Posts tagged space-travel
What would be the best way to launch space craft/get into space from a northern latitude? Canada, Scandinavia, UK, Russia, Alaska, those sorts of places. I understand that being closer to the equat...
This is my first question on this site, which I recently found and can't get enough of. In many time travel scenarios, the machine is static in space. My question is how to explain this. For exa...
Set in the distant future, space travel becomes prominent and cheap. I can imagine each spaceship would have a multitude array of sensors to track distance and relative position in space. Is there ...
Okay, so I'm working on a novel and I'd like to have a dense asteroid field, something akin to the old ESB Hoth field, though it doesn't need to match that exactly. The notion is there is an advan...
This short story, which I've already written, is set in the FAR, FAR FUTURE, where a robotic space probe is exploring as much of the known universe as it can, despite its AI not knowing if its crea...
The Aurora company has unveiled the new Interplanetary Airliner (usually simplified to space shuttle) offering both affordable and comfortable space travel to the middle and upper classes of the He...
Consider: A spacecraft is travelling between planets. It accelerates at a constant rate for the first half of the trip, and then decelerates on the other half. Throughout the journey, aside from ...
A spacecraft enters an unnamed system and spotted a gas giant with a pulsating planetary ring, it glows bright intermittently. What natural phenomenon could be responsible for such brilliant displa...
Earth is under attack, the empire has gathered thousands of battleships each has a displacement of 500,000 metric tonnes and 20 motherships with a displacement of over 15 million metric tonnes now ...
Medrunner Lao Dorn and his team have been given a mission. A young woman has contracted some sort of parasite that is slowly eating away at her vital organs. The doctors on Oberon are unable to do ...
I know that chemical rockets would allow for some minor loads to escape the gravity of a planet with higher gravity. My question is, what kind of technology would possibly allow a dominant specie...
There are many questions on Worldbuilding about what item(s) a time traveller should take back in time in order to alter past events or even simply to survive. There has never as far as I know bee...
I have seen some people talk about the idea of ships using their magical anti-gravity systems in a story in order to not only give ships a standard floor layout and inertial dampener systems, but t...
How would faster-than-light travel appear through window of a space vessel? All the movies and TV shows like Star Trek and Star Wars seem unrealistic: Star Trek credits: passing stars get bigger...
FTL (Faster than Light) travel exists,taking around 88 hours 48 seconds to travel 1 light year. FTL communications also exists and takes only 53.28 seconds to travel 1 LY (Light Year). Jumps longer...
Assuming the ship has access to fusion power, a large volume of solar panels, and crude antimatter power generators (say maybe 1 gram a day per generator, or whatever is reasonable for technologica...
Caulerpa taxifolia, an algae species popular with aquarium owners, is the largest single-celled organism known to us as of today. It is notable for being able to regenerate from any part of the b...
Okay, let's assume that travel between star systems is done through stable, stationary wormholes on the outer boundaries of each system. This alone is slightly magic for now, of course, but let's r...
The Humern Empire (no relation) spans the galaxy, using a variety of methods to move from place to place and planet to planet. One thing all of their modes of transport share is that they are not ...
Imagine that humanity found a rocky planet with earth like gravity, atmospheric pressure, and temperature, orbiting a sun-like star. The only problem is that the planets atmosphere is that it is co...
Let's say we have a society that for some reason (a MacGuffin, Unobtanium, Handwavium, whatever) have found a way to travel off the earth without having to fight gravity along the way. They can tra...
My question is pretty basic, would square thrusters and RCS ports have any real drawbacks over round ones? I know that angles on windows for airplanes is a problem because of the pressure, so I don...
Hypothetical: Hundreds of years into the future. Humanity needs to travel to exoplanets quickly. I'm aiming for hard sci-fi. What kind of propulsion can travel people at 0.1 - 0.9 lightspeed? Is i...
If all of the crew and passengers of an interstellar craft were in suspended animation except prior to Earth departure and just before destination arrival, would they need artificial gravity (throu...
