Posts tagged space-travel
The title says it all. How would one go about creating a planet with aliens that have medieval grade technology (windmills and carts and stuff.) No high level technology. However, I want the aliens...
I am writing a hard science fiction story and I want to avoid violating known physics, while still enabling some of the classic mainstays of science fiction under the auspice of sufficiently advanc...
While once living in Texas, my family and I had the privilege of watching a shuttle re-entry. It was breath-taking. I kid you not, it was like watching the finger of god drawing a line of fire th...
I've seen many sci-fi scenes that feature a ship underway on a deep space journey. As the ship passes the vantage point we can see engines burning during sub-FTL speeds (The Expanse most recently)....
I'm trying to figure out a concept for some sort of super-advanced space propulsion system that works by bending spacetime. As I understand it, planets' orbits are actually straight paths, but the...
Mars is a cold, inhospitable, slightly damp ball of rock that would be very difficult to do things like grow crops on. However, it's also very far away. Far enough that, presumably, it would probab...
Let's imagine that people, if they'd want could freely leave Earth to pursue their own destiny on other planets etc. How far could we get assuming following: Assumption No. 1: It's trivial to get ...
Suppose you had a device with the ability to temporarily give your ship tachyonic properties. Would this allow for FTL? How would it affect warfare in a sci fi universe? The reason I am asking thi...
Can two objects solar powered, equal in weight, traveling on the same orbital path in the opposite directions propel each other to intersect on the opposite side of the Earth in alignment to propel...
Suppose NASA, SpaceX or any other aerospace company has managed to build a technology that allows them to fire a rocket to the moon, from "space". Basically, they have created a huge weather balloo...
So I'm working on a story that at its groundwork has a lot of sciency things, and then has a lot of unsciency things attached to it. The story has an FTL drive which is the good old "fold space, pu...
I'm writing a game script at the moment that involves the protagonist exploring various planets in several solar systems. The character starts the game with nothing to their name, but I want them t...
Assume that you are in an alien star system. Your ship is currently being hit by a phenomenon called solar overflow, which messes up your electronics and can kill you without good shielding. It is ...
[![enter image description here][5]][5] Model Lightcraft under laser power While sadly the funding for this research has not been forthcoming, there have been proof of principle flights and ope...
When in space, the amount of force required to move goes down drastically, due to the virtual lack of drag. In this environment, would be feasible for engines in space (more specifically belonging ...
In my universe, there exist molecular level machines that can behave as a single entity. The humans use them for many purposes, including faster than light travel. The concept is as it follows: T...
Please reality check my place from which one could watch time outside move faster... A space station constantly moving at near light speed. The space station is created by a race with superior te...
Ok I have a moon, or cored out moon, that is a generation ship. I really do: I built it by mining out one of the rock/ice moons around my solar systems gas giants (not earth's solar system). Its...
This question is partially a spinoff of some points that came up in another recent question at Worldbuilding about interstellar space travel. Runaway Truck Ramps I live in Colorado, and on the do...
I had in mind a sci-fi setting where humans have begun terraforming nearby planets without the benefit of faster-than-light travel. For example, Wikipedia lists a handful of terrestrial planets wit...
I was reading this article from NASA about chemical rockets and they argue that, with a planet 50% larger than the Earth (assuming similar density, about 1.5G surface gravity), it would be impossib...
Sci-fi setting where cargo is being shipped to colony worlds. If a spaceship has to land and take off again, that costs a lot of money, so that mode of transport is reserved for people and urgent, ...
In the universe there are several worlds where energy harvesting is feasible without pesky wild life habitat preservers standing on your patch'o land bare breasted. So earth has set out to harves...
It's now the late 23rd century and there are now hundreds of space stations, orbiting approximately at the height of the (now deceased) ISS, give or take a few kilometers. Lately, the International...
I am creating a history for my galactic civilization, and was thinking that the first colonization ship might be launched around the year 2200. World War Three Just a few years from now, a third ...
