Posts tagged space
Say a star system in the local neighborhood (~15 light years away max) has a species that did not survive its own version of the cold war. The result is the usage of tens of thousands of nuclear we...
In the 22nd century C.E. human already colonised the entire Solar system, and Earth becomes a dangerous place to live because of the spread of deadly synthetic virus that kills every animals and sc...
I am writing up a system of wormhole-based gates to allow "fast travel" in a far-future setting. My description is an extrapolation of the way I understand a flatlander's experience of the followin...
On Earth and other planets, the surfaces spherical shape and rotation lead to a Coriolis effect or force which causes large storms and weather systems to rotate (clockwise in the Northern hemispher...
I've always liked living spaceships, but it seems to me that the animal kingdom would make far inferior spaceships to the plant kingdom. With that in mind, what does this tree-ship have to be made ...
Could you power a starship by feeding matter into a black hole and collecting the plasma produced by the tidal forces ripping apart whatever you fed it, or is this impossible/impractical? I keep re...
Imagine a starship with a tonnage of 600,000Â metric tons that must maintain an average speed of 10km/s to remain in Near Earth Orbit, that's probably going to consume much more energy than simply ...
An O'Neill cylinder for those not in the know is basically a space habitat consisting of a rotating cylinder 32km long and 8km in diameter. I want to turn one into an actual spacecraft rather than ...
I imagine such a creature would be composed of thousands, possibly millions of planets, gas clouds, asteroids and stars. Almost like a giant living engine powered entirely by gravity. Obviously t...
Okay, so while I'm fairly certain this is possible to do, I wanna know if it actually makes sense to do so. Imagine you have a fleet of ships, each of them so large it takes megatons of antimatter ...
What would it look like for a ship with an Alcubierre drive to drop out of FTL both for the passengers, and to an observer (assuming they aren't obliterated)?
This is a spin off from this question here. I want a spaceship or several spaceships to be able to move a planet out of its orbit around another planet. How big could the planet realistically be...
I've created a new question and worded differently to help me get the answer I want. Click here to view A planet is in orbit around a larger planet, and I want to push it out of orbit. The plane...
Given advanced enough telescopic technology, would it be possible to detect that a planet in the order of 50 light years away is inhabitable? (i.e. without having to actually go there) I'm just lo...
Human have begun colonizing the solar system using the ablative laser microwave drive, our next target is Proxima Centauri and inbetween there is basically nothing except dust and occasional astero...
Lore: "Not much is known about the past of Unus Solum. What is known is scattered and fractured. Unus Solum was a planet that was subject to colonization efforts. The Ark ships that came were pre...
Humans require a 20 degrees environment. that's 250 degrees warmer than Pluto. So, if humans lived there, their structures would melt the surface and sink. −200 cracks all common metals. most sp...
In the background for my book, I'm looking for an alternative way for space travel. What I'm currently considering: A starship travels to the center of a star by using the natural downwards flows t...
I'm writing my first sci-fi novella and I'm looking for a bit of guidance from some scientifically literate people. My main premise is that an alien space ship similar to the death star enters Eart...
One thing that necessarily happens on a generation ship is that people die of old age. Now that poses a tension: On one hand, you need to handle the dead with dignity. On the other hand, you probab...
Imagine a space battle between two warships without inertial dampeners. Obviously the ships would be limited to perhaps 4 gravities of prolonged acceleration, and could only perform short bursts o...
An interstellar civilization has superluminal travel which allows for travel between two points, effectively without traversing the space in between so they don't crash into anything between them a...
Imagine: A Kardashev Type I civilization mainly resides on a planet analogous to Earth, with one moon, analogous to Earth's moon. Eventually, the society grows so complex that machines filling spac...
So Turbines in Space don't work, how about sticking beefed up versions of regular wind turbines near the top of a space elevator? My thought is that the elevator at the top experiences some serious...
This is the next piece in my question-series, you guys have been absolutely awesome in your answers to the first question: How to solve the old 'gun on a spaceship' problem? In this series, I try ...
