Posts tagged space-travel
I am writing up a system of wormhole-based gates to allow "fast travel" in a far-future setting. My description is an extrapolation of the way I understand a flatlander's experience of the followin...
Okay, so while I'm fairly certain this is possible to do, I wanna know if it actually makes sense to do so. Imagine you have a fleet of ships, each of them so large it takes megatons of antimatter ...
What would it look like for a ship with an Alcubierre drive to drop out of FTL both for the passengers, and to an observer (assuming they aren't obliterated)?
Human have begun colonizing the solar system using the ablative laser microwave drive, our next target is Proxima Centauri and inbetween there is basically nothing except dust and occasional astero...
Considering the rather hostile radiation environment on Europa, what communication and navigation systems might be used with near-future manned spacecraft? What would the ranges and features of th...
An interstellar civilization has superluminal travel which allows for travel between two points, effectively without traversing the space in between so they don't crash into anything between them a...
How much wattage would you need to accelerate a four petaton spaceship by 1g for a year? This should be about enough to reach near light speed, which is perfect for interstellar cruising, but I'm w...
So let's say that some advanced future civilization is capable of creating and manipulating wormholes, and uses a network of wormholes for their FTL transportation. If an enemy gets too close to o...
As we all know, hydrogen and by extension water, gaseous, liquid or frozen, is pretty much everywhere in our solar system besides maybe Mercury. The most abundant source may be the Asteroid Belt, w...
By the time we develop the technologies necessary for travelling between stars, I think it is fairly likely that we would have already developed the technology to digitally augment, edit, and uploa...
A person is traveling in a space craft that was designed and built by sufficiently advanced aliens. This space craft left from Earth and is capable of traveling infinitely close to the speed of lig...
Suppose a starship is being powered by a lasers beamed first from the departure star, and then from the destination which is a moving base. The ship is moving in the regime of 10"“30% of light spee...
Assuming the feasibility of utilizing a brown dwarf for a gravity assisted slingshot, or Oberth Maneuver, what sort of hazards/difficulties could one expect during such a maneuver? EDIT: To make ...
Let's suppose anti-gravity/gravity-manipulation/telekinetic technology is found in the near future. It allows to move large ships (thousands tons) into space from the surface of the Earth with re...
In this world, as soon as humans invent FTL, they launch "telescope-satellites" (I don't know what to call them) out in several directions. They travel at 10c, can communicate instantly with Earth,...
I'm working on a sci-fi/fantasy world set in a solar system with a few habital, currently-being-colonized planets. Most of the action will be taking place on the surface of one of them, but I want ...
In my world there exists a planet called Solara Prime. The planet orbits a large yellow star, healthy and capable of sustaining the system. There is one planet and 4 moons whose orbits are roughl...
What would be the impact on modern civilisation be if a benevolent inventor gave the world the ability to travel around the solar system quickly and cheaply. If over the next five years this tech...
It's the near future, and Bob goes for a spacewalk outside the International Space Station or Space Shuttle or some similar type of realistic space craft. Suddenly, and unfortunately, Bob goes spac...
I'm looking for some data to create my own sci-fi setting, but I want to base it on real world as much as possible. Also, I don't want to come up with any arbitrary year like 3290 with no backgroun...
We all know (or know how to find) the "rocket equation" that drives the design of a conventional rocket, and we've gone over such things as "specific impulse" and the difference between fuel and re...
In this world FTL travel is accomplished by entering an alternate dimension, let's call Aqua. Aqua is a very simple, albeit strange dimension. A great expanse of water as far as civilization has ma...
There seem to be honest scientific exploration in the field of the alcubierre warp drive if you believe some articles on the net. So to be a little bit scientific accurate in a story using it, I wo...
To start with, i know You measure the Kardashev scale from stellar success, but lets say we have a civilization that are vastly advanced compared to us, so they are equivalent to a type 2 civilizat...
So I've got a bunch of freeze-dried colonists traveling in torpor to a solar system 55 light years away at 92% c. From an outsider's perspective it takes them sixty years to get there, but how long...
