Posts tagged travel
I'm interested in the viability of the following scheme for (relatively) fast space commerce within the Solar System: have a fleet of space stations essentially built around a long linear acceler...
Average Joe was an amateur astronomer. While he was out in the wilds one day with his telescope he was kidnapped by aliens, carried off and kept as a slave on a world somewhere in the Milky Way. Ha...
I want to know whether or not my starship's cordinate system is efficient or not. Soon after my race flew into the stars, we realised we needed to be able to tell where we were. We need coordinate ...
I'm looking to use water as a radiation shielding device, but do not want to waste space on my ship with waste and other water byproducts. Rather than just storing waste, I plan to use it as part o...
Suppose that our random heroic brave interstellar expedition is returning to Earth from Alpha Centauri at 60% of the speed of light, but there was an accident in the nuclear reactor, forcing the ca...
3-D printers, replicators, nanofabricators etc. are all technologies that, when pushed to their logical limit, seem to make the transport of finished goods obsolete when all you need to do to obtai...
I have heard of gravitational slingshots being used to theoretically accelerate a spacecraft using a planet's gravity and momentum in orbit. But how about decelerating a ship? If it is at all possi...
QUESTION So recently I was doing research on Magnetic Coil based weaponry in the Halo universe, and while reading about how the "Super Mac" worked, I noticed that the theoretical speeds at which t...
This question is really about best possible travel times between celestial bodies. In my current sci-fi setting, the Human race is spaceborne, but incapable of FTL travel. Their thrusters are exc...
Voidcrawler (Mycocelium Nocturnis) is a voracious invasive species, most similar to a fungus but much hardier and with some singularly unique properties: Firstly it absorbs not only light, but als...
What I am imagining is some sort of gargantuan beast that encloses a star with its monstrous jaws and then feeds off the rays released by the sun to power itself. I am curious what kind of creatur...
I am interested in finding out if a black hole or mass on the verge of forming a black hole with enough spin could generate enough centrifugal force to change shape into a torus? Specifically I am...
So humanity has finally overcome the economic problems with asteroid mining, not to mention setting up colonies elsewhere in the solar system. Some are dragging the low-hanging fruit into near-Eart...
Say you have an interstellar spacecraft packed full of advanced technology, such as: Fusion generators Androids A sublight drive capable of ~0.5C Various robots, holograms, and other automated sy...
What would be able to explain a visor like device that can see the past or future? I'm trying to make it as little as clarketech as possible. Any ideas?
So, normal humans can tolerate up to 4g of acceleration. If I had the tech to freeze and thaw people, would being frozen aid in tolerating high-g forces, or would the brittleness of your froz...
Recently, a planet around Proxima Centauri has been found. It is in the habitable zone, in the sense that if the planet was a black body, it would have a surface temperature of −39° Celsius. The p...
We have escaped the galactic government, and now our greatest endeavour yet, life in space. How shall these gargantuan space entities move and travel through space? The whale or other in question...
In my setting, military innovation spurred by the American Civil War (1861-1865) prompts the design and construction of counterweight-driven skyhooks for the delivery of suborbital long-range munit...
I'm making an alien race that's kinda like the Tyranids. My problem right now is that they're starting out on a planet. How would they actually leave this planet using only their biological abiliti...
I'm working on a science fiction story involving starships travelling about 95% of the speed of light. I wanted to have a reason for the starships to need to shield themselves against time dilation...
Linked What would the flora on a methane world be like? What would animal life on a methane world look like and how would it evolve? What would the conditions on a methane world be like? How wo...
I was imagining a scenario where an 21st century engineer accidentally finds himself transported through time to early Renaissance Europe. Realizing that no help or rescue is on the way, he decides...
I'm embarking on a fantasy book so I guess in essence you can write about anything but I do want an element of plausibility. Could you have hot desert caps on a planet and an icy/winter equator?
Suppose we have a Branching Timeline paradigm, in which time travel into the past creates a new timeline. Is it fair to assume that any probabalistic events which might occur might be very differe...
