Posts tagged materials
What happens when PVA glue sets? I am curious about the white PVA glue that is commonly used for bonding wood and paper. Although an Internet search find lots of articles they mostly seem to be ne...
The shell variant of a Dyson sphere consists of an artificially-made shell of material about 1 AU in radius encircling a star. The sphere captures most of the star's energy and stores it for future...
Inspired by many questions that make use of utility fog. Utility fogs are not, as the name might suggest, fogs, but rather lattice solids. Cells of the foam are pollen-like micrometer-scale mach...
Recently I've been looking into Metallic Hydrogen as a fuel for the vehicles of my fictional future world. The only issue is that I'm uncertain if the blasted stuff is metastable. And while I kno...
I'm working on a military sci-fi piece that involves a lot of exo-skeleton enhanced, well, parkour -- for lack of a better term -- and was wondering how to deal with descents from great heights. ...
The setting I've cooked up for a D&D campaign I'm running features a fair amount of buildings that have been totally abandoned by civilization for hundreds or even a thousand years. Obviously w...
The setting is a science fiction story set roughly 500 years in the future. Looking at Wikipedia, I see a number of baryons that have so far never been observed. I'm interested in exploring this s...
How long can objects made of hard material last at room temperature in otherwise ideal conditions? If left outdoors on Earth, over the course of millions of years, any material will be eroded by w...
I originally wanted to create giant land biological life-forms but the square cube law is limiting me to sauropod body sized creatures so another element of my story is artificially enhanced biolog...
Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin, and copper is a significantly more abundant metal in the Earth's Crust, at about 70 PPM compared to tin at 2 PPM. Because tin was the limiting factor in bro...
In multiple sci-fi, Degenerate Matter is often used for a myriad of applications. Degenerate Matter consists of Neutronium, Quarkonium and other matter coming from dense stars. They have high stren...
So, one of my D&D characters has a cut/relief-carved quartz crystal amulet (medallion shaped) that's both an arcane focus (crystal) and a holy symbol (amulet), and I thought it would be a good ...
I have a post-apocalyptic scenario, set in the ruins of an American metropolis with flooded streets. Boats are used most of the time, but aircrafts have advantages, for battle or if you have to get...
In most future sci-fi settings, it is apparent that laser weapons (or as Star Wars likes to call it, blasters) and energy weapons in general would have replaced most standard ballistics for main in...
Missing magnetosphere on Mars keeps popping up. Most likely caused by Mars core being cold, mantle not bubbly enough. Mars mantle is dormant, core does not move. What would be good way to get it g...
For my story there exists a fictitious element with special properties. In its pure form is most closely resembles metal (for its physical properties) This material is quite abundant in salt and o...
The limpet teeth's microscopic structure is analogous to man-made short-fiber composites. Its strength depends on the direction of the force, relative to the orientation of the fibers. https://www...
There is a concern that's been brought up only recently--steel and concrete buildings are environmentally wasteful. In further clarification, they waste away too much greenhouse gases. And consid...
Question: does a liquid or gelatinous substance exist that once outside a body could solidify and be hard enough to be used once as a tool? The setting is low fantasy without magic, yet with creat...
While my setting has magic, the material world acts the same way as ours. Only reason why I am mentioning magic in my question is because I'm explaining why I need to satisfy such an odd set of req...
Problem statement There exists a thriving Bronze Age civilization in a gigantic rainforest, bigger than the Amazon and Congo put together. This civilization is built in on the flood plains of a mi...
My world is spread across thousands of planets in thousands of star systems, with a sort of United Nations (of Planets) acting as intermediary to ensure peace and prosperity between the planets. E...
For background: I have some sci-fi technology based on sci-fi physics which depends on some fictional forces that interact differently with up quarks vs. down quarks. So, to get certain types of ef...
In my world, there are giant fish, reptiles, and bugs. My question is, how would you be able to put a harness or saddle on a fish? Info: Swamp bio being ridden by humans Fish range in all differ...
When the giant aliens came lumbering out of the interdimensional fissure, we fought back, building giant robots of our own... which promptly collapsed onto themselves and were unable to move becaus...