The story situation is that a generation ship is headed to another solar system where there are several planets in the star's habitable zone and once the ship arrives, it will approach these planet...
I ask because I have a problem trying to find an appropriate launch window around that time or any point in the mid-1980s, and I need to reach Jupiter via Hohmann transfer so I can then use a serie...
My idea was to use 2 stages for an interstellar spacecraft (particularly the Orion Drive) and use it in a way similar to Project: Daedalus. Phase 1 would involve accelerating to cruising speed foll...
I have a humanoid individual who for various reasons finds themselves in low orbit with no ship or shuttle or tech to take them down The society they come from is about renaissance era level (b...
Would it be possible to move Ganymede into Mars' orbit causing them to fuse together like the two proto moons of earth? The new planet "Marmede" would have a mass equal to 13.2 % of Earth. Ho...
Recently I have become obsessed with the idea of twin sapient species developing on separate planets of the same horseshoe orbit. As I was considering the technological advancement of this planet, ...
While I do know that there is no possible explanation for how we might wake someone up from such a long sleep, I was wondering what food would be edible after one million or so years where the huma...
In Mercury's orbit around the Sun (Solar orbit, not Mercurial orbit), what are the conditions like? What shielding or heat management would be required for a manned spacecraft? Could a spacesuited ...
In a setting I've been working with, I sought a method of sublight travel that wasn't crazy engines or magic. I've already got FTL using a different method than the Alcubierre drive, so it wouldn't...
A spaceship of several kilometers length is accelerating to a very high fraction of $c$ (basically as close as they can possibly get). Which problems can the machinery and the crew encounter? And...
Some days ago I had a discussion with a friend about possible alien life forms. He was stating that there anywhere could be lifeforms that do interplanetary or even interstellar travel by jumping ...
A Russian billionaire wants to send postage stamp-sized probes off to Alpha Centauri using meter-square light sails. Regardless of the practicality of such an attempt, is there a lot to be gained ...
Building from this and this, given an aquatic civilization somehow manages to forge tools and build computers, could it build space-faring devices? Also another development that would come earlier...
In this answer to another question, solar system-scale rail gun acceleration (and deceleration) was brought up as an alternative, and I found this intriguing. It's worth another question at least....
One day in the year 1980 humans receive a message from an alien race. It reads a little something like this: Hey guys, real sorry, but a weapon we launched in an excercise malfunctioned and is ...
I've just read this article and watched the accompanying video. Heady stuff, for sure. I'm particularly intrigued by the concept of a "solar gravitational lens telescope" somewhere out near the h...
Let's consider DCR-97, HMSS Liberty, 300 kilotonnes (or 300 Gg) of dreadnought-carrier ship. It's a big one. Let's say it can move forward. Let's say it could potentially move backward, or at the ...
There it is. The elusive Ersa 772. Filled with an estimated $15 trillion in precious metals, mining that asteroid could make you the richest man on this side of the galaxy. You have all of the fund...
There is an emergency on board the ISS. Astronauts can´t evacuate and they will die within five days if critical repairs are not made. Fortunately an automated cargo spacecraft, like Cygnuss or P...
Another question on this site deals with the question of interstellar trade without faster than light travel. I'd like inspiration for a related but more generic question. Why would people choose t...
All the recent talk on Worldbuilding about the vast energies available to higher-level Kardashev civilizations, the need for 50,000 year message-systems, and so on, got me thinking. With enough ene...
It is some small number of years into the future. We are regularly using beamed energy, as defined in this answer: large arrays of microwave transmitters. We have developed this so that these array...
The situation is bad, human kind have waited to the last minute (literally) with building the huge ship that is supposed to save man kind. The sun goes nova, nothing can stop that but the ship has ...
I want my actors in outer space but I don't want them roaming around freely. Like, if the actors were in a building, there would be walls, doors, elevators. If they were on a land, there would be ...
A generation ship was sent out a long time ago, to colonize a far away planet. However the ship failed to reach its goal due to navigational issues (which also means they didn't have any clue where...
