Posts tagged space-travel
I'm writing a story and I was thinking about the ending in advance. I posted a question about how the population would be wiped out. I have developed from that and thought about the virus having no...
I'm working on a story involving humans looking for another habitable planet, and I have been scouring the net for days, finding lots of info on varying levels of oxygen and nitrogen, but none that...
Steampunk!! In a world without the fine electronics that we have today, would space travel be possible? ....I'm not averse to small amounts of magic in my steampunk worlds, but I'd like to keep i...
I am still puzzled by the original The Planet of the Apes movie from the 70's. How come that sentient species invented weapons, but was unable to develop powered flight, or spacecraft. Thus, the qu...
There's a lot of talk on futurist blogs about mining asteroids for propellant and other resources for space travel, but I have something else in mind. Could a spaceship, starting out in geocentric...
I'm allowing for approximately 150 years of technological advancement. This is in Earth's future, so I want to be realistic based off of what we are capable of now and projections for declining res...
I understand it might happen in a weak gravitational field. If I have twins on Earth, but one of them suddenly gets transported to intergalactic medium (without any great mass nearby), then the tra...
In my story people are traveling from somewhere beyond the opposite side of the galaxy to Earth. The distance traveled is approximately 66 million light-years. I would like the travelers to exper...
A space ship travels (almost) at the speed of light. When it nearly reaches its destination it starts decreasing the speed. What would be the most appropriate deceleration for human body in such co...
So, I've got an idea for galactic travel involving some fancy particle physics and the Higgs-field, but I've just discovered I don't know how teleporting really works. Or any of that kind of stuff,...
I am writing a short story about an overworked planet whose civilization has achieved space elevators and orbital rings. The planet, which is earth-sized, has three complete orbital rings in stabl...
I've been looking at the altitude boosted SSTO designs from the 90s that were designed to be lifted to launch altitude by modified jetliners and thinking about bumblebees and wondering if bioships ...
I have a spaceship that can get to speeds very close to the speed of light. How can this ship measure how fast it is going near the speed of light? I would think one would measure how fast other ...
In a near future setting I am working on, humans have built space-habitats and have established colonies on celestial objects such as Luna. Their spaceships cannot go faster-than-light and have the...
So what I'm looking for is some plausible idea of two human planets, orbiting each other closely, that despite having regressed to a medieval homage, were capable in this old era of powering solar ...
In this answer https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/25219/50641 (to the attached question) one of their counter points was "oh, crows use tools, therefore, human advantage negated". That got ...
I've been puzzling over the logistics of orbital spaceports, and this has been the one sticking point I keep coming to: radiation control between docked, or even neighboring, ships. Mass limitation...
Basics: There is a wormhole in a fixed position within a solar system. It is roughly 40 million miles from the orbit of the habitable planet, which kind of mimics Earth (roughly 12 month solar orbi...
Alright so I'm not really a physics person by any stretch so forgive me if I butcher some physics jargon on this post. So I'm making this hard sci-fi interstellar ship with a rotating habitat that...
Space is two things: empty and (mostly) dark. This makes it really, really hard to hide in it, because to do anything in it, chances are, you'll be shining a big bright light through it. Even if ...
Assume there's a spaceship in earth orbit that its crew of 24 want to get to Mars, the crew are all humans and possess all of modern day knowledge and equipment, is it possible for said ship to mak...
I am trying to create an organism that can survive in space for short periods, but I realized that I can't have its eyes be similar to those of most animals and humans because they would boil in sp...
World Rules: Travelers are able to move at the speed of light without disruption of their lives. Time passes "normally" for them. They think, breathe, love, cry, and steer the ship as if they w...
There are a lot of answers on Worldbuilding about how to destroy planets - just as an example - and they seem to be the method of choice for many people intent on destroying the world. My objection...
For a space-based story I am writing, I was hypothesising about how to have organisms that can thrive the vacuum of space. Ignoring plausibility of such a creature evolving, I realised a few probl...
