Posts tagged physics
In my world, a web of space stations was built around the planet to save humanity from ~as of yet unspecified horrible disaster~. Now, it's been a thousand years, and the space stations have begun ...
A scientist has recently invented a gravity machine. This machine pulls all mass within a certain radius (say 50 feet?) towards it at an adjustable rate. The machine can... create as strong a g...
I've got a near future setting where humanity has colonised the solar system. The setting is relatively hard science fiction, with realistic spacecraft and space flight. However, it is also a setti...
A large group of people has been banished from Earth and punished to scrape out a perilous existence on a strange planet. The planet has breathable atmosphere, and consists of an immense ocean teem...
The setting is a moon-sized body with solid surface, thick (but mostly transparent) atmosphere and magnetosphere. But most heat from the space is supplied with relativistic charged particles impact...
Assuming that we have a universe with four spatial dimensions plus time, within which atoms exist that can form solids, liquids, gases and plasmas, the compounds that can be formed having physical ...
The Wikipedia article on Klemperer Rosettes states that hexagonal rosettes are slightly more stable than other, non-hexagonal rosettes, due to the position of the orbital objects in the Lagrange po...
In our universe energy is conserved. In a parallel universe could energy divided by distance be a conserved quantity instead of energy itself? So in this universe if two objects were to move away...
I have an exomoon that orbits close enough to its planet that it has notable geological activity. I would like to limit active volcanoes/geysers/lava lakes/etc. to at most, a couple dozen areas on ...
My advanced human society understands how to search & find data on other dimensions; as well, we can travel if they're compatible. For years all we've found was data indicating dimensions wi...
I've come up with a couple of exoplanets for a story, and have reached the limits of my knowledge. I've googled around, and I had a space enthusiast friend look at them, but he freely admits that h...
Split out from this question since it was too large. I'm designing an exoplanetary system that was the victim of a drive-by super-Jupiter ejected from a nearby supernova that crashed into the syst...
I have a terrestrial moon that I would like to have spectacular and frequent lightning storms. What atmospheric compositions and conditions could cause this? Tools The moon orbits a 21 earth-mas...
I've come up with a couple of exoplanets for a story, and have reached the limits of my knowledge. I've googled around, and I had a space enthusiast friend look at them, but he freely admits that h...
Suppose you are given an armor that has this curious property: as soon as a force is applied into it, the force vector is changed by 180°. If you throw a rock against it, the corresponding energy ...
No, not that one. This one. I want to see the USS Enterprise fly, but I'm curious how it would be accomplished in any realistic fashion. Now, the world I'm building that needs a flying Enterpri...
Is it possible for nuclear waste to somehow naturally cause a nuclear explosion? (with no human input, other than dumping the nuclear waste) The yield of the explosion would preferably be enough t...
If the moon started to move closer to the earth, for e.g. one meter per year, I suppose that it would be accelerating towards the earth and then, eventually, will crash to it. I suppose that if it...
I have a city on a 3km-high mountain-top with a population of perhaps 50,000 humans, at a technological level of late renaissance or early steam. Below the city is a coniferous forest with wildlife...
In this answer to another question, solar system-scale rail gun acceleration (and deceleration) was brought up as an alternative, and I found this intriguing. It's worth another question at least....
I remember a cartoon about some spy guy. In that cartoon they did mass media by projecting from the surface of the earth to the moon in the night sky. Would that technique be possible? Could an e...
My question regards mirroring, specifically what you would expect from a universe that was mirrored from the perspective of our own, regarding its interactions with our own. The mirroring works exa...
I've just read this article and watched the accompanying video. Heady stuff, for sure. I'm particularly intrigued by the concept of a "solar gravitational lens telescope" somewhere out near the h...
As I understand it, very small black holes have very small and close event horizons, and wouldn't necessarily pose a gravitational risk (I know they give off huge amounts of energy, but let's leave...
I've been designing a world and wanted to base it on a rather interesting cosmology proposed by the ancient Greek philosopher Philolaus. He was a very early opponent of geocentrism, believing that ...
