Posts tagged space-travel
A speedometer is a gauge or device used for measuring instantaneous speed of moving vehicle roughly speaking, so for example the reading shown on the speedometer of a car parked at road side displa...
Imagine a far-future spacecraft drive that accelerates its reaction mass to a small fraction the speed of light (say, 1,000 km/s). Say the mass flow rate to the drive were 1kg/s, and say the reacti...
Is it possible for a large enough Ion Drive with enough power to be dangerous to other objects "down wind" of the vehicle, even at long distances (100+km)? As I understand it, ion drives accelerat...
Effectively what the title says; What would different observers experience while travelling through / seeing one travel through the tube, and how could they be used to cut travel times? (Just answe...
A federation of alien spacefaring nations is doing basically the opposite of prime directive: they are jamming the Solar System, preventing us from leaving it. They are doing so by placing some de...
So, my understanding of how Alcubierre drives would theoretically work is not particularly complete. I know it involves compressing and expanding space, but I don't really have an intuitive grasp ...
Would the principles at work in the theoretical Alcubierre warp drive apply to a slower-than-light starship? I'm building a setting in which FTL communication and travel is impossible, (due to vio...
Having your radiators tactically protected from enemy fire by the armor shape of your space warship is nice, but having a regular one or double-sided radiators is still a vulnerability. Other conce...
In my world a giant ship attempts to land on a planet, sadly it fails. Fortunately the top half is intact but the bottom is ripped up, holes all over it, basically destroyed except for some lucky s...
What would be the economic trade offs of building fusion powered rockets vs building laser relays across the solar system? What assumptions would you need for each one of these to be the superior o...
In the near future, humanity has spread out across the Solar System. A new planet is discovered, let's say 30 light years away, that shows it to be Earth-like and could harbor Earth life without to...
The fleet in my setting are forced to leave the planet due to a volatile virus, and leave in pre-prepared spacefaring vessels capable of transporting ten million people per ship. The ships have alg...
We are using a Morris-Throne Wormhole Metric. Let's presume the throat of this wormhole (in internal hyperspace) is short, let's say 1km. Now, as you are travelling through the entrance wormhole,...
The universe as we know it has ended. The concept of "natural" illumination ended when the last red dwarves and quasars died out. Now, only brown dwarves and blackholes dot the empty void that was ...
Starliners are huge colony ships. They carry enough equipment, building materials, embryos, colonists and nutrient rich rations to permanently establish a sizeable colony on a far-flung world. Alth...
I have a spaceship which I want to have travel very quickly around a system like our own solar system -- let's say about 10 million miles per minute, which would go from Mars to Earth in ~15 minute...
The crafts would have to contain large farms in order to sustain the immense amount of people, and they'd obviously have to be large and spacious to have good living conditions. I did some research...
In the distant future a breakthrough in cryostasis technology can put healthy people into frozen state so that all metabolism halts and cells never age a bit, the spaceship is carrying them across ...
I want to write a story taking place on the natural satellite of a gas giant, with said satellite being massive enough to prevent, or at least strongly deter, space travel, such that the resources ...
I'd like to have faster-than-light travel (and communications) be an late-game option for a video game I am working on. The extent of the playable universe is approximately 4 million light years in...
Many countries, authorities and companies have the concept of a maximum weight limit for manual handling, both to protect their workers and to protect themselves from lawsuits. Interstellar Shippi...
We've found a habitable planet orbiting a red dwarf star some light years away and conditions are Earth-like enough that a colonization project was initiated. Before any humans landed on the planet...
I am currently working on a character backstory for somebody whose fictional character gets sent back in time an era before his species existed (essentially to bronze-age times or even earlier, it'...
My idea involves an alien spaceship inside a roughly Earth to Mars sized/massed planet, but the whole planet is displaced when the drive is activated. If you wanted to travel back to our solar syst...
Would it be feasible to have an interstellar vessel be constructed in flight after smaller sections are boosted up to speed? The idea here is about using laser sails which would be easier to use wi...
