Posts tagged light
The robot in question is a large, worm-like mining robot built for digging tunnels. It has electromagnets positioned throughout the segments of its body, for the purpose of pulling metals out of th...
Imagine a spaceship capable of achieving faster than light travel uses several transporters to allow crew members to move around its interior at the constant speed of light. What happens to the cre...
How plausible is a six-limbed flying animal roughly the size of hatzegopteryx to be aerial? In this case, an aerial animal will be defined as a creature that solely inhabits the sky. I will call t...
Part of the Anatomically Correct series of questions. Due to the nature of Superman having so many different powers, I wanted to focus specifically on one aspect of his character: the ability to...
The cylinder is 32 km long in total, 8 km in diameter, with 3km long endcaps, resulting in a habital area with a length of 26 km (= and an area of cirka 754 km2). The main body of the cylinder is...
Ignoring the plausibility of their evolution and sources of food, could a whale-like creature which internally consists largely of hydrogen bladders/gasbags realistically stay aloft? If these cr...
I am working on a habitable planet that orbits around a red dwarf star and it is about 1.5 times bigger and more massive than the Earth. Gravity there is stronger and the atmosphere is thicker. No...
I am making a story of a species who lives on a planet several light-years above the Galactic Bulge. With advanced technology, how much could they see from their vantage point? Could they carry out...
Stars are never green. When a star's spectra "peaks" in the green range, it also releases a significant number of waves of the adjacent colors - so "green" stars appear yellow or white. I want ...
I am writing a sci fi novel in which one of the primary factions is a lost space colony sent to Proxima Centauri (Alpha Centauri C) roughly 350 years prior on a generation ship. The trip took rough...
How would a planet need to be changed (gravity, air pressure, air makeup, etc) to allow for the realistic flight and take off from a small hill of a gryphon with a human rider? You can assume the ...
I'm working on a sci fi story where one of the species has batlike wings and comes from a moon around the size of Titan with roughly the same atmospheric pressure as Earth. Initially, I thought the...
I need my jet-propelled squid to be an efficient glider, something similar to an albatross but he's built in the canard configuration like a real flying squid (below). His combined weight is 5 k...
I've had a fairly complex world built up in my head for several years and finally writing a story in it. One thing I'm struggling with is explaining the galaxy's faster-than-light traveling. It's n...
How plausible are naturally-evolved, biological, fixed-wing flying creatures? Could such a creature plausibly evolve in Earth-like conditions? If so, what method would it be most likely to use fo...
One of the Stack Exchange's most popular topics is remaking mythological and fantastical creatures with realistic, believable anatomy. Usually, the answers go that for an angel's anatomy to be bel...
NOTE: I previously asked the same question regarding wheels, because I thought that the answers would still help me and that wheels were more applicable to a wider audience than propellers. However...
Perhaps you've flown in a plane on an especially cloudy day when all you can see are clouds beneath and above you. It's a beautiful sight, strata'd white all around. So what if the plane were flyin...
I'm providing an interesting twist on the Anatomically Correct series by focusing on a single body part instead of an entire organism. The following image depicts the average range of the cones ...
If there were people with wings, who didn't want to be naked all the time, what clothing could they wear, without it interfering with their flying? Note: I am assuming arm-wings, like birds, but y...
Generally, when someone uses telekinesis to fly, it's either by riding an object that can be levitated, or by applying the power to their body. Would there be any advantages to alternative techniqu...
Fact 1: The cause of a sunset is from the angle of the sunlight, because the amount of scattering increases as the light passes through more and more of the atmosphere. Fact 2: Higher frequency ...
We are developing a game setting and, while discussing certain aspects of the it, have stumbled upon our inability to adequately account for some phenomena due to our lack of knowledge. The thing i...
In a world where the development of internal combustion engines had been seriously delayed (for whatever reason), would it have been possible to power heavier than air aircraft by steam propulsion?...
