Posts tagged ships
An old saying goes that if you have an army, it will want to fight a war. That seems to be true also for our personal army, our immune system: there seems to be various pieces of evidence that man...
Following on from this question. Question Context : Mars second moon Deimos has been converted into a generation ship. A considerable portion of its mass has been shaved off during the process &...
Question Context : Mars second moon Deimos has been converted into a generation ship. A considerable portion of its mass has been shaved off during the process & ejected backwards along its p...
Imagine that when Christopher Columbus sailed West in his Carrack to travel around the world to reach India, he had never made it to land, because halfway across the Atlantic Ocean between Europe a...
So, I was recently watching Stargate: Atlantis, and I saw a very interesting concept. In one episode, the villainous Replicators use the stargate network to fire what is essentially a high-powered ...
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...
I like to have a concept of an engine that spaceships can use to lift off (and land) from/on a planet (regardless of it having an atmosphere or not) with the following constraints: It should be s...
In my story, I need a spaceplane, that is, a shuttle which can fly in an atmosphere as well as in space. It needs to be able to land from space, and then take off and go to space without refuelling...
Goal: Just imaging a Star Wars X-Wing fight, and you've got the idea. However, I want to know whether something like that is possible without tons of metaphysical hand-waiving and 'just because'. ...
I'm trying to not delve too into the sciences so as to keep things fairly suitable for a space opera setting, but I'm trying to figure a few things to a reasonable degree of detail. My question he...
I'm working on a version of wormhole-based FTL travel, and one of the side effects of passing through the wormhole is going to be instantaneous heating of every molecule of the thing passing throug...
A large railgun mounted on the spine of a mega-scale starship (20-32km) or an antimatter-powered missile launched outside the ship? For clarification's sake, when I say "safer" I'm referring to "sa...
And I'm not talking about the wimpy 32"‰MJ kind we have in the real world, I'm talking about the superweapon kind. Anyone familiar with Knights of Sidonia and their flagship's Heavy Mass Cannons wi...
How could a generation ship "steal" energy or resources from star systems which it passed without changing velocity?
Spacecraft in my Scifi setting use strong magnetic fields for many purposes. Fusion containment, magnetic nozzles, gauss guns, magnetic fields as pusher-plates for nuclear pulsed propulsion and def...
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...
At a constant 1G acceleration it takes a little less than a year to reach near light speed speeds. Time would dilate locally on the ship slowing time for them. Could the time dilation be pushed t...
What materials and what shapes should be used for struts inside a vacuum airship's envelope? The vacuum airship is a theoretical dirigible design were you replace the hydrogen/ other lifting gas w...
"The planet moves." Inspired by this link in a comment from Gryphon here, I also see the concept in this question. We've colonized the moons of Jupiter adjusted their orbits to our satisfaction (...
So, I was watching a funny movie about undead pirates when the realization hit me, I never once tried to create naval superiority for my Mary Sue. Well, guess I just do it now. Titanic 2: (n)Ice t...
This is a self-contained follow-up to a different previous question. Based on the answers I got there I've taken a different approach to my original idea, and now want to try using antigravity on ...
Lets say you have a space ship. This ship will do a lot of maneuvers causing a lot of G forces to go in different directions through the ship. During straight acceleration it pushes the people insi...
I understand that in order to compress and expand spacetime, an Alcubierre drive would require some sort of "exotic matter" with a negative energy density. Is that sort of exotic matter purely hyp...
The goal is to get from Earth to the Outer Solar System, preferably the Kuiper Belt, as quickly as practical, with a crew of about 12, and a not-set-in-stone dry mass around 30 tons. The character...
I previously asked how best to use wormholes for spaceflight, focusing mainly on propulsion in space. I'm now wondering if there's a good way to get off Earth with this ship. The ship needs to be ...
I have the tables explaining time dilation for a single ship at different relativistic speeds, but am unsure how to modify that to work out for two ships at different velocities, and the two differ...
Animals on planets are so 20th century - let's herd us some space animals! In this story I have the need to move a herd of pesky space animals. They like Suns for their juicy solar energy and hydr...
Set in the near future, the interior of the spaceship is coated with thin layers of Teflon approximately 10mm average thickness on top of titanium alloy which in case you are wondering it is weakly...
The probe in my mind is unmanned, with a super-reflective surface to deflect most of the energy from the Sun on all wave length, only absorb enough to power its operation. Please also elaborate i...
For some reason, all the nations in the world have banded together. Their goal? Go to the Moon. Their budget? As much as the planet and humans can throw at it. How fast could we build a reliable a...
A moon-sized asteroid approaches Earth in the near future, where space tourism has become normal. The Earth has a few satellite structures above Mars conducting research, as well as successful terr...
The Question about the blockade of en entire star system makes me wonder: How would, if possible, a space "radar" work? Or how would you scan for Ships further away than your Optical sensors can ...
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...
With all the interest in VASIMR and the idea of getting to Mars in 39 days, the biggest challenge I can see is having a power source that is strong and light enough to make that possible. So I was ...
In the climactic final battle Faction A engages Faction B on Faction B's planetary base, both in orbital and ground combat. Realizing they can't win, Faction A activates a device that transports an...
Taking into account all of the developments in the alcubierre warp drive theory including the new calculations by Harold White. Are their any plausible/theoretical ways to generate a warp bubble wi...
Airships are cool, and I would love to use them and see them used outside of steampunk a lot more. One key aspect of Airships is that they seem to have the square cube law reversed. For other thing...
I'm writing a story and I was thinking about the ending in advance. I posted a question about how the population would be wiped out. I have developed from that and thought about the virus having no...
I'm designing a small two-person spaceship for use in battles in space. It is set around the year 2100. It would be around the size of a tank (approx. 50 tons). It would need to be fast and easy ...
As far as I know airships, specifically rigid-airships, do not have an upper size limit other than what is required by practicality and how willing you are to build gigantic airship sheds. But one ...
I understand the Apollo 13 CM got down to 39°F after it was powered down following the explosion in the oxygen tank. Could the interior of the ISS be cooled (for more than 12 hours) to below 32°...
A space ship travels (almost) at the speed of light. When it nearly reaches its destination it starts decreasing the speed. What would be the most appropriate deceleration for human body in such co...
Assumptions - atmospheric pressure is 3 atm