At speeds near the speed of light, interstellar particles and gas may affect the movement of the ship, and microscopic particles may even badly damage the ship. Would not it make sense to make the ...
Set in a distant future, reports of alien and drug traffickings have been on the rise and there was mounting pressure for Mr User6760, president of intergalactic interpol to resign. The traffickers...
A plot point of my novel is that the pilot accidentally finds a planet that is being purposefully hidden (i.e. been deleted from all star maps). It starts with him arriving at a location that is j...
A human crew of 6 has been sent on mission to Mars The lowest energy transfer to Mars is a Hohmann transfer orbit, which would involve an approximately 9 month travel time from Earth to Mars, a...
Imagine your spaceship encountered a gravitational anomaly and discovered that you are lost in space, your computer tells you that you are still inside the Milky Way galaxy but it cannot find the S...
A major plot point for my story is the Protagonist stumbling upon a planet that was purposely hidden from the rest of the galaxy (at the edge of the galaxy) as it's being used by high level governm...
I am doing some hard sci-fi worldbuilding and really want to get as much correct as I can, but the effects of high sub-light speed travel on the travellers is doing my head in. I've pored literally...
In terms of scientific and engineering challenges, which one is closer to fruition? Specifically I am looking for the feasibility of using one of these systems for space-only travel between the orb...
In my story I have paleolithic era humans who were contacted by aliens long enough ago for them to have used space travel to spread across many planets. I want them to be able to fly and somewhat m...
Picture a setting similar to that of many fantasy works: a relatively low level of technology among the general population, lots of manual labor, agriculture or hunter/gatherer society, and that mo...
It's the late 2020's, and humanity has expressed an unprecedented and powerful renewal in the interest of space exploration. Sometime between then and the turn of the next century, a practical form...
Is there any practical g-limit for unmanned spacecraft, or could you theoretically push a missile to significant fractions of c in hours or minutes while pulling hundreds or thousands of Gs? I need...
There is a planet called Galileo with life on it. The life is getting extremely complex, in fact, with some of the life on Galileo beginning to form tribes and clans and learning language. Humans w...
After centuries of careful search and travel, some intrepid extraterrestrial explorers have finally found another inhabited world! Elated with their discovery and exhausted after their long journey...
I am looking for as hard science answers as possible, but I am willing to bend some rules for a good answer. Assume they need to move 10 million 100 million people off of a planet what technology...
Leaving aside the matter of how well would humans fare on the surface of Mercury (we only have to factor in the weight of their life support: air, water, food and spacesuits), and assuming material...
Currently, NASA is investigating the use of hydroponics, aeroponics, and other low soil techniques to grow regular plants for consumption and oxygen generation/CO2 removal on long voyages in space....
My Dino theme park business didn't end well and I reluctantly fall into depression and decided to go into suspended animation to seek a cure. 200 years later, a lady claims she works with the milit...
My question is as follows - let's assume our objective function is to have as many humans as possible living outside the confines of the Earth as soon as possible. For this, we need to provide thos...
I want to design a realistic interstellar spaceship that uses centrifugal force for only the crew quarters. But while looking up for designs I found the most common ones are the torus or ring desig...
My character is traveling aboard a spaceship through inter-galactic space (it has left the Milky Way). The ship is traveling at the speed of light or so and has been for the last six thousand years...
Inspired partially by this comment on one of my answers, I got to thinking on what the quickest way to communicate would be on an intergalactic scale. Say humans have colonised the galaxy, and use...
Strange! this question does not seem to be on site with a search (only what to wear). I am concerned about the psychological aspect of food production and eating. Clearly tube food is out and I thi...
How would a biological drop pod make it into the atmosphere and land safely? I have a race of aliens that use biological tools instead of technology. Their ships are living beings that can travel t...
Set in the not-so-distant future, interplanetary travels are the norm. Most spaceships are powered by fission reactors, and accidents do happen due to negligence or flaws in the system. It will pro...