This is the first part of a series of questions I'll ask about a self-sustaining colonization ship. I'll keep editing this post as things unfold. Part II - Landing Edit 1: Added two movie referen...
I'm writing a colony story, and I want my ship to colonise Ross128b, which is 11 light years away from Earth. I need the characters to be alive when they get there, but it's okay if they've aged tw...
Let's say that suddenly NASA needs my characters, a party of scientists without prior experience, to go to space with a Space Shuttle-like spacecraft for a seven days mission. They only need to do...
Let's assume we have a working FTL drive and thus interstellar travel is possible, either by traveling at very high speeds or by instant teleportation (the two main subtypes of FTL drives in sci-fi...
I'm writing a story in which a civilization previously capable of (firmly technobabble-based) FTL travel has become stranded, orbiting an isolated star with no rocky planets. (There was a planet, b...
Assuming a sci-fi style nebula, like the thick clouds seen in Star Trek, extending several light years and hosting star systems inside, one of which gave rise to intelligent life up to current huma...
This is the second part of a series of questions I'll ask about a self-sustaining colonization ship. I'll keep editing this post as things unfold. If you can, check out the other questions of this...
So one of the ideas I've come up with for system to system travel, in the early colony stage of my world, is using fuel boosters to start the journey and then to reach the required speed for the co...
With the Kuiper Belt being composed of well over 100 million objects - some grand, some insignificant - is it possible to hide an asteroid base from enemy sensors within its confines, combined with...
Let's say that I've developed a new engine that can accelerate at 1G continuously. Within about a year, I'm nearing the speed of light. Naturally, I recognize the danger of collisions with gas and ...
We know that Gor, or Counter-Earth, is not stable in a long-term sense. Let's handwave that away, or assume that we are dealing with a temporary span of time in which the instability is immaterial....
Some astronauts have just arrived in Mars orbit! They're fixing to set up a small refueling station/outpost on Deimos. One problem, how might they keep their small habitat and associated structures...
Would it be possible for there to be an almost torchship (essentially a very, very weak one) which could fly almost brachistochrone trajectories? So instead of a full on brachistochrone, where you ...
I'm working on a simulator-type game which I want to be at least internally consistent, and which I'd like to work as close to reality as possible. That being said, it's set in space, which means t...
This is something that was just offhandedly mentioned in a Sci-Fi book I read once and as I am now writing one myself I thought I might use it. The scenario is that I have a ship approaching a wa...
I have been working on a sci-fi story for a little while now, and have recently discovered that I made a very big error in assuming the position of Eris. The main issue is that I had forgotten to t...
In a setting with (mostly) near future technology what material would a top end naval spaceships hull be made out of? The hull must follow the following requirements: Able to withstand the strai...
Assume a universe depressingly like ours, in which special relativity holds. No hyperspace, no warp drive, no wormholes, and even the limited get-out clauses offered by real world physics either do...
What role do satellites, communication towers, GPS, etc, play in the operation, and specifically the landing, of a space shuttle? If those and any other human-made things suddenly disappeared, cou...
I'm making a hard-ish sci-fi universe where humans colonized nearby star systems and found not one but two civilizations in Alpha Centauri, each at home on a planet orbiting one of the two main sta...
An answer to the following question mentions a free online calculator for long-distance space travel. Software to ease my interstellar travel calculations I'm looking for a 3d simulator that accu...
In 1869 a giant space gun was built, with the intent of firing a projectile at the Moon, just to prove that they can do it. Of course, the ludicrous idea to put people inside it was never even take...
A side shot from my series on a computer-less future; see here, here, and here. Project Rho defines a torch-drive as an engine with both high acceleration and high exhaust velocity. A torch-ship i...
We have escaped the galactic government, and now our greatest endeavour yet, life in space. How will these gargantuan space entities eat and survive in space? The whale or other in question is th...
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 ...
Introduction See background information here. 1000 years after darkness fell on Old Earth, humanity is scattered throughout the solar system. Apart from the Harmonious Republic of Mars, there are...
