Posts tagged space
What would be the most efficient text communication method for a spacecraft operating on a super low bit rate (I'm talking something like 5 bits an hour, excluding error handling)? As you want bo...
DISCLAIMER: Any resemblance to other starships (living or dead) is purely coincidental. The starship 'Exciting Undertaking' is a brand new ship about to set off on a five and a bit year mission to...
Cold and Flu, are common viruses which normally infect us in the cold of winter. Ironically, those people who always keep themselves warm, stay less out-of-the-house and office, keep their windows ...
I was recently looking at this question, which seems to argue that FTL travel within the existing laws of physics can risk resulting in the destruction of half the universe. (Specifically, bad thin...
A newly-built base on the moon has the first two compartments of a pressurized greenhouse farm. An airlock system automatically seals one compartment off the others when pressure sensors indicate a...
Larry Niven's "Known Universe" (KU) features "The Outsiders" as one of its most prominent alien races. As per KU canon, the Outsiders evolved in a frigid moon (similar to Nereida) and they sustai...
A launch loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_loop is a proposed way to put lots of things into space at lower unit cost than rockets (only need to pay the energy cost in electricity for each ...
Alright, so I've been meaning to write out a planet with golden/yellow fields and a violet / purple ocean. What I was thinking about is having the water of this world is so clean and nourishing th...
Alright, so the primary inspiration for this is 55 Cancri e, the speculated carbon "diamond world" and to a degree, Nkllon, a planet in Star Wars that is essentially what Cancri is, but "confirmed"...
I'm putting together a scenario, where a "Sun" and some debris are flung so distant that 14 billion years after the big bang, it has an "Earth" (and maybe some other minor rocky/icy objects), but n...
Storm fronts — especially surprise storm fronts — are a popular Sci-Fi trope. Ion storms and radiation storms and neutronic storms and they invariably look 2D, like ribbons in space. But then I r...
I realize the response to this question is fairly involved but here goes. I need to have an alien spacecraft either in orbit around Uranus's moon Puck or somewhere in Puck's orbit around the planet...
So for the story I'm writing, I'm designing is a gas dwarf with a very strong magnetic field and a planetary ring with a slightly inclined orbit. However, the rocks within the ring are very sensiti...
I'm well aware that a Sun-like star is incapable of producing a supernova at the end of its life. However, would removing the core or a fraction of it, trigger an explosion from the star collapsing...
What technology (at minimum), devices or minimum civilization development is needed, so that an individual member of this civilization would be able to detect that some star is going supernova? My...
Think of this alien life form as something resembling earth bats, placed in a planet with Earth-like conditions. Micro-bats have small and poorly developed eyes. Similarly, this alien species is ...
In my sci-fi world, mankind has begun colonization of the large asteroid Ceres. There are several established towns on the surface, but most of the population live underground in icy/rocky caves. T...
If it is even possible, what would the Goldilocks zone be like - in fact is such a system even possible of holding life - around a binary black hole? Could it have planets orbiting it? EDIT 1: Oh ...
When traveling at fast speeds through the galaxy, would it be possible to identify where all the black holes were on your path? I know most black holes are identified by their affect on other nearb...
In my sci-fi world, mankind has begun colonization of the large asteroid Ceres. It's a mining hub, with a lot of cargo vessels transporting things in and out. Hydrogen peroxide fuel is cheap and p...
Let's go with an example. Three planets, all of roughly earth's size, follow the same orbit around a star with a mass of roughly 1 sun. Basically, all three planets are almost identical to Earth, o...
I'm currently writing this story where an intelligent lifeform, instead of human eye-sight, is able identify the chemical composition of their surroundings, by detecting and "mapping" all the atoms...
This question differs from that question in that the other question is asking about a change in history while this question is looking for a change in the future. In a near future setting I am w...
In my conworld I have two moons (they could be planets if desired as long as they can stay 'close' to a larger nearby body) of habitable size. I want to reality-check and provide an explanation for...
The industrial company Astor since 2124 has equipped all "Long Hauls" (voyages beyond 3 months) with cryopofs in accordance with a new company bylaw and cost cutting measure (less resources the cre...