I'm working on the setting for a fictional story I'm writing and I wanted to inquire as to how possible massive-Universe-sized planets are radius: 5.0x10^30M, without me having to re-make the laws ...
What I've found out is that Ammonia has (in the relevant temperature/pressure regime) cubic crystal structure. But what would that mean for ammonia snowflakes? Would they have fourfold symmetry? Bu...
In many games the characters, particularly the main character, has weird physics. I want to know how these things could happen in real life and whether current technology could make it happen. Thi...
In a backstory for a potential videogame I'll likely never realize I've got the situation that a Deimos-like object... let's drop the facade here, the object is indeed Deimos, one of Mars' satellit...
Is there any software tool for quickly prototyping a planetary system? Ideally this should: Allow for placement of planets of different sizes and masses around a star. Allow for examination of th...
The setup for this is complex, so I'll begin by stating the core question: In a heavy ship engagement, using energy-dissipation armor, about how much warmer will the sea get, and will that have an...
The host star for this hypothetical system is 1.05 (M☉) The gas giant is 20 percent more massive than Jupiter and orbits at 1.40 AU, now I need to know if these three orbits are stable around th...
Purely hypothetical and kind of creative quesiton. My idea is an alien humanoid-like civilization (and basically everything alive on that planet) which uses methanol/ethanol or other alcohol as a s...
Stars and constellations have been for many civilizations,sources of wonder and mystery. We look at the stars so much, that we found patterns and shapes in the stars, and used them as guidance duri...
Holograms are a real thing. But what science-fiction TV shows and movies call holograms are something different entirely. From a classical geometric optics standpoint, in order to create the illu...
I have this player with some portal based technology that wanted to build a moving base. His technology works like this: You need 2 portals connecting two spaces, both go in both ways, and conserv...
You have undoubtedly played them. Games with floating land and platforms, "falling out of the world", high jumping, floating and slowly revolving objects, and wingless flying enemies. Question: W...
Related somewhat to Gravity on a Minecraftian world? say I have this infinite plane/world, then punch a circular hole through it to the other side. Say I manage to make a circular hole around 1 ki...
The Halo video game's extended universe book Halo: Evolutions describes the Battle of Psi Serpentis, in which a superjovian planet is converted into a brown dwarf via massive nuclear bombardment of...
It's just my typical luck: I discover and recover the billion-dollars worth of gold on a sunken galleon on the same day my arch-nemesis decides to detonate a one Megaton hydrogen bomb right above m...
Would it theoretically be possible for a solar eclipse to occur within a few days or even a few hours after a total lunar eclipse? The star, moon, and planet from which the event is being observed...
In a parallel universe much of the physics equation have tetration in them. There are things such as tetrational growth as well as tetrational decay. $x^x$ and $x^{x^x}$ are also found in some ph...
Many sci-fi questions here are derailed by complaints that the proposed version of FTL breaks causality. However, relativity-safe FTL concepts do exist. What range of conditions allow FTL (movement...
There is a system of one star and something like an asteroid belt around it. But the distance between asteroids is much less than usual, with some perhaps within nine kilometers of each other, and...
Gravity in our universe is an attractive force between bodies with mass [citation needed]. This allows matter to coalesce and form all the large scale structures we observe - planets, stars, galaxi...
Ignoring how this sort of atmosphere would come about, what are some things that happen regularly on Earth that would be altered by this sort of atmosphere? Example: Would firearms still ignite nor...
When looking to design armor - how can I determine whether a given ballistic object would completely stop, deflect into another direction, or penetrate another object given complete physical inform...
I was thinking of a hypothetical universe in which electromagnetic waves decrease in intensity with the distance instead of the square of the distance. What kinds of effects would that have on that...
I am looking for a tool that can be used to create worlds with a realistic (= physically plausible) climate and surface given general terrain shape, or can at least assist in such a task. My ideal...
Deep underground, there's a huge limestone cavern, roughly 50m x 100m. It's 250m deep, and completely filled with still water. There is a very small inlet, but the system is now effectively closed,...
