Posts tagged space
In Star Trek, going faster then light will take you back in time (Possibly in real life too!). But I've noticed one inconsistency. Ships, even when going faster then light, have a finite speed. By ...
First question on stack exchange I've been lurking and learning for years and finally decided to pose a question for a novel I'm working on. Given the appropriate advances in material sciences an...
It's something that's been used several times as a plot device on Star Trek, notably in the TOS episode "The Tholian Web", and the TNG episodes "The Next Phase" and "The Pegasus". I'm certain it's ...
I was wondering what the best ways for turning minerals mined in the asteroid belt into useable materials would be, so far I came up with three methods, utilizing nuclear, electromagnets, and final...
I'm thinking about a design like this generation ship, which obviously has spin gravity. Would the fact that the ship is rotating affect the use of a magnetic sail? The magnetic sail as a sort of...
If you took a giant drill (~one hundred meter circumference) and bored down two kilometers into the moon, what would it look like (assuming the lighting was good)? Is there a gradient, or is it a u...
Set in a distant future, every interstellar spaceship runs on antimatter propulsion which can achieve fractional speed of light travel. There is a doctrine stating that all spaceships with mass exc...
Are there any areas of space where an antimatter object, the size of a small house could survive without coming into contact with any or extremely minimal amounts of matter? I had assumed in all a...
My augmented society of humans have managed to engineer their power-hungry cyborg components to run on a hydrogen fusion reactor. Whilst they have so far managed to fuel it by drinking lots of wate...
At speeds near the speed of light, interstellar particles and gas may affect the movement of the ship, and microscopic particles may even badly damage the ship. Would not it make sense to make the ...
Set in a distant future, reports of alien and drug traffickings have been on the rise and there was mounting pressure for Mr User6760, president of intergalactic interpol to resign. The traffickers...
Imagine a spaceship entering Earth's atmosphere, it has lost control of its engines and is relying on its reverse thrusters to decelerate before crashing into the Pacific ocean. So in an attempt ...
How might an enterprising spacer, mining the rings of Saturn, go about quickly measuring/estimating the velocity of and distance to a nearby moving object (asteroid, habitat, pirate, etc)? Bonus po...
A plot point of my novel is that the pilot accidentally finds a planet that is being purposefully hidden (i.e. been deleted from all star maps). It starts with him arriving at a location that is j...
I have a solar system containing multiple planets, most having an intelligent species inhabiting it. To keep a common peace, they created a large government system to help stop territorial wars bet...
Imagine your spaceship encountered a gravitational anomaly and discovered that you are lost in space, your computer tells you that you are still inside the Milky Way galaxy but it cannot find the S...
So, in the S.S Portland (The main setting of my story) there is a variety of rooms. A lounge, a lab, etc. so, i was thinking that at some point, the lounge would be changed out for a 0-g pool. A ba...
A major plot point for my story is the Protagonist stumbling upon a planet that was purposely hidden from the rest of the galaxy (at the edge of the galaxy) as it's being used by high level governm...
I'm making a series where a multi-purpose frigate travels to Jupiter in order to help in the Mars versus Jupiter war. However, I don't know what the colonies would look like. Maybe floating wit...
The universe is dying because it has exhausted nearly all of its resources. Humans became the last species in the universe because of their resilience and sheer willpower. And yet, humanity still...
I am doing some hard sci-fi worldbuilding and really want to get as much correct as I can, but the effects of high sub-light speed travel on the travellers is doing my head in. I've pored literally...
In terms of scientific and engineering challenges, which one is closer to fruition? Specifically I am looking for the feasibility of using one of these systems for space-only travel between the orb...
Imagine a distant future in which humans' descendants have scattered throughout the stars, settling wherever they can. Some planets and moons are resource-rich paradises, while others are barren w...
If we didn't have the capability to use faster than light travel then how could we stay unified and are any realistic examples in science fiction?
Many people are excited with the idea of super-Earths--rocky, habitable exoplanets greater in mass, density and diameter (because I'd prefer to go the whole way than stop at the halfway point) than...
