Posts tagged space
Assuming a passenger was sitting in an elevator in a rotating wheel space station, as depicted in the movie 2001:A Space Odyssey and based on this question Elevator on rotating wheel space station...
Spacecraft in my Scifi setting use strong magnetic fields for many purposes. Fusion containment, magnetic nozzles, gauss guns, magnetic fields as pusher-plates for nuclear pulsed propulsion and def...
A civilization has begun its space program without any knowledge of general or special relativity. How would this affect the program? Would this establish any limits on where/how they could travel?...
For a spacecraft cruising without thrust it is my understanding that the sort of spin gravity utilized in the film 2001, for instance, would actually be debilitating to the crew due to the coriolis...
I am writing a sci fi novel in which one of the primary factions is a lost space colony sent to Proxima Centauri (Alpha Centauri C) roughly 350 years prior on a generation ship. The trip took rough...
In the 1960s we were disappointed to find that the moon is a pile of dust and rubble with no easily accessible valuable materials. Well, we kind of knew it before that, but we weren't sure. Anyway,...
I know that gas giants are much larger than terrestrial planets, but wouldn't several million or billion years allow for it to gain mass from collecting space debris and the like?
Assume that you have a Rogue Planet hurtling through deep space. Somehow, an alien civilization from, say, 1,000 ly away acquires astronomical data from this planet. This data is in the form of h...
If the Earth all of sudden was instantaneously transmuted into pure light, what would happen? How much energy would be released? How much damage would it do to surrounding space? Would it destroy...
This question hopes to make a space tug crew's life tolerable. A supply pipeline links two civilizations. Due to the long travel time between the ends, cargo is "thrown" at the other side in unman...
A familiar scenario in scifi: a bubble of space is isolated artificially from the outside world by means of time dilation: time inside the bubble moves more slowly than time outside it. Assume that...
I've had a fairly complex world built up in my head for several years and finally writing a story in it. One thing I'm struggling with is explaining the galaxy's faster-than-light traveling. It's n...
At a constant 1G acceleration it takes a little less than a year to reach near light speed speeds. Time would dilate locally on the ship slowing time for them. Could the time dilation be pushed t...
Assuming interstellar travel, and self-sufficient colonies in other star systems, what are some methods of destroying the Earth while leaving minimal impact on the colonies? Context I would like ...
I have an idea for an energy source for a colony on a cold world with not enough solar power. Is my idea workable, or is it debunked as perpetual motion machine? Here is the set-up and my plan: Sc...
I've read a lot of posts about moons around large gas giants and I think I have fairly good idea about basics to them. I'm not super great with all the science parts myself but they give me lots of...
Let's consider an O'Neill cylinder with a radius of 3.2km and length of 20km. In the classic O'Neill design, we have three large axis-aligned windows in the shell, alternating between purlins of ha...
In my novel, the many moons of Jupiter and Saturn have been colonized, but I'm running into some logistical problems - namely, waste disposal. My first instinct was to dump it on-moon; while this ...
The Hegemony is in need of superconductors for their fleets of stratospheric craft (stratocraft for short) as well as many, many, many other applications. I recently read metallic hydrogen is a the...
What would make a good propulsion source for small engines and manouvering thrusters for spacecraft vehicles on Europa (moon of Jupiter), both for near-surface operations (vacuum) and in caves bene...
This planet orbits a larger planet, which then orbits a binary solar system. Is there a way - based on the tilt of a planetary axis or the positioning of the planet in relation to its mother planet...
On the Earth, with our atmosphere, even small objects entering the atmosphere such as Tunguska or Chelyabinsk can do devastating damage due to the shock-wave travelling through the air. People coul...
Let's say metallic hydrogen becomes an economically viable resource that we are able to either make ourselves or mine from a gas giant, how would we use it as a power source for vehicles both plane...
Would it even be feasible under science fiction logic? It would allow nuclear weapons to be mass produced if the nuclear pasta could actually be collected and contained safely.
