Posts tagged navigation
I was recently introduced to the South Atlantic Anomaly. As I understand, for satellites and space craft, this is a natural feature that can wreck space craft by taking even computers designed fo...
In my story, I have a small extended family of 30 to 40 individuals ranging in age from 0 to 50 who are on the run from Chinese and Japanese forces in 1400AD. No place in Asia is safe for them. By...
Based on the planet from this question. The main thing that distinguishes this planet from, say, Europa, is the handwavium light-source, which I must assume is wrapped in a perpetual explosion wrap...
Brief setting notes: it's a "basically earth" type situation, a spinning ball of rock in space with the same size and gravity and atmosphere and magnetic fields and everything else. The main diff...
How might an enterprising spacer, mining the rings of Saturn, go about quickly measuring/estimating the velocity of and distance to a nearby moving object (asteroid, habitat, pirate, etc)? Bonus po...
On Earth, sailors would navigate the oceans at night by using the stars as guides; since there are no landmarks in the ocean like there are on land (save for the occasional island), that's pretty m...
On this planet, there is a nomadic tribe of humans who are the descendants of unwilling colonists from thousands of years prior. They are a nomadic tribe because of the incredibly extreme seasons, ...
I am currently building a campaign for DnD. The main plot plays out on an island the heroes are stranded on after their ship goes off track and sinks. They discover that this island is ruled by m...
Question: Would a modern-day teen, trained in using the north star for directions when camping/hiking, notice a difference in how the "north star" (Polaris) works when transported suddenly to 1350 ...
The ISS uses port and starboard to differentiate between the two sides of the station. (The Harmony node photographed after it was attached to its temporary location on the International Space St...
Context The world is made of floating islands suspended in the atmosphere. For all intents and purposes, the world doesn't have a solid surface. Due to a magical influence, islands rise from the ...
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...
On one (of many) of the planets that I am planning out, there are no seas. The planet is mainly composed of enormous mountains, with some deserts in between. There are no seas or large bodies of w...
I am currently creating a Spacefaring Race that regularly travels between planetary systems in order to harvest resources, but due to the fact that the conditions required for them to Breed are fai...
Premise I envisage a world of would-be navigators with roughly Bronze Age technology, sailing on ships to explore their planet. In contrast to our history of navigation where we "cracked the code"...
I'm working on a story set in an Earth-like world but with rings (say, proportionately similar to Saturn's). I'm trying to get a solid handle on how these rings would affect the sky. For the purp...
Is it necessarily a given that a compass (as they magnetically function on Earth) could be made to function similarly on an alternate, Earth-like, ringed planet? Another way of asking: is it feasi...
Using current technology, what could I do to optimize the odds of being located by time-traveling humans a thousand years from now? The accuracy must be such that they could "transport" me out of ...
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. They basically jump you to another lo...
One of the aspects of most sci fi time travel representations that I find most challenging for my suspension of disbelief is this idea of people travelling through time and not travelling through s...
We are creating a world of floating islands, these vary in size from small outposts that are little more than a Dock and Watchtower, through independent farmsteads, to full Nations in which the maj...
I have a tidally locked planet on a circular orbit, with an axial tilt of 22.5° That means one side is always in the sun, the other one in the shade. The subsolar point moves along a north-south l...
In the world I'm building, there is a race of people whose main shtick is that they can detect the magnetic fields of their planet and use them to navigate. In one of their cultures, the people are...
Premise I would like to create a world that is rendered nearly impossible to navigate by natural circumstances. In my particular world, a thick jungle covers the whole planet from pole to pole; th...
Average Joe was an amateur astronomer. While he was out in the wilds one day with his telescope he was kidnapped by aliens, carried off and kept as a slave on a world somewhere in the Milky Way. Ha...
I'm curious as to what the implications to any navigation system are: ship trekking aviation etc. Will their compass change shape (as being spherical), or might they dump the compass alltogeth...
An exploratory spaceship holding strangers from many cultures and races has a problem leading to escape pods being deployed to a nearby world that is conveniently survivable. The pods crash land in...
Imagine a world (or rather a solar system) where in its history there has been a war with emergent AI's There are very strict laws governing the speed and complexity of computer systems However b...
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...
Imagine a world with a very wacky magnetic field, the magnetic poles are not aligned at the top of the axial tilt and the sun is active enough to cause huge northern lights each night. I know elec...
In my world spaceships are guided by lighthouses floating in space instead of electronic navigational systems. A lighthouse in space has the shape of a huge sphere emitting intense red light. Like ...
This question prompts me to evaluate the possibility that the romans or greeks could be blown in a storm to the Americas and survive if they had enough water provisions? Or maybe not provisions bu...
This is the second question in my Arctic Airships series of questions. The first one is Arctic Airships, Part 1 - Generating Electricity. The setting is outlined in Part 1, but I'll rehash the pre...
