Posts tagged materials
In my world, both lighter- and heavier-than-air craft exist and are rather useful devices. However, problems tend to occur when confronted with storms. Steering through a storm is not a problem in...
I'm writing a story that takes place entirely underwater, mostly in a deep sea town and shallower city. Both are underwater and populated by beings who can survive underwater. My thinking is that...
Considering that oil is only really prevalent on earth (where dead biomatter can be compressed over millions of years into long hydrocarbons) I began to think that plastic might be just as rare as ...
What is the best material to use for a near future spaceship. Assume that most materials in the solar system can be mined and used. The spaceship is 700m long, 500m wide and 500m high. It travels...
Regarding the idea of a generation ship carrying a community of people for thousands of years to another planet: Is there is any material for an engineered structure or set of systems that will re...
Imagine a world that works mostly like our own: it's built of atoms and quantum particles, there's gravity and conservation of energy, etc. Perhaps the physical laws aren't exactly the same as our ...
In my pre-plastic world there is a killer who removes unblemished skin from their victims and replaces it with a non-human 'skin', so that one can't tell the replaced skin from the remaining human ...
I'm currently trying to set up an underwater race in my world"”merpeople if you will"”and I'm trying to figure out how their city would look. I'm basing their religion and lifestyle on native civil...
Set in the mid 22nd century AD, a major construction work is being carried out in the orbit of Uranus. The military is developing a cheaper fleets using precast reinforced concrete(PRC) hoping to e...
My magic system transfers quantities of certain properties from one object to another. For instance, electrical conductivity from metal to rubber -- the metal becomes less conductive, and the rubbe...
Would it be possible to use spider silk for armour, instead of metal? I am not worried about how to obtain the silk. I know that spiders are not domesticable and that they are too aggressive to ea...
In the far future, man is trying to build a small colony in the asteroid belt - on one of the bigger asteroids. All the materials are to be mined from asteroids, and it is assumed the colony will h...
***** Xenobiology expedition 'Profundity': Log entry 504 ***** Glass Ants are a fascinating species. We discovered them on an arid desert world last visited by humanity aeons ago. They seem to h...
In my world, high velocity projectile weapons have become obsolete due to a shield/forcefield that can nullify and deflect projectiles traveling at, or above supersonic speed (EDIT: Firearms are de...
The Romans had pumps, aqueducts, water wheels (which were used to grind flour, saw wood & stone etc), valves & pipes (they are known to have used stone, clay, lead & copper for pipes). ...
My world has a city of glass found along the outskirts of a desert. I decided on this because sand can become glass and so it was a huge resource that could be used for building. However, the conc...
Could we fire a heavy, long (e.g., 50 meters), spear-shaped object into Europa's icy-surface from space and then, when momentum stops, gravity gradually moves weights down inside copper tubes the l...
I'm exploring a post-apocalyptic world and want to build a realistic scenario for the condition of abandoned ruins. What would you estimate to be the lifespan of the following building types? And...
In a setting with (mostly) near future technology what material would a top end naval spaceships hull be made out of? The hull must follow the following requirements: Able to withstand the strai...
Many fantasy worlds use a "Medieval Stasis"trope. What resources could we expect to become depleted during a stasis? Surely, since technology is stagnant, the people would mine all the materials th...
Long ago, I asked for a kind of steel alloy under an alternative recipe. Right now, the list is as follows: Carbon (2%) (Reasonable material and amount) Chromium (12%) (Reasonable material a...
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...
With a powered-by-phlebotinum (ergo very handy, very powerful) rifle, I am able to shoot high-energy beams which, in turn, can pulverize anything in their path in a considerable radius. The beams c...
I've been playing with different conceptualizations and types of armor for historical settings, especially armor with magic enchantments or made from weird materials. I was stuck thinking about lig...
Consider the facts that a blackhole: Eats everything that passes through its event horizon. In layman's terms, it is defined as the shell of "points of no return", i.e., the boundary at which...
