Posts tagged space
Piggybacking on this question: Could soft matter infused with nano or pico sized magnets be used to clump together so that we could create environments with it? ...So we have a planet that has low...
I'm looking for a star system between 15 and 36 ly from Sun with these characteristics: composed by 2 or more stars one of the stars should be a late G/ K type star (it doesn't matter for the ot...
I am envisioning a habitable world with an atmosphere comparable to earth's in which one day is extremely long (>100 earth years). Human settlers have successfully colonized a small portion of t...
An abandoned outpost from a long extinct race is discovered. It can easily be repaired and would make an ideal location for a colony, however it has been breached and any usable air has been long ...
Background: The main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter is the closest and richest source of non terrestrial resources to Earth in the solar system. Even though it is vast its resources are ob...
The Earth-like planet I'm working on is the culmination of years of labor by the galaxy's best scientists. It consists of fully artificial ecosystems, and is, for all intents and purposes, like Ear...
Will be possible in the far future to use megascale engineering to create an artificial hollow moon to give Earth a big moon in the sky like in billion years ago? Since it would be hollow, it would...
Eskimos in space! Let's say, just for contextual concerns, that a band of water-rich comet miners want to use water-ice found in the outer Solar System as the main structural and functional compone...
Okay, so I have a species of tree that's absolutely enormous, 1-5km tall when fully matured. Its immense size is supported by a large base, bark that incorporates a 2-d carbon lattice for strength ...
Geckos use the van der Waal force to stick to things, an effect that humans can replicate and make various materials that utilize such (like extra sticky gloves). My question is, would these work i...
I'm writing a story where there is a large mining outpost built on a moon. This mining outpost is one large building holding around a thousand people, with an extensive system of passages and mine...
I've been wracking my brain about a world I'm writing in, how to make some group of regular people able to survive in space for extended periods with or without a suit. I can reduce the amount of t...
Assuming we never break Newton's third law, in the near future thousands of chemical/nuclear/electric powered spaceships will be flying through our solar system expelling reaction mass. Since a g...
I have two planets that share an orbit around a pair of stars at a distance of 2.05 Earth-AU from the Barycenter of those two stars. (I can provide more details about the two stars, if needed) Usi...
So, the United Terran Federation and the Qulian Star empire have been in really bad terms lately. Wars, skirmishes, it pretty bad. So, the UTF and QSE have made an agreement. No ships piloted by ci...
Imagine a gas giant orbiting Sirius B, a hot Jupiter. 120 million years ago give or take, the star reaches its final stage as a red giant then collapses into a white dwarf, ejecting countless billi...
I'm looking for a weapon a ship can carry that can disable a ship without any permanent damage to its subsystems or significant hull breaches. This will mostly be used by pirate factions (capturing...
The idea of "Flat Space", an area of space-time with minimal, preferably zero, gravitational curvature, is an important concept in many Sci-fi universes, often those with "jump-drive" based FTL tra...
Dyson spheres are a staple of science fiction. Solar system spanning megastructures, they represent a significant effort by whatever species chose to build them, and a significant mass moved into t...
So, here's my issue. My setting's central conceit is that a myriad of human societies developed at relatively concurrent times across a large system separated by only a few light-hours. (There are,...
Imagine we have a faster-than-light drive which costs ~$250,000 USD per drive and can propel an ISS-sized craft at 1000 times the speed of light. It is reliable and has safeguards that stop it from...
I mean in the far future megascale be advanced enough to allow the construction of a ring world around Earth or around a low mass star( a red dwarf for exemple). If yes, how big Earth would look f...
This question would be best answered for the time period of our first colonized planet, which will most likely be Mars. With the thinner atmosphere, weaker gravity, low oxygen, and the bodily damag...
Spaceplanes are cool. SSTOs (Single Stage To Orbit) are even cooler. Imagine a spaceplane that is pretty much a 747. Imagine if Boeing decided to have a crazy new idea and made a space variant of ...
So what size comet/meteor/rogue planet could wreak havoc on a populated world without killing off intelligent life entirely or actually ruining the planet for life? Assume the world being affected ...