Say there is a civilian ship going less than the speed of light, travelling from one star to the next. In the event that pirates board the ship (or some other dangerous situation, like a hull breac...
My hypothetical gas giant has five major moons. Three of those moons are icy bodies with abundant water ice and volatiles. Any of these could provide fuel for translunar spacecraft, or for spacecra...
Assuming an ion propulsion ship was leaving station in an orbit at the radius of the heliopause, and the most direct trajectory takes 18 months to get to Earth, would there be a launch window or co...
On Earth, our atmosphere contains 78.09% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, on average around 1% water vapor at sea level, 0.93% argon, 0.04% carbon dioxide, and small amounts of other gases. Looking through...
So I heard about this thing on vsauce a while ago, where scientists use this thing called "acoustic levitation". They use ultrasonic frequencies to levitate various substances, for use of studying ...
I was reading on another question (this one) and was thinking "What if those bullets could return?" What I am looking for is: Practicality Cost effective Combat effective Manufacturability
I'd like to travel really really fast, and I've got some scientists proposing a novel new way of doing so. They've developed the technology to generate extremely powerful controlled gravitational ...
This one's more sociological, and it seems like a shoe-in to me, but sociology was never my strength. Given how pronounced the Coriolis effect of a smaller Von Braun wheel would be, does it seem ...
My answer to the question Is there a scientifically sound faster-than-light travel system for a spaceship? involved an Alcubierre-drive starship. However, that then got me thinking. What would an ...
Assuming the power source for such acceleration places no limit on things, how quickly can a space craft be accelerated to the speed necessary to cross the distance between Jupiter and the sun in a...
What would be the most efficient text communication method for a spacecraft operating on a super low bit rate (I'm talking something like 5 bits an hour, excluding error handling)? As you want bo...
I was recently looking at this question, which seems to argue that FTL travel within the existing laws of physics can risk resulting in the destruction of half the universe. (Specifically, bad thin...
Storm fronts — especially surprise storm fronts — are a popular Sci-Fi trope. Ion storms and radiation storms and neutronic storms and they invariably look 2D, like ribbons in space. But then I r...
I realize the response to this question is fairly involved but here goes. I need to have an alien spacecraft either in orbit around Uranus's moon Puck or somewhere in Puck's orbit around the planet...
Think of this alien life form as something resembling earth bats, placed in a planet with Earth-like conditions. Micro-bats have small and poorly developed eyes. Similarly, this alien species is ...
When traveling at fast speeds through the galaxy, would it be possible to identify where all the black holes were on your path? I know most black holes are identified by their affect on other nearb...
In my sci-fi world, mankind has begun colonization of the large asteroid Ceres. It's a mining hub, with a lot of cargo vessels transporting things in and out. Hydrogen peroxide fuel is cheap and p...
This question differs from that question in that the other question is asking about a change in history while this question is looking for a change in the future. In a near future setting I am w...
In my conworld I have two moons (they could be planets if desired as long as they can stay 'close' to a larger nearby body) of habitable size. I want to reality-check and provide an explanation for...
I was doing some research online about slower-than-light interstellar spacecraft, and it got me thinking about a couple things. Although it may seem empty, the space between stars isn't a perfect v...
From my understanding shkadov thrusters, they use huge mirrors built on the scale of a dyson sphere, to reflect all the radiation of a star in one direction, accelerating the star as an enormous st...
Ok, Space Elevators have fallen out of the limelight, sorry for them, but the concept is intriguing just the same, so here it goes. One of the worst problem space elevators face is the fact that t...
Background I have a spacecraft traveling from one planet to another, say from Earth to Venus. The journey will take at the least several weeks. During this time, the sun will emit a number of sola...
In an upcoming writing project, I will be focusing on an autonomous drone that picks through space wreckage. It has access to intermittent star light, but has no source of chemical propellant. The ...
A spaceship crew, during their interstellar travel loses control of the spaceship for a few hours due to external factors (exact factor not important). This causes the spaceship to deviate from its...