I have a slug that I need to kidnap. Not an ordinary garden slug; this slug is special. This slug's slime is violently reactive with the atmosphere on my planet, and explodes into flame on contact ...
Before we get into the question, I'd just like to say that this isn't specifically for Spider-man, but more of a general "character who moves around a lot and finds themselves upside-down quite oft...
I was on a beach recently and was contemplating what it would look like if Silicon just didn't bind oxygen very well/at all, perhaps similar to gold. I'm not sure if something else would take the ...
On earth, the skeletons of Osteicthyes and all their descendants are made of a mixture of collagen and calcium. We can do this because Earth contains food sources for all these animals containing v...
I'm researching possible materials that maybe be used in the far future. I came across something called metallic oxygen. If oxygen is compressed to 10GPa, it turns into a dark red solid O8. If this...
I'm developing a silkworm that spins webs of a particular kind of "silk" and weaves thin, fragile webs. The magic part of this is that it also spins wind. The following addresses how this works and...
In my earlier question, regarding airships, I mentioned fictional gas, as light as hydrogen but non-flammable. Is it possible to make chemical element, with atoms made not from nucleons, but with s...
One of the points made in a number of recent questions regarding underwater races has prompted me to review one of my older pieces of world-building. Namely: the difficulty of producing common stru...
What exactly happens to leather armor in different environmental conditions, for example battles or long exposure to rain or desert heat? What can be done to negate or care for it?
After reading this post about a sort of translucent biological visor I was inspired to incorporate a similar design. I'd like to create an organism with a translucent upper cranium, serving no purp...
I'll confess that I have a real issue with iron--it rusts quickly. In fact, the History Channel program Life After People constantly states that, left to its own devices, the iron that makes up a ...
What existing material (e.g. 410 steel, no unobtanium) and what thickness should the ribcage of a creature (of humanoid size and shape, let's say it's a genetically-engineered human) have, to survi...
A spacefaring people buries their fallen heroes in space. The bodies are adorned in uniforms (fabric), equipped with the weapons they carried in life (mostly aluminium, steel or polymer, but contai...
Ludicrous Leg Man has never skipped a leg day, as a result of which he has infinitely strong and fast legs and all attendant secondary superpowers. Don't ask why, just roll with it. While performi...
This question is inspired by Green's Volcanoes in Orbit! The premise is that there is a 50-mile-high shield volcano (again, let's ignore the height implausibility) with a slope of about 2-3 degrees...
The Setting I'm doing background work on a story involving a civilization about as advanced as ours materiologically. A significant part of their military operates along the continental shelf zone...
So lots of Sci-fi works use mono-crystalline diamond as a wonder material used to build all sorts of impressive and in some cases seemingly impossible structures, I'd like to ask about the science ...
In my world I've created an alloy that can melt at low temperatures and solidify at high temperatures. This got me wondering, is something like this actually possible/does it exist. With most mater...
Imagine technology, possible achievable in short time (maximum half of the century), that we can use to build aquarium that won't break because of internal damage (water pressure, badly distributed...
Far Future. Almost every household has a 'fabber'. You put raw materials in it (can be almost anything) and it does what you program it to do. It transmutes the raw materials into what is needed. T...
Global warming is awful, we all agree. The problem is that there exists materials that warm up easily naturally or artificially. But, why isn't there cold materials? Cooling something requires ene...
This is for a story line that I would prefer to be based on known science as much as possible. Is there a known compound that can phase shift from gas to solid or liquid, or the other way around, ...
My world is covered in a black stonelike material which is similar in structure to coral, being that it's highly-porous but not formed in the same way. The (non)water on my world, which is (curren...
With a Janka Hardness of 5,060 lbf, the Australian Buloke is considered to be the hardest wood on Earth. Compared to other materials however, it still yields a weaker Compressive Strength and Modul...
Inspired by this question. Imagine a sea of liquid helium. Some people like to use submarines, but we've got a better plan. Jet-Skis. Impeller pumps are used in jet-skis and can also be used to ...
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