Posts tagged gravity
In the first question I posted here on Worldbuilding Stack Exchange, I asked if lifting gas would be more effective on a world with 1/3 of Earths gravity but with the same atmospheric composition a...
Take-off in a craft with rockets allows a gentle acceleration that doesn't kill the occupants. Given that the Moon has no atmosphere: Is there any current technology that would allow safe takeoff ...
This is a simple question, hopefully not broad. My colonizing company wants to put little habitats on the surface of a planet with more gravity (2.0G) than earth. Is there a way to reduce gravit...
Let's assume that this hypothetical alien crawled out of the identical primordial ooze to the point where they share significant genetic similarity with humans, and due to either evolution or outsi...
Many sci-fi words use anti-gravity or artificial gravity to manipulate the weight of their ships making flight much easier. Wikipedia even has an article on it which discusses several attempts to m...
Larry Niven wrote a novel called The Integral Trees, which was followed by a sequel The Smoke Ring. This is Wikipedia's synopsis of the setting: The story occurs around the fictional neutron st...
In my universe, spaceships use a device that can generate a bubble of gravity that is homogeneous and unidirectional. You can manipulate the direction and intensity of gravity in any way you want. ...
The TRAPPIST-1 planets are all very close to each other and thus are subjected to strong gravitational forces amongst each other and to the red dwarf they're orbiting. Would it be possible for them...
So my story is set in the TRAPPIST-1-system and a rogue planet enters the system. When it's still far off, a scientist discovers that one of the numbers is slightly off. (She has some tables that p...
As many of us probably know airships were one of the great forms of transportation in the 20th century but a great hindrance to their development was weight. In a world I am currently constructing ...
There is a big, very big planet that is travelling fast, very fast. It's a rogue planet (not attached to a star system). It's going to pass close, very close to the earth. The earth is probably ...
In micro-gravity and zero G, people's muscles deteriorate. If you sent a set of already very physically fit soldiers to train/live on a high gravity planet, would they perform better than other sol...
Simplistically, a neutron star is a celestial body with enormous mass crushed into a small volume. That crushing force is gravity and the result, one might think, is atoms packed much more closely...
The selected answer on this question provides an extremely good, and detailed, description of what is generally accepted to be the main (only?) way a terrestrial planet can form, i.e. through accre...
Imagine that, through some cosmic phenomena not yet understood, the Sun 'burps' and ejects a vast amount of its mass into the cosmic void. A huge coronal discharge, perhaps. A pressure bubble insid...
I'm trying to auto-generate random solar systems, and I'm basically just allocating 2% of the total system mass to planets (and moons). It provides interesting results, I always have a few gas gian...
I'm working on a story involving first contact with an alien species that bases their space travel on directly manipulating gravity fields. My question is not about how that would work, but rather ...
Would heavier clothing solve the problem of bone and muscle loss in Martian gravity? It doesn't have to be a perfect solution, I just don't want my Martian colonists to be total wimps compared to E...
You know how there are some beaches in the world where tons of sea glass or other random sea trash washes up, just because the currents and the shape of the land naturally collects it all there? I ...
Let us assume that in the future, there is a formerly human colony on Mars that has existed there for some centuries. The people of this world have had time to adapt to the lower gravity over at le...
I have seen a few similar questions but none seem to take the density of a planet into account. I'm creating a planet on which several small civilisations develop. The planet needs to have a few bi...
I'm taking the example of a rotating wheel space station, in which artificial gravity is created through rotation due to the inertia inside. The idea in the 3D environment is that the wheel (2D) i...
So, the idea in a story is that in far far future there's a trend that rich people, they are able to buy themselves planets. Tiny little planets with sizes 4-6 km (3-4 miles) in diameter. The compa...
If there were a planet similar to earth where the lines of latitude and longitude were half as far apart (about 35 miles instead of about 70), but the planet's density were increased to compensate ...
How large could a solid planet be (in theory) without becoming a star or black hole? Too much in the way of light elements would lead to thermonuclear ignition, but too many heavy elements would ev...
