Posts tagged space
What might clothing designed to be worn, long-term, in microgravity look like? For the purpose of this question there are two categories. Practical, or everyday wear, and impractical or simply fanc...
In my military scifi novel the military is, obviously, very concerned with security aboard its spaceships. They don't want other people to be able to receive any information about what happens on t...
Being new, this is my first question. I've read some other posts that gave me valuable insight, but I still have some questions. First, some specifics: Star: red dwarf. 80 x jupiter mass. 3 bill...
What would happen if the entire inner surface of a Dyson sphere (not necessarily a solid shell, maybe a very dense swarm) would be coated into a highly reflective material? Let's say it can reflec...
I am trying to create an organism that can survive in space for short periods, but I realized that I can't have its eyes be similar to those of most animals and humans because they would boil in sp...
For a story I'm working on I'm designing a sattelite to take down infantry from orbit, but without the power to take down tanks or infrastructure. The goal would be to kill off a military base, or ...
World Rules: Travelers are able to move at the speed of light without disruption of their lives. Time passes "normally" for them. They think, breathe, love, cry, and steer the ship as if they w...
If you have miles of steel pipes 10m thick, could you pump water from the sea to the centre of Antarctica, then pump it into the air like a geyser so that it falls around the pipe. As the fallen se...
In an effort to work out a believable form of faster-than-light communications for my setting, I've ruled out a few things: wormholes (which are in use, but are too random in where they lead, to be...
For a space-based story I am writing, I was hypothesising about how to have organisms that can thrive the vacuum of space. Ignoring plausibility of such a creature evolving, I realised a few probl...
Say there is a civilian ship going less than the speed of light, travelling from one star to the next. In the event that pirates board the ship (or some other dangerous situation, like a hull breac...
Throughout history, humanity has made a few scientific blunders where a scientific principle held as fact for hundreds of even thousands of years is found to be completely or mostly false. Our s...
If I needed a large area for zero-G training, is there any place to put it on a rotating wheel space station if the hub was needed for docking of spacecraft? I wanted a place on the station that...
Based on Docking on the outer edge of a rotating wheel space station would it be impractical to launch ships off of the outer edge of a rotating wheel space station? Whether launching the ships al...
Assuming such a space station needed to have its central hub not used for docking spacecraft, would it be plausible for a spacecraft to dock on the outer edge of a rotating wheel if the ship approa...
Armageddon is coming. A giant Texas-sized meteorite on a collision course with planet Earth is discovered in 2020. It will hit Earth in 2030 and will wipe out 90% of living things including humanit...
Considering that oil is only really prevalent on earth (where dead biomatter can be compressed over millions of years into long hydrocarbons) I began to think that plastic might be just as rare as ...
What is the best material to use for a near future spaceship. Assume that most materials in the solar system can be mined and used. The spaceship is 700m long, 500m wide and 500m high. It travels...
My hypothetical gas giant has five major moons. Three of those moons are icy bodies with abundant water ice and volatiles. Any of these could provide fuel for translunar spacecraft, or for spacecra...
What would be the best configuration of solar panels on a rotating wheel space station? I am thinking about Space Station V design and dimensions. Space Station V comes from 2001: A Space Odyssey...
Could Space Station V, from 2001: A Space Odyssey have an inner ring? Would the inner ring have a different G-force if the inner ring was halfway between the outer ring and the hub. Would there b...
Assuming an ion propulsion ship was leaving station in an orbit at the radius of the heliopause, and the most direct trajectory takes 18 months to get to Earth, would there be a launch window or co...
In my world, interstellar vessels use a drive whose design mankind learned from an extinct elder civilization. While construction of the drives is possible, the physical principles making them work...
On Earth, our atmosphere contains 78.09% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, on average around 1% water vapor at sea level, 0.93% argon, 0.04% carbon dioxide, and small amounts of other gases. Looking through...
If the outer ring of a rotating space station was producing the equivalent to 1G, but a higher G was needed could in small modules, could a bolo-like attachment be included with the ring to accompl...