I was doing some research online about slower-than-light interstellar spacecraft, and it got me thinking about a couple things. Although it may seem empty, the space between stars isn't a perfect v...
Suppose Ship A is being targeted by Ship B, which intends to use a laser weapon in an attempt to destroy Ship A. Ship A has special technology that allows it to alter gravity (mainly used for gen...
My question is this: can excess mass be bled off into hyperspace (the large and compact extra dimensions, not the Star Wars-esque swirling vortex), yet the matter remains in our universe? Is mass ...
I know a similar question was asked whether gas masks could be used to survive in space but it didn't quite focus on the parts I'm interested in. I'm building a world in which space travel is regu...
Please assume the following: A spaceship in the far future. Output: The ships systems have a high base demand of energy and sometimes you need extreme amounts of Energy in a very short period of ...
From my understanding shkadov thrusters, they use huge mirrors built on the scale of a dyson sphere, to reflect all the radiation of a star in one direction, accelerating the star as an enormous st...
Are there any kind of contaminants or other reasons that might be dangerous? I'd assume that as far as microbes/bacteria goes, eating off the ground on the moon is much safer than it would be on ea...
I have a spaceship which is basically a cylinder a little less then a kilometer long. Attached to the ship by pylons connected to a hub is an inhabited ring which spins to produce a gravity-like ef...
My planet is a 20% larger than the earth, assume a similar atmosphere, but it can be changed to fit the narrative. My ship is not so large as in the original question, a cylinder shape, about a mi...
Ok, Space Elevators have fallen out of the limelight, sorry for them, but the concept is intriguing just the same, so here it goes. One of the worst problem space elevators face is the fact that t...
Set in the late 22nd century AD, spaceship designs are becoming more streamlined and have longer bodies measuring from the tip at the front of ship to the thruster located at the back of the ship. ...
Set in the mid 22nd century AD, a major construction work is being carried out in the orbit of Uranus. The military is developing a cheaper fleets using precast reinforced concrete(PRC) hoping to e...
Background I have a spacecraft traveling from one planet to another, say from Earth to Venus. The journey will take at the least several weeks. During this time, the sun will emit a number of sola...
In an upcoming writing project, I will be focusing on an autonomous drone that picks through space wreckage. It has access to intermittent star light, but has no source of chemical propellant. The ...
The Hegemony wishes to organise not only terrestrial games within the inner colonies, but has also wished to establish major sporting events for the other colonies in low gravity environments on to...
A spaceship crew, during their interstellar travel loses control of the spaceship for a few hours due to external factors (exact factor not important). This causes the spaceship to deviate from its...
What would be the best way to launch space craft/get into space from a northern latitude? Canada, Scandinavia, UK, Russia, Alaska, those sorts of places. I understand that being closer to the equat...
Is there a possible scenario in which once a year a celestial body can be seen from the surface of the Earth-like planet for a short period of time? With it being big enough for early civilizatio...
In a distant future, a spaceship was investigating a gravitational anomaly somewhere within a chartered sector in the Andromeda galaxy. A disaster strikes and the spaceship was found marooned on a ...
This is my first question on this site, which I recently found and can't get enough of. In many time travel scenarios, the machine is static in space. My question is how to explain this. For exa...
What would humans look like if they were genetically suited for life under a giant orange star like Iota Draconis ? These would be people who were genetically indistinguishable from humans from ear...
It is known that when a planet orbits very close around its star, the tidal effects will soon (on an astronomical scale) force the day and the year of the planet to have the same length, making the...
Set in the distant future, space travel becomes prominent and cheap. I can imagine each spaceship would have a multitude array of sensors to track distance and relative position in space. Is there ...
It is the mid 22nd century A.D. Twenty men and women signed on a ten year space exploration trip to the nearest star system. There are robots to do ship maintenance and a powerful A.I. to monitor t...
Okay, so I'm working on a novel and I'd like to have a dense asteroid field, something akin to the old ESB Hoth field, though it doesn't need to match that exactly. The notion is there is an advan...