The starship 'Exciting Undertaking' has set off on a brand new five and a bit year expedition to explore the galaxy. To make such a starship possible, an artificial gravity generator had to be inve...
Say you have a galaxy, possibly ours, with a central black hole. In an instant the black hole falls through a plot hole and vanishes. What happens to the rest of the galaxy? Does everything keep ...
For a book under construction, I need a starship to make a 180 degree turn rather quickly. Give him sub-light speed in a star system (no relativistic effects) and on a path to the system primary. ...
I've been grappling with a story for a while, involving a scenario where gravity starts to fail. The goal of the story is mostly how people react to the knowledge that the world will end. But, I al...
On the inside of a Dyson sphere there is effectively no gravity. Is there an alternative method to keep people on the inside surface from floating around? I know it could spin and that would keep...
In my fantasy universe, there is a disc-shaped world that has a flat surface that has roughly the same atmosphere as Earth (see this); the atmosphere moves along with the world. There is no gravity...
Is it unreasonable to suspend one's disbelief that an asteroid belt naturally formed with enough mass distributed through the belt to justify the formation of a belt-wide atmosphere given the follo...
Within the Star Wars Extended Universe, there is a science base on a small object within a near impenetrable sphere of Black Holes. Is this possible? The place referenced is called the Maw Install...
I'm writing a JRPG-inspired novel set on a planet with 1.7 Earth masses and 1.4 Gs, but is it possible for life to even develop on such a high-gravity planet in the first place? I tried scouring th...
(Not entirely sure if this is the right place to ask this but hopefully I'm right!) I'm writing a novel and the planet this novel takes place on has two, twin moons of approximately the same size....
Let me clarify on the title, because this is important. In recent years, people have been feeling less comfortable calling the only natural satellite orbiting Earth a moon. It may not be the larg...
So, imagine a team of space marines, fighting some sort of space bug zombies on a planet's moon. Things are going pretty bad for them, and the last surviving protagonists are running for their live...
Scenario: An exact copy of our world is sliced in half by a particle beam. The beam has a diameter of 40 meters and moves at a speed of 0.999c. The beam slices the earth from top to bottom in 600...
This is in regards to the Tyranny of Rocket Fuel. Summed up: Heavier ships need more fuel which makes them heavier, etc. You end up with diminishing returns. This is compounded by higher gravity - ...
I'm not a smart guy, can't find an answer to a question: Everything I see involves a large construct spinning at a slow speed to create gravity. Instead of something large could you not use a, le...
An absolute madman of a scientist tractors the Moon from it's orbit, and carefully lowers it through the Earth's atmosphere and gently brings it to rest upon the Earth's surface. There is no reentr...
I was just wondering what kind of rule changes court layout etc would happen to have a 'basketball' game in a zero-g arena? I'm assuming the most likely thing to stay is a ball and 2 opposing bask...
Using Artefaxian's excellent spreadsheet I have created a basic idea for my planet, but in the 'Stability Checker' part my low gravity planet is unable to hold H2O. I am wondering if it is possibl...
A habitable planet with multiple moons, only one of which is tidally locked to the planet: is this general scenario possible? I understand that tidal locking takes a very long time to happen. So ...
If a planet has a core of super-dense material, how might that effect the geological composition of that planet? Specifically: imagine a lunar-sized planet, with earth-like geology and density. If...
Just how gravitationally flat are real Lagrange Points? Many classic "jump drives" require "flat space" in order to fire, the classic diagram of Lagrange Points as shown below suggests ridges or pl...
I'm sure that this has been asked before, but I need floating islands for a fiction story I'm writing. It takes place 5000 years after a catastrophic event (on a vaguely earth-like planet populated...
A planet orbiting an Red m-dwarf is tidally locked to its sun. Can it have a satellite which is not tidally locked to the sun? Also can the satellite be tidally locked to the planet ?
So when making my space stories I have put them in a technological time in history where gravity manipulators are available to the common creature and you can use it to go to other planets and live...
In my world, people have powers based on the four fundamental forces. One of my characters can generate spontaneous gravity to crush his opponents. He's also resistant to his own power (so I ignor...
