the massive alien mothership landing/crashing on the North Atlantic. What mass would a starship, or any other artificial object constru...
I'm attempting to rough-estimate potential population density of three-dimensional megastructures in space. Assume a filled spherical volume (i.e. death star, not Dyson sphere), where all internal ...
Someone showering after exercise aboard a rotating space station spinning to simulate 1 gravity. How might Coriolis affect jets of water falling within a cubicle of 2 metres in height?
How do you go about building a working Earth-like ocean ecosystem from scratch in Europa's subsurface ocean? On Earth, abyssopelagic species have evolved to live more than 6km below the surface. A...
I'm trying to think of what kind of cosmic event would cause an explosion powerful enough to "shake" or disrupt the whole flow of a galaxy and on that same note what other kind of super cosmic even...
The setting is our Earth of today (2018) with one difference: some Space Agency decided to go back the Moon and built a ship that is ready to depart, using today's technology. For reasons, the cre...
To make it short, time-space shenanigans transported everything in a 60 kilometers circumference around an old space-based particle collider to the year 1855. The particle collider was in geosynch...
We do not know how exactly it happened, but poor John Doe made a space-time trip along a three dimensional analog of a Möbius strip (a Klein bottle). He is now back on Earth, but he is now the mir...
Kjør bestillingen 92 umiddelbart. Frøhvelvet skal åpnes, skyttelbussen skal tilberedes. (Execute Order 92 immediately; the seed vault is to be opened, the shuttle prepared) ...
In my story there is a full size (Island Three) O'Neill cylinder, 5 miles in diameter and 20 miles long. It doesn't have windows, but is lit internally down the center of the cylinder with a 20 mi...
In a world I am creating, some people have colonized Ceres-like and Moon-like worlds - that is, they live in domes or underground, in pressurized buildings. The planets have no atmosphere for all p...
A civilization uses the sci-fi staple of space gates to get around between systems. These gates, for our purposes, are big, round and very much not transparent; think the star gates but huge or the...
In my story there is something akin to an Island Three O'Neill cylinder buried vertically into the side of the asteroid Vesta. It is 5 miles across and 20 miles long. The station is buried but is...
Okay, so our society has starting harnessing significant amounts of energy from its sun, and has started mass producing micro-black holes (although there have been experiments with gathering energy...
In my story, reasonably far in the future, an intrepid group of explorers are on the first manned mission to the Andromeda galaxy, travelling close to the speed of light. They slumbered in suspende...
I have developed a fictional planet with the following atmospheric composition; 60.4% Nitrogen 27.6% Oxygen 9.8% Xenon 1.5% Water Vapor 0.64% Argon 0.06% Carbon Dioxide Is this breathable to hu...
I'm working on a passage of my SciFi novel where my current primary character is escaping from a highly secure, enemy military, space station. I would like him to cause some sort of catastrophe to ...
I've got a subspecies of human, Homo Volantes, that has been designed to live both in zero-G and in surface gravity. Several adaptations have been made, one of them including the replacement of fra...
Inhabitants of another planet (their biology is yet undefined, and if helpful to solving the problem, suggestions can be included in the answer), have a spaceship in which they plan to accelerate t...
I would like my human colonists to settle on the high plateaus (2500-3000m above sea level) of my planet thus never meeting the civilization living in the lowlands (in a huge forest so they aren't ...
Earth, far future: We built multi generation ship which can get 20 000 people to another solar system in next 20 generations (600 years) For scope of this question assume that ship itself is well ...
My question on refueling around stars got me thinking about the transit method of detecting planets and how it could be used to detect a ship whilst it is refueling (either by accident or on purpos...
Suppose that there is an alien spacecraft travelling towards the Sun. This spacecraft is similar in design, size and power output to Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 as they were immediately after launch fr...
Background It is the near future. After a major world war and limited nuclear exchange, the nations of Earth have consolidated into a few blocs. The threat of further war and the cumulative damage...
In my book series (link here), there is a star system at the northern edge of the galaxy called the Ryu system. I am planning for this star system to be huge, encompassing 120 planets. The vast m...
I would like to know if a very advanced civilisation could rule an entire galaxy without mastering teleportation or any other method that allows traveling faster than light (unless you give mathema...