So, I have been watching a lot of flat-earth debunking videos on YouTube, which has tickled my world-building bone. So, I'm imagining a world with a sphere of sunlight-level luminosity hanging rela...
How could a vertebrate animal evolve for extended flight before evolving land adaptations? Is that even possible at all? By extended flight, I mean breathing air and spending most of their time in...
My planet (I'll call it $P$ for practical reasons) is 2 AU from the Sun, a distance in which it receives 25 % of the sunlight that Earth receives. This can be estimated with the Inverse Square Law:...
I have only encountered the "Sonic Boom" a couple of times in my life, once when I was lucky enough to watch Concorde fly over my town in the late 70's. In a story I'm writing someone claims to ha...
I'm currently designing a world for a story that I'm writing that is based on a system of magic that deals with barriers, specifically domes. To get to the point one key characteristic is that thes...
One proposed type of desert planet is one in which the equator and the "tropics" are harsh, hot deserts, but the polar regions are temperate, habitable, and lush with life. You can see an example o...
So, to quote pterosaur.net: Unlike the wings of birds, the wings of pterosaurs would have tended to change shape under aerodynamic load - something often referred to as 'passive cambering'....
What I'm using your information for: My planet is small, has a thicker atmosphere than earth and it's orbiting a white dwarf. The main reason I chose it to be a white dwarf is that I read somewher...
The Scenario: Airships are awesome, but in the real world airship design is greatly constrained by the problem of lift. It seems like this, above all else, is what makes the elegant and compact s...
In my story, there is an Earth-sized planet orbiting a red dwarf, tidally locked to its parent star, with large oceans like Earth, two moons similar to ours and a thick atmosphere to distribute hea...
Sequel to this question. Basically, I've been designing an intelligent avian race based on bats. After reading through some of the answers for the linked question, I've decided that these bats wil...
First question! I'm excited to see if anyone can help me. Any missteps are unintentional, but feel free to tell me so that I may learn. So, I've recently started brainstorming over a possible st...
Assume that an Alcubierre drive is feasible. In fact, assume that one has been built. A superluminal starship can propel itself through space by distorting space in front of it and behind it. Howev...
In an alternate universe, the nine realms of Norse mythology--Midgard, Asgard, Vanaheimr, Jotunheimr, Alfheimr, Hel, Nidavellir, Niflheim and Museplheim--are actual, real-life "Earths", in the sens...
I want to make a human able to fly, much as Superman or any other superhero can (meaning without wings or any other non-human physical characteristics), but respecting the physical laws otherwise. ...
I'm not a professional at world building or character building, still starting out, but I do want to make an attempt at having my fantasy character be somewhat realistic. He's 11 years old, 4.8 f...
So, there are birdpeople/birdfolk in my setting. They're ~170 cm tall bipedal humanoids with a pair of functioning wings, slightly below the shoulders. They're covered with feathers, except for the...
I wonder whether the birds or other flying animals heavier than air could evolve without trees of other protruding objects?
Taken from this fascinating answer: The Sun is immensely loud. The surface generates thousands to tens of thousands of watts of sound power for every square meter. That's something like 10x...
I had a vision of a creature that touched things, and wherever it touched, it left a mark opposite to the original colour. For example when it walked across the grass the grass had red footprints,...
What would it take to build helicopter blades that can fold in several parts? This is the continuation of a question on Aviation. Unfortunately, there have been no use case for this for existing h...
If a planet like Crait existed and was covered by (mostly) white sand, what would its average albedo be? Crait is a planet from Star Wars that has a thin layer of white salt on its surface.
Can we create any electrical equipment which works in the opposite way to a bulb, such that is whilst it is switched on all the light in the surrounding area gets absorbed creating darkness?
Long ago, I asked a question on how to make possible turning the nine realms of Norse mythology--Midgard, Asgard, Vanaheimr, Jotunheimr, Alfheimr, Hel, Nidavellir, Niflheim and Museplheim--into nin...