A traveling scholar during the Dark Ages, with full knowledge of how precious books were, decided to keep his rolled up in a scroll. He's fashioned a clever case for it that allows him to turn a no...
I want to know whether there is a way to make coins that are "swimmable" in the fashion of Scrooge McDuck. My inquiry is based off this Family Guy meme from Pinterest The coins don't necessari...
What is the cheapest material per ton that one could purchase on our Earth in the 21st century? This could also include the cheapest material per ton to harvest so dirt may seem like the obvious an...
i want to make an armor made of liquid, for example like dew accumulate and attached to the person or just dip into water and the water attached/carried on (just example), but it also condense the ...
In my DND world, I've established that there is a substance that has these properties: It is made from a chalky "dust" that can be mined The dust gets mixed with unspecified chemicals to create a...
Is it possible in 21st century Earth for someone to create a small super insulated box to store heat like an "anti-freezer" such as putting lava inside the box and the box not being hot to the touc...
SPOILERS FOR ATTACK ON TITAN, READ AT YOUR OWN RISK... Hardening, or Titan hardening is an ability posessed by certain types of titans in the anime Attack on Titan. Since the setting has rifles ...
as the title, what materials or ingredients in modern gunpowder that if change to be expensive or rare to get, can ruin the evolution of advance gun or can turn modern gun obsolete or undesirable ?...
Not exactly indestructible, at least after flying to certain height it may pop out. I mean something like the bubble is as hard as stone or steel but still elastic and light to float like bubble, ...
The pillars are spread out about a mile apart each, and they all come straight from the ground, slowly gets just a smidge smaller in the middle, and then get bigger near the top, reaching a height ...
Would it be possible to have a planet created by a God - but still obeying the known laws of physics - to have a bouncy surface that would be strong enough to bounce any large incoming matter, like...
I recently came into possession of a rather large mass of molasses due to a misunderstood Alexa inquiry and since the restocking fee is outrageous, I plan on using it to answer a nagging question I...
I was considering this answer I wrote: https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/21374/75 It got me to wondering... if we had a flying sailing ship with a twisted-rubber energy storage device that...
Suppose a two-storey timber cottage has been left unoccupied for 15 to 20 years. The entire structure is wooden, including all beams and supports, with a rammed earth foundation. It's situated with...
Why and how could an organism evolve to make its bones or exoskeleton out of a UTH (Ultra High Temperature) ceramic like TiB2, WC, B4C, or TaHfC? Is it even possible?
Could I, purely in quantity of material only, build a solid bridge to a star? Ignore anything like strength, relative motions of systems, that is all taken care of, using lalalaicanthearyouium - t...
To be able to colonize another world, there are some requirements; the harvesting of energy, enough recourses, handling of the environment (pressure, temperature and gravity and so on) and availabi...
On this parallel earth all vertebrates received the ability to efficiently produce super strong materials from readily available minerals/nutrients in the mid Triassic. The specifics of these comp...
Let's say that space around earth has no debris. Super elevator is some super durable cable between a space station and earth by which some elevator can travel. Space station is in geostationary or...
A staple of science fiction is substances like 'durasteel' or 'tritanium', which, through generally unexplained means, have vastly superior material qualities when compared to conventional material...
In my fantasy world, the magic system pretty much makes metal armour and weapons obsolete. The magic system's specifics aren't important, just note that the magic system allows the users to 'penetr...
My question is, how can, say, a spacecraft have self repairing armor? It works using three layers: Delicate computers and people inside, armor repair system surrounding that, and then the armor its...
Background: I have typical dragons: Huge, scaly, winged, and fire-breathing. I also have dragon magic, but I'd prefer answers not to draw on this too much. In my world, a planet similar to earth, ...
In my late-Victorian world high-precision clockwork is highly available, but I am having trouble finding out exactly how precise their work could be. I have done some research on the subject, but ...
I'm currently bouncing around ideas for a sci-fi / cyberpunk world and one of the major technologies in this universe is the manufacture and usage of metallic glass. I don't want to handwave too ...