After reading this question by Nick M (now closed) and exchanging some comments with him, I have some ideas related to the scenario. I realized that the comprehensive design covers several distinc...
Every time a rocket is launched into space, debris accumulates. Every time an old satellite runs out of juice, it goes derelict and turns into more junk. Over the years, paint-chips, broken off sol...
You don't need to be traveling faster than the speed of light to encounter some pretty major problems. At just 30% the speed of light (90 Mm/s) a spaceship of mass 4 x 10^5 kg (about the mass of t...
Congratulations, you've finally earned your space pilot's license! The only problem is, you can't afford a large enough ship to house more than one person (considering food, breathable air, refuse ...
I saw this old closed question on Physics.SE and thought it would be perfect for here. The original author is long gone, so I thought I'll just have to post it myself. We can consider factors of p...
My understanding of special relativity is that a clock that flies one lap around the earth then returns to its starting position measures less time than a clock that "stayed put" relative to the ea...
For space travel: would you need to recreate earths air composition? Or could you just get by with the top 2 or 3 main components, i.e. either 78% nitrogen and 22% oxygen, or 78% nitrogen, 21% oxyg...
In 1890's H.G. Wells famously takes a "science fiction" approach to time travel by building a machine that can move freely through time as a dimension. It was made of clockwork "” mechanical gears...
I am working on a world (see this question) which I currently plan to have FTL via Alcubierre warp drive. I want to avoid the possibility of FTL sneak attacks so I plan on having something that pr...
Many SF stories feature faster-than-light travel as essentially a trope: Roddenberry has stated☡ that the Enterprise travels at the speed of plot. As an allegory of the south seas, or some throw...
OK, so I'm writing a Star-Wars-esque science fiction book set some centuries in the future. Rather than break the laws of physics and say that faster-than-light travel is possible, I've chosen to g...
Is it easier to build colonies within the solar system than to send colonies to other stars? Logically, wouldn't we have cities on Pluto sooner than we will have travelled to an exoplanet?
Assuming that the planet is 20 light years away (so back and forth trips would be impractical) we have no clue whether there is any edible life forms on the new planet hibernation (freezing/thaw...
Because of an error in the interpretation of the Mayan calendar I just discovered, I know now that Earth will be destroyed on March 13, 2021 at 11 o'clock in the morning, time zone of Palenque. I ...
If a rocket ship with limited fuel has fallen into a decades-long elliptical orbit around the Sun, where in the orbit should it fire its engines in order to achieve escape velocity with a minimum o...
We are the only sentient civilization currently known to man, and sight is an integral part of both our everyday lives as well as most major technological advances throughout human history. Withou...
Thanks to enhanced space telescopy Earth has found some great candidate star systems for colonisation. But they are not yet ready to try sending people. There's no new physics. However, the cost...
Imagine a species that evolved on a planet where there was no metal (or not much) of any kind. They, of course, discovered fire and were able to start building buildings and basic machinery from ...
First off, let's get definitions out of the way: A "race" here is defined as stable, heritable, phenotypic, clearly visual distinction between large demographic groups living in different geograph...
So, I know that the universe is expanding, and that that means that things are generally getting further apart as time goes on. What I'm having difficulty with, however, is figuring out just how mu...
Okay, so I have a sci-fi setting in which there is a form of FTL travel. Imagine the universe(all three/four dimensions of it) was stretched out onto the surface of a sphere. Now assume that ther...
This seemed too scifi or hypothetical for physics, so here goes. Suppose a manipulated quark with 0 mass could travel faster than the speed of light. It's known that the faster you go, the slower...
Let's say we have a wild rabbit that can see a few minutes into the future. Being a non-sentient animal, it barely registers these abilities, and largely uses it to find food, avoid predators, save...
Note before I begin: I am aware that this might be a Math-heavy question that might be better suited for the math.se Goal: I'd like to use n-dimensional geometry as a method for effectively travel...
We know the depressing fate of John Doe who woke up one day in the Middle Ages, to quickly die or spend his life in a monastery. His more lucky friend Mark had a vision before being transported a...