OK, let's say that you have an interstellar human population. You've got people who live on different planets in various systems, but you also have people living in space stations in different syst...
Assuming a civilization has the capacity to build space vessels designed to travel from one solar system to another, what is the technological difference between traveling at 50% light speed and tr...
The Humern empire uses Photonic Railways to transport its unimaginably vast cargo containers from one solar system to the next. These ships can reach truly staggering velocities (>0.8c even for ...
In my story, I have two huge generation ships racing each other to another star system. Assume they are on an exactly parallel path, neck-and-neck, about one astronomical unit apart. They are trave...
There exists a Universe in which all of outer-space is filled with some form of human-breathable air. Theoretically, you could fly a Zeppelin up there and explore other worlds, with a sufficiently ...
Established rules for the universe: FTL travel exists with special drives, special artificial generated wormhole like tunnels where space ships can break the laws of physics. Engines runs hot, bu...
A wormhole usually helps us to create a shortcut to a distant object through a higher dimensional space. Can the time factor in that higher dimensional space differ from our three-dimensional spac...
I'm building a sci-fi world set a couple hundred years into the future. If humans were to suddenly discover FTL space travel (which are handwaved away as generic sci-fi warp speed or something) in ...
I am looking for medically viable reasons why we might discover it to be more difficult than expected to bring pregnancies to term in space. This is for a society based approximately 75 years in th...
The question, Reference to Earth in Intergalactic Universe illuminates the shortcomings of the term "light-year", which defines a distance by mixing the universally constant speed of light in a vac...
I'm an aspiring author, aiming to determine the physical realism of certain fictional concepts within a constructed universe identical to our own. There are many contingent ideas which I must expla...
Setting So for generations a ship has been traveling through space. After reaching their desired destination you are left with a group of people who have been used to their largest spaces being no...
The term "light year" is used a lot in futuristic writings that focus on space, but light years are defined based on the length of a single year on Earth. Would that not make the entire measurement...
Malgrovian gliders inhabit the middle layers of the atmosphere of Malgrov, a gas dwarf. They spend most of their life gliding, preying on giant balloon-like floating lifeforms. When they get olde...
The idea of an elevator reaching to the near cosmos is very tantalizing when trying to think of ways off planet. A major draw back to this idea is that a long, thin tower into the atmosphere seem l...
While on a space mission to Neptune, you accidentally broke your tether on the way. After a couple of hours floating, you were hit by an asteroid. You passed out. When you are conscious again, yo...
If we want to be realistic, we imagine ships pushing stuff out the back and relying on the conservation of momentum to move forward. Gravitational waves carry momentum. Are they viable as a kind o...
I recently came across Could pulsars really act as "lighthouses" to help in interstellar travel?, asked a week ago. The author was trying to figure out if pulsars could be useful for interstellar F...
Background I was pondering my answer to this question. I asked myself, "Why would I only do a 45-minute burn and then float for 3 months to get to Mars?". Then I answered, "Because you only have ...
(This question is not about getting scrap metal out of orbit and recycling it: please see the second and third sections of the question text.) Consider an object which was not designed for, or ha...
Let's just take antimatter off the table right now. As I've learned recently, it's hard to make, expensive as hell and even more volatile, and you can never get more energy out of it than you put i...
I'm curious what might need to be considered if a group were exploring the vicinity if a neutron star. Gravitational waves and radiation could be dangers, but what else? Is it possible that habit...
Would a starship that was propelled by magnetic monopoles fly faster and longer than ion engines (assuming magnetic monopoles exist) of course.
I was reading the Q/A on water as radiation shielding. The prime answer went in to detail on the cost to lift water from Earth which is cost prohibitive, but how feasible is it to get the water fr...
Faster than light travel is a really cool thing to have in sci-fi settings. It allows humans, in relatable time scales, to travel the galaxy and see a variety of worlds. It allows for conflicts spa...