Set in the year 3020 CE, every crew on board has a personal issued portal gun to easily get around the interior of the spaceship. The handheld portal gun can instantly teleport the user along with ...
Lets say an alien trickster wants to trick a group of human astronauts into thinking they've been transported to another world far away. But in reality, he wants them to stay on good old Earth, thr...
In my narrative universe, there will be ships that use a 1g acceleration for artificial gravity. However, when they are not accelerating (whether on a longer journey at a constant velocity or simpl...
Imagine a generation ship heading for a distant star. Humanity had means to observe that star up to a point, that it is 99.9% sure the star has a colonizable Earth-like planet (with water and atmos...
Mostly what it says on the tin. If a spaceship, let's say about 200 meters long and 100 meters wide (made of modern materials) was approaching Earth and slowing down (say from 100 km/s to 3km/s), h...
The universe described in the orthogonal series http://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/00/PM.html is one, in which the minus sign in the space time interval is replaced with a plus sign. So this unive...
In my story I have paleolithic era humans who were contacted by aliens long enough ago for them to have used space travel to spread across many planets. I want them to be able to fly and somewhat m...
Picture a setting similar to that of many fantasy works: a relatively low level of technology among the general population, lots of manual labor, agriculture or hunter/gatherer society, and that mo...
I wanted to create an extremely large space city which will be made up of many different large space habitats of ringed and cylindrical varieties. Although each habitat will contain its own city o...
It's the late 2020's, and humanity has expressed an unprecedented and powerful renewal in the interest of space exploration. Sometime between then and the turn of the next century, a practical form...
Is there any practical g-limit for unmanned spacecraft, or could you theoretically push a missile to significant fractions of c in hours or minutes while pulling hundreds or thousands of Gs? I need...
There is a planet called Galileo with life on it. The life is getting extremely complex, in fact, with some of the life on Galileo beginning to form tribes and clans and learning language. Humans w...
It's the future. The setting is about as "hard-ish sci-fi" as it is possible to be, with the one big exception of a viable FTL engine. Humans have began spreading out into the galaxy, colonising n...
After centuries of careful search and travel, some intrepid extraterrestrial explorers have finally found another inhabited world! Elated with their discovery and exhausted after their long journey...
In my story, a planet of low-tech natives in the midst of war are abruptly brought into contact with a much more advanced empire. There are many historical precedents for this kind of event, and oc...
Say a group of people travel to a different planet where they have to wear spacesuits to live (because there's no oxygen and because of the atmosphere's density). What would happen if they planted ...
Let us assume at some time in the near future, medical science perfects a biologically safe liquid air solution. It can fill up the lungs of the adult human subject and they can breathe it potentia...
It's easy to imagine how would a water-breathing aquatic race outfit its spaceship - take a normal spaceship, insulate it, fill it with oxygenated water, possibly add some enhanced turbines to pump...
On the Earth's surface, we look back to an ultimately high tech evolution of computer hardware and according integrated circuit manufacturing appliances. The knowledge required to build robust mod...
Suppose you want to build a large scale habitable structure in space or on a planet or moon without an atmosphere or any organics, and this would be a long term or permanent settlement, not a tempo...
I am looking for as hard science answers as possible, but I am willing to bend some rules for a good answer. Assume they need to move 10 million 100 million people off of a planet what technology...
Leaving aside the matter of how well would humans fare on the surface of Mercury (we only have to factor in the weight of their life support: air, water, food and spacesuits), and assuming material...
So I'm working on a fictional planet which would experience a daytime sky similar to this. This particular picture is from the movie Valerian: City of a Thousand Planets. Fictional alien atmosph...
Currently, NASA is investigating the use of hydroponics, aeroponics, and other low soil techniques to grow regular plants for consumption and oxygen generation/CO2 removal on long voyages in space....
My Dino theme park business didn't end well and I reluctantly fall into depression and decided to go into suspended animation to seek a cure. 200 years later, a lady claims she works with the milit...