Need help with a topic for a sci-fi book. Basic premise is 200yr in future, mining facility on small Mars moon of Phobos. Power source we would like is an Sodium Fast Reactor breeder as we think th...
Okay, as an extension of my previous question, I'm just going to lay bare all the details I've written down about this planet (including corrections from my last question), and ask the big question...
In 2001:A Space Odyssey, from Space Station V the Earth appears to be spinning around a center that is near the edge of the planet. Phone call from space station scene If the same station (300 met...
Internal mass drivers are a potentially useful space drive, due to the ready availability of reaction mass (you can use anything from spare parts to literal dirt as a propellant, assuming you have ...
In my universe, humans nuked themselves in a war so thoroughly that the Earth has been rendered uninhabitable. As a result, they have to leave Earth and find a new home. They briefly tried to settl...
Lets say you have a space ship. This ship will do a lot of maneuvers causing a lot of G forces to go in different directions through the ship. During straight acceleration it pushes the people insi...
Sadly, the asteroid belt isn't the place to showoff your ace pilot skills. It is so sparse you wouldn't even see an asteroid most of the time if you flew through it. But Saturn's rings! The rings ...
Thanks to all who helped me with my first question about how a geocentric system would work! I'm not sure how the moon works in a geocentric model. (This would be a roughly Earth-similar world, t...
In my fictional universe there are two galactic civilizations that have never interacted until recently and thus have developed different cultures, science, etc. From a technological standpoint, o...
Imagine we have a sufficiently tall space fountain positioned at either of the Earth's poles, such that the upper station is permanently within view of the sun. A large array of solar panels could ...
I understand that in order to compress and expand spacetime, an Alcubierre drive would require some sort of "exotic matter" with a negative energy density. Is that sort of exotic matter purely hyp...
The goal is to get from Earth to the Outer Solar System, preferably the Kuiper Belt, as quickly as practical, with a crew of about 12, and a not-set-in-stone dry mass around 30 tons. The character...
it's my first question here, I'll try to be clear. I'm creating a story where there is a steampunk style civilization that has to face advanced civilizations in planetary and spatial battles. I'm...
I previously asked how best to use wormholes for spaceflight, focusing mainly on propulsion in space. I'm now wondering if there's a good way to get off Earth with this ship. The ship needs to be ...
I have the tables explaining time dilation for a single ship at different relativistic speeds, but am unsure how to modify that to work out for two ships at different velocities, and the two differ...
Animals on planets are so 20th century - let's herd us some space animals! In this story I have the need to move a herd of pesky space animals. They like Suns for their juicy solar energy and hydr...
I am wondering about Tatooine, and was reading about binary systems here, which provided a lot of good basic food for thought. My specific question is not addressed at that link, and so I pose it h...
Stars are born through the fusion of light atoms and the star's nucleus. So let's say that as a star is being born, the nucleus split and creates two stars. Could this even happen? If so, would the...
Imagine a spacefaring creature, one that colonises star systems, and then shoots some of its kind on to another system (the mechanism for doing this doesn't matter). The question is, how could thi...
Say 200-300 years in the future, humankind has colonized much of the solar system, using a combination of laser thermal drives and solid-core nuclear rockets (fusion never really panned out). Sudd...
This question about eating on a alien world got me thinking.... Would it be easier for humans to colonise a world with existing life, or one which was biologically dead? For the living world, let...
The illustrations of O'Neill cylinders I have come across with so far allow unrestricted view through the whole tube. Some are more playful with topography but still, there is a visible end. Are t...
Set in the near future, the interior of the spaceship is coated with thin layers of Teflon approximately 10mm average thickness on top of titanium alloy which in case you are wondering it is weakly...
If people were attempting to build a space station beyond the Hill Sphere, (outside of the area where Earth's gravity dominates), and wanted to mine the raw materials for the station from dwarf pla...
The probe in my mind is unmanned, with a super-reflective surface to deflect most of the energy from the Sun on all wave length, only absorb enough to power its operation. Please also elaborate i...
We had a long discussion in my office about this - if we were in a smallish 500m diameter O'Neil cylinder would hot air balloons work?
