Posts tagged space-travel
A large (compared to Earth life) species of creatures live in space. They gain energy from interstellar dust and starlight. How they do this is a separate question so not relevant here. However the...
I am a post-human adapted for permanent life in vacuum and micro-gravity. How might my physiology and biochemistry overcome the following challenges? Please note I have a strong cultural aversion ...
In its heyday Earth was a great interplanetary trading post on account of its low gravity moon which was used as a warehouse for all kinds of goods. The Moon was covered almost entirely in large w...
The question of whether or not humans could reach space without various resources has been exhaustively researched on this site, but one question has not been touched- what about the social and pol...
My first time here, hope this is a useful question. Mostly about orbital mechanics and vacuum. So the crew of a general-purpose interstellar spacecraft have stumbled across a paradise planet. Afte...
I have a world where humans have developed interplanetary space travel that allow them to travel to other planets. There is an issue though- the speed is slow, sublight; as an example it will take ...
In Kim Stanley Robinson's new novel Red Moon the first few pages describe a method of Earth-to-Moon transportation that I had not encountered before. The idea is to use a magnetically levitated and...
Force field technology has come a long way. The latest energy-efficient engines can guarantee stable energy output in any situation, making force fields extremely reliable and very cost effective c...
I am trying to design spacecraft with realistic mass estimates, so that I can "accurately" design fuel requirements and calculate potential speed. Obviously the mass of a ship is going to vary wid...
Setting is 20 minutes into future - everything is as we know it, or as we can reasonably predict, except the zero-tau capsules. Capsule is a thin mesh of Unobtanium connected to a portable Handwav...
Antenna farm as seen on the USS Sulaco from Aliens (1986) We often see menacing sharp communication spikes and clusters on spacecraft in movies, shows, games, and etc. It makes the ship look...
The setting is our Earth of today (2018) with one difference: some Space Agency decided to go back the Moon and built a ship that is ready to depart, using today's technology. For reasons, the cre...
Kjør bestillingen 92 umiddelbart. Frøhvelvet skal åpnes, skyttelbussen skal tilberedes. (Execute Order 92 immediately; the seed vault is to be opened, the shuttle prepared) ...
In my fiction I'm setting up a civilization which uses Laser Propulsion for moving things between bodies within a solar system (assume Earth/sun analogy). Laser Units have been set up anchored to a...
Inhabitants of another planet (their biology is yet undefined, and if helpful to solving the problem, suggestions can be included in the answer), have a spaceship in which they plan to accelerate t...
Earth, far future: We built multi generation ship which can get 20 000 people to another solar system in next 20 generations (600 years) For scope of this question assume that ship itself is well ...
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 ...
In the near future we may find cargo ships fleeing space pirates! Given that... It's a small cargo ship carrying 10 metric tons of wheat (cargo volume, approximately 13 m3). Total volume: 100 m...
How big could a nebula be? If a spaceship were traveling 300,000 times the speed of light (assuming this were possible and had no other effects, such as time travel or time dilation) is it plausibl...
Some Context I'm creating a universe where humanity has reached the stars. They've colonized a few star systems and, obviously, FTL drives are a common thing. The part of the story I'm currently...
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...
My current ongoing science fiction project has FTL travel that is instantaneous for the ships and their crews, but still, usually, takes years of real-time in the rest of the universe. This is goin...
Think of a giant hemispherical shell, constructed of spaceships, sitting just far enough from Earth to be too far for Earth-based defences and close enough to effectively cast a shadow on the entir...
In my story there are multiple planets in a solar system. And each of them are inhabited with different species. The main inhabitants of one planet are "bird+human" things. Is it possible for th...
Let's say in the year 2000 we launch a ship to some distant part of the galaxy. If the ship travels with a constant 1 g acceleration for like 28 years (accelerating halfway then decelerating), then...
Assuming humanity was suddenly highly motivated to do it, how long would it take a probe launched from Earth to get into a position to record and broadcast images of the position in the opposite or...
So, this is for a "space drama" that is set in the not too distant future. The world is running out of resources, but has developed an rudimentary interplanetary travel capability. Several planet...
An alien species has been conquering planet after planet around the Milky Way for some time. They detected intelligent life on Earth a while back and now they decided it's time to add us to their c...
For the obvious reason of weight, our modern space stations and satellites are made out of metal or lightweight compounds to reduce cost. In a quick Google search, about $20,000 per kg is the cost,...
I've seen some cool art and scenes from the Cowboy Bebop which had trade lanes made up of what looks like large rings that accelerate and deccelerate a ship. I wanted to replicate a system like th...
Looking into fleshing out my world story. One of the things I had in mind was an infrequent but consistent shipment of supplies to a planet from Earth. For simplicities sake, we'll use 10 as the nu...
I've looked around the forum but didn't find an answer to this particular question. In short, what food could realistically be produced in a space station assuming current (or near future) technolo...
This question is inspired by Could a species develop the tech necessary to land on their own moon without comprehending light? Consider following scenario: a civilization of alien tricksters abduc...
Inspired by comments to JBH's answer to The worlds between, the consequences of instantaneous FTL. The Premise A technology for instantaneous travel exists, making it possible to travel to any po...
What additional difficulties might the inhabitants of a gas giant moon face when attempting to launch spacecraft beyond their moon's orbit, especially beyond the planetary system? I presume that th...
IF they were real, would wormholes work in the way that they do in sci-fi (for all intents and purposes "teleportation", travel without movement, FTL, immediately "appearing" at the other location)...
What properties of a species of plant would make it the ideal choice for taking it on a year-long trip through space as both an oxygen source and food source? We should assume that the amount of ...
Is it possible to calculate/estimate the size of a star's heliosphere? If so, how? I am working on a semi-near future, sci-fi novel. As part of the technology base, humans are able to travel betwe...
I've been wracking my brain about a world I'm writing in, how to make some group of regular people able to survive in space for extended periods with or without a suit. I can reduce the amount of t...
Assuming we never break Newton's third law, in the near future thousands of chemical/nuclear/electric powered spaceships will be flying through our solar system expelling reaction mass. Since a g...
The idea of "Flat Space", an area of space-time with minimal, preferably zero, gravitational curvature, is an important concept in many Sci-fi universes, often those with "jump-drive" based FTL tra...
This question would be best answered for the time period of our first colonized planet, which will most likely be Mars. With the thinner atmosphere, weaker gravity, low oxygen, and the bodily damag...
This is, for the record, the same universe as in Is space piracy orbitally practical? and How can I prevent Kessler Syndrome among space stations?. In my world, circa 2100, space stations orbiting...
It's the height of humanity's space-colonization golden age when casual interplanetary travel has become possible and humans have either colonized or established large space stations around nearly ...
I want to be able to have interplanetary travel very cheap and fast, within minutes. Seeing as planets are light minutes away from each other, I suppose even for fast interplanetary travel the tech...
When flying a big spacecraft, one needs to keep several things in mind when designing the "user interface" used to control the spacecraft's flight path, or ultimately, the output of the thrusters/e...
First, yes I was inspired by this question: "How do you check if a room behind a door aboard a spaceship has an atmosphere/pressure?" I wanted to take the scenario further, instead of asking how t...
Consider a near-future situation where humans have begun to explore the solar system, most groups are still working to start a profitable mining operation and only a few ships have gone beyond Jupi...
Prelude Prelude TLDR; A fleet of ships is passing through our galaxy, stopping off at particular stars and causing small dips in the light from stars. This is related to a couple of other questio...
In my world, humanity reaches their new home among the stars by way of a portal that pops into the solar system one day. This portal instantaneously transports those who enter to a place that is lo...