If I wanted to image an Earth-like planet at a resolution where one could read the lips of a human speaking on the surface 1, 10, and 1000 light years away, how large would the telescope reflector ...
I want to have air and STP (standard temperature and pressure) around my spaceship. Other properties: Objects can enter and exit it without bumping into any kind of a barrier? In fact, there doe...
Me You might call me evil but the facts are I deserve to rule all of the world, everyone & everything in it. What I already have done For years I have worked in the shadows (as much as you c...
Whether exhaust from a solid rocket engine, or something released by spaceships in flight (like aerobatic smoke in the atmosphere), could extended trails behind a ship be created that would not dis...
So I heard about this thing on vsauce a while ago, where scientists use this thing called "acoustic levitation". They use ultrasonic frequencies to levitate various substances, for use of studying ...
The ODESSA network, a highly secretive organisation of former SS members, decides to hold the former Allied nations to ransom; with a giant parabolic mirror in space that can focus sunlight into an...
I'd like to travel really really fast, and I've got some scientists proposing a novel new way of doing so. They've developed the technology to generate extremely powerful controlled gravitational ...
Suppose you have a regular old Stanford torus space station with a 'glass ceiling' rotating at 1.3 RPM. Put it in orbit around a star such that its axis of rotation intersects the star (in other wo...
I have seen a similar-ish question on here, but it doesn't quite match my inquiry. Suppose you have an interstellar civilization (the means of travel between stars being stable two-way wormholes o...
This one's more sociological, and it seems like a shoe-in to me, but sociology was never my strength. Given how pronounced the Coriolis effect of a smaller Von Braun wheel would be, does it seem ...
In my next novel, there are three major powers in the solar system: Earth, Mars, and Saturn. Earth runs on a slightly modified Gregorian calendar, Mars goes with the good old Darian calendar, and S...
My answer to the question Is there a scientifically sound faster-than-light travel system for a spaceship? involved an Alcubierre-drive starship. However, that then got me thinking. What would an ...
The Coriolis effect on a ring-shaped space station gets the most attention, but disregarding that, would the rotation of the starfield be too disorienting? A 1km radius station at 1G simulated gra...
A moon is just a natural satellite - something orbiting a planet - so I'm interested in what kind of factors influence how many moons a planet can have, and how many moons a planet will actually ha...
Considering the well-established relationships between stellar mass, surface temp, and luminosity, how unusual would it be to find a star (or brown dwarf) that possesses about half the mass of an a...
Assuming the power source for such acceleration places no limit on things, how quickly can a space craft be accelerated to the speed necessary to cross the distance between Jupiter and the sun in a...
In the not too distant future, mankind has established several mining bases on Ceres. There are a lot of spaceships which come and go. Large mining machines are chewing up the interior for resource...
If you look at this list of potentially habitable exoplanets, very few of them actually come close to having the same size as Earth, this means most of them would have surfaces gravities significan...
We've all heard the on-again, off-again theories of another massive object in the vast reaches of the outer solar system. Some potential evidence to support the possibility are its affects on small...
I want to have a group of space colonists get stranded on a planet where the only way they can get enough nourishment is to gather or cultivate edible plants.
In the year 2069AD, a spaceship is transporting hundreds of people in cryogenic sleep to a distant star. The spaceship engine is a nuclear fission reactor and its thruster is based on an ion drive ...
For context, this takes place about 300 years in the future. The space city in question is located in a nebula, completely man-made (not build upon any preexisting foundations like an asteroid etc....
As title suggests, what is the size limit by volume for a rocky planet, if any? Some ideas are discussed here, but I'm wondering if there is more concrete, expert evidence to point either way. If p...
I have a population living in a dome, and they have been for generations, totally sealed off from the outside world. What type of engineering would need to be in place to effectively convince the ...
Let us assume that I built a dome on the moon's surface. That dome is pressurized and has nuclear-powered lights to deal with the long lunar night (or is in one of the poles). I also have water, ei...