In the mid-21st century, humanity has an interplanetary colony system principally spanning the Moon, Mars, and Titan (as per usual). The furthest established colony is on Proxima b. Humans have FTL...
Suppose there was a race of aliens who had created engines for there spaceships that could operate at any speed under light, and Hulls strong enough to withstand the crushing pressure of earths cor...
I am wondering if there is any benefit for a rotating wheel space station to be based on mobius strip layout such as more rooms for growing population maybe because both side of the strips are popu...
In a story of mine mankind has established a permanent base on the earthward-side of the Moon complete with a beanstalk dangling into Earth-Luna-L1 for easy transport of material off Luna. Getting...
In my universe there are more than just one FTL method: Wormholes, Warp, Hyperspace and more. The thing is I need to predict the destination of an enemy fleet. I only can think about spies and h...
In a world where travel is limited to the speed of light, reaching a different star, while not necessarily impossible, would be very time consuming. For an empire stretching across several solar sy...
I want to create a system orbiting an Orange Dwarf star, approximately 0.5 M☉. I've a 5-planet system, one of which needs to be within the habitable zone of this star; this planet will be 2 M⊕...
Would there be any benefit to this? At first I was thinking if you had an outpost on Mars you could spend less money on the actual trip to the belt itself, but I'm not sure if having your launch st...
This is an answer I found while looking up random factoids. And it's gotten me wondering. ((If I should take down the picture, and just paraphrase the text, please let me know.)) Charlie here i...
So let's say that some advanced future civilization is capable of creating and manipulating wormholes, and uses a network of wormholes for their FTL transportation. If an enemy gets too close to o...
As we all know, hydrogen and by extension water, gaseous, liquid or frozen, is pretty much everywhere in our solar system besides maybe Mercury. The most abundant source may be the Asteroid Belt, w...
Could an artificial plant species be designed and created that lives in a vacuum - for example on the surface of our moon? The main problems I can see immediately would be the lack of an atmospher...
What if in a massive display of power, in the future a human military would build a massive spaceship with huge rocket engines and decided to land the craft vertically onto a desert in a magnificen...
By the time we develop the technologies necessary for travelling between stars, I think it is fairly likely that we would have already developed the technology to digitally augment, edit, and uploa...
So say we discovered aliens through a wormhole near Saturn (Interstellar anyone?). Congratz to us! But we have a bigger issue in trying to communicate with them. They developed in a completely dif...
I am working a hard science fiction story and I cannot come up with a really good reason to put people on Mars. I need people on Mars for the story to work, but there is no reason for them to be th...
A person is traveling in a space craft that was designed and built by sufficiently advanced aliens. This space craft left from Earth and is capable of traveling infinitely close to the speed of lig...
Noting that this question is specific to human colonization, and Thucydides's answer is explicit that driving concerns are to support life, and I notice that the story I'm working on turns this on...
The year is 2109 C.E my friends and I were caught in a space disaster when the spacecraft we're in broke apart during a daring escape from a patrolling spacecraft. We stole an antique cellphone (fr...
What would colonists building a base on Europa use for building materials? I am interested in habitats in three locations: on or just under the surface bolted onto the underside of the ice sheet...
I Was playing space engine and i was looking for a planet like Earth for quite some time and then i stumbled on this beautiful world covered with liquid water which orbited a main sequence star wit...
As human population continues to grow and need for raw resources grow, various nations and private organizations begin colonization efforts of our Solar System beyond the blue and green sphere we c...
The Setup: We have a highly advanced orbital station. It is designed to be rather stealthy, like a observation post. Is it possible to make it completely invisible to the naked eye, even when in ...
2035 a human population on Mars of 500 (mostly workers i.e.: miners, biologists, medical staff, engineers, etc. Most of the colony is underground with above grou lead bunkers. They have an establis...
I saw some games or stories where space mines were used. My question is: would it really work ? I think the chance of hitting a mine is really really low in space. Where would you place a mine in...
