Posts tagged spaceships
This is for a video game project. In a future where living in the Earth's surface has become undesirable. People are building colonies in Earth's orbit. If materials from Earth are used to build ...
Imagine someone putting a battleship over a country, always in sight, in order to threaten them to not try anything funny. Imagine tech that allows to suspend the ship is not a problem. How high i...
Yesterday i was playing a bit of Aurora 4x, and among other resources, there's one called Sorium, which is then refined to produce fuel for starships. Sorium is found on gas giants, or super jovian...
I am trying to understand the physics of an interstellar race. Say two ships are racing past a black hole as if it were a corner on a race track. One of the ships takes a hard line and comes very ...
So, here's the setup. Spaceship emergency lands on a habitable planet in the middle of a desert. Being a desert with decent wind movement, the ship quickly ends up being buried under the sand. A f...
One thing that just about all interstellar civilizations need if they want to be anything more than long-distance friends is a way to get from their starships down to the surface of planets and bac...
In an Electric Universe, where space is plasma soup and electromagnetism is the "magic" that can defeat the laws of physics, all stars are connected by invisible Birkland currents. Picture the rop...
If you were to decide to live on a spaceship for the rest of your life, how would you farm? You have access to the necessary farming materials; Dirt, plants; etcetera. Ship is large enough to...
Currently your work and life schedules fall mostly into 'day' and 'night', with a few areas breaking up work times into 3 part shifts, morning, evening night etc. Imagine we live in an artificial ...
Nuclear rockets, or as I like to think of them, "half way between a continuous small atomic explosion and reactor whose front fell off". There are many variants, and my aliens are using relative si...
Given that a laser beam is made up of coherent light waves running in parallel in the same direction, and that space is not a complete vacuum (dust, radiation, electromagnetic forces etc.), what ki...
I have a story that requires travel through a wormhole. I know the basic requirement to go through a spherical wormhole would be that the object must be smaller than the wormhole diameter. Assume t...
In the Mass Effect Series, the Quarians have a population of 17 million individuals and they get all their food from 3 massive "liveships." I'll round this down to 5 million individuals supported b...
Say that America/NASA has developed a small city with around 100 or so inhabitants on the Moon. Would a cannon or slingshot or trebuchet type machine be able to launch cargo out of Earth's orbit a...
If a spaceship left earth traveling at near or at light speeds (that being possible in this situation) would they not when coming back to earth, arrive many years in the future due to Einstein's th...
The year is 2267 A.D. Humanity has colonized Prima Centuari system. A federal government is established; the population is expected to grow at an exponential rate to reach 1 billion by 2300 A.D. A...
Assume that Amazon has set up a processing station on the Moon for whatever motive as a way to ship things out to space (Mars, etc.) faster and more efficiently. How much time today and perhaps i...
The Intergalactic Colonization Authority has a problem. They've recently discovered this awesome planet they want to colonize, but it's located in a part of the universe most of the rest of the civ...
Imagine there is a space station shaped like a cylinder. The cylinder spins on its axis, in order to create artificial gravity through centripetal force. My question: How fast would the space sta...
Year 2317 C.E. traffic report: heavy traffic expected along upper Curiosity sector H-311 going towards Juno boulevard, there is an accident at Exit C right lane, so vehicle leaving for Europa via t...
Let's assume the reactor takes up about 4 vertical kilometers and has the same radius as the ship (4km). This gives you a volume of about 2.01e11 m^3, which given about 3-5% of the reactor's estima...
Radiating heat into a vacuum is a no-go, so a spaceship that generates any kind of heat is going to be in trouble. I had an idea for a potential solution - dumping your heat into a disposable heat ...
How do force field work in many sci fi fictional universes? I remembered the last time I checked the strength of the electromagnetic field a.k.a force field is proportional to the power output from...
And how much fuel would you need to carry? I'm trying to determine what kind of engine you'd need to accelerate a good-size spacecraft (thousands to millions of tons) at a constant 1g in a race acr...
The readership of science fiction gets smarter over time, so making your SF "smart" (even if it's not hard SF) is an ever-moving target. This earlier question makes me think about Conservation of ...
Scenario On Earth in the latter half of the 21st century: the increasing ravages of climate change (e.g. droughts and a rising sea level) are creating more conflict between nations over the batt...
Spaceships are a peculiar thing. We've got them in all forms, sizes & colours. They have vast computers needed to do all the real-time calculations required for astrogation. Assuming our compu...
I'd like a gravity room on my space vessel for long space stays to avoid osteoporosis. They would spend a few hours each day in this room, reading or doing paper work, to maintain bone-mass. I'm ...
I plan to write a story about a large number of space probes that are equipped with artificial intelligence and told to explore star systems and travel between them. These probes are not equipped w...
Consider a hard-SF (slower than light) starship. Boosting it up to speed takes enormous energy. There are good reasons to want to not take all the fuel with you, but to collect energy on the run....
I want to put 10,000 humans in a space ship and send them into space. They don't have a set destination - they're having to flee their homeworld, and they don't know what planet will take them in, ...
What would happen if two spaceships with Alcubierre warp bubbles were colliding? Would the space bubble collapse? Would they reject or push each other? Would they survive it without problems?
I was wondering if it would make sense to hollow out an asteroid to use for a generation ship? Also, might it be a good idea to use hollow asteroids for any kind of long distance space ship? I'm th...
Hear me out before you downvote; It's not as simple as it seems. On Earth, nuclear reactions produce heat energy. This is used to heat water, creating steam, powering turbines connected to generat...
Scenario: A generation ship travels to a star system that has at least one planet that's believed to be potentially habitable and, therefore, a possible location for a colony. After sending some p...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
How much wattage would you need to accelerate a four petaton spaceship by 1g for a year? This should be about enough to reach near light speed, which is perfect for interstellar cruising, but I'm w...
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...
Suppose a starship is being powered by a lasers beamed first from the departure star, and then from the destination which is a moving base. The ship is moving in the regime of 10"“30% of light spee...