It's the height of humanity's space-colonization golden age when casual interplanetary travel has become possible and humans have either colonized or established large space stations around nearly ...
Assuming that the observer is on the moon for a full lunar cycle, would the appearance of the planet wax and wane, would the moon's shadow occlude the planet during an eclipse while on the moon?
Is it possible to have a structurally self-supporting hollow Earth where the weight of the shell is balanced against the atmospheric pressure inside? It must be human habitable (gravity is nice b...
I want to be able to have interplanetary travel very cheap and fast, within minutes. Seeing as planets are light minutes away from each other, I suppose even for fast interplanetary travel the tech...
Imagine that you want to colonize Venus. But a day on Venus lasts 4 months, and that's terrible. The big brains at the Science Palace have decided to make Venus spin faster, so that the length of d...
Solid Core Nuclear Thermal rocketry has existed for a while and I was thinking about using it as the primary propulsion in my setting. Now most Solid Core rockets still have fairly long transit tim...
I understand that a Sol is a Martian day, a little longer than a day on Earth (... 30 minutes I think?) and there are 24 months using the Darian calendar. So if people lived on Mars, what is a casu...
User Interface Customization for Spaceship Controls; "In theory, practice and theory are the same. In practice, they're totally different." We often find that what we plan for isn't what actuall...
This question relates to an attack on a biological space vessel. My vessel is a space station made from wood, with an oxygen-rich atmosphere inside it. It is under attack and the attackers have de...
When flying a big spacecraft, one needs to keep several things in mind when designing the "user interface" used to control the spacecraft's flight path, or ultimately, the output of the thrusters/e...
The Rygyphae are a species that lives in the geothermal pockets, areas heated by volcanic activity. The rest of the planet is nothing but frozen ice and rock, but these pockets are lush jungles ful...
This is not a very hard-science-fiction tale, but more about human relations and adaptability, but I still want it to sound plausible. A space faring civilisation that descend from humans uses bio...
Here's the plan for the proposed system of FTL communication. A huge pole made of the strongest solid in existence (or whatever solid would work best for this scenario, if no solid exists that wo...
My thoughts go like this: I postulate a superintelligent rational agent, that is given, or assumes, control over its mother civilization. I call this agent "the Ruler". I postulate that in order ...
First, yes I was inspired by this question: "How do you check if a room behind a door aboard a spaceship has an atmosphere/pressure?" I wanted to take the scenario further, instead of asking how t...
Space is filled with all kinds of things that are unkind to cloth, such as dust and radiation, and they are the reason why sticking a nylon national flag on the moon isn't permanent. In my world I...
Consider a near-future situation where humans have begun to explore the solar system, most groups are still working to start a profitable mining operation and only a few ships have gone beyond Jupi...
The ships would be permanently extra planetary and manned by 4-5 crew. All life support water, food, oxygen and propulsion being produced by bacterial cultures (not necessarily the same). With all...
I've never been satisfied with how this has been handled in any sci-fi story I've read, watched, etc. It always seems to get handwaved away with "we have sensor packages of various powers" and "the...
Here, star systems are connected with "wormholes". The wormholes facilitate travel at $250\ c$, regardless of mass. They are made using special ships. Any travel (including military vessels) not th...
Prelude Prelude TLDR; A fleet of ships is passing through our galaxy, stopping off at particular stars and causing small dips in the light from stars. This is related to a couple of other questio...
In my world, humanity reaches their new home among the stars by way of a portal that pops into the solar system one day. This portal instantaneously transports those who enter to a place that is lo...
In the near future, say about 50 years, the most powerful governments are starting to compete for control of interstellar resources. The first step is to send a probe or probes to a neighbouring st...
The title says it all. How would one go about creating a planet with aliens that have medieval grade technology (windmills and carts and stuff.) No high level technology. However, I want the aliens...
OK, here's the problem: I want to have a spaceship that is built for transporting large machines (in particular, heavy mining equipment). It does not and is not designed to leave space; transport d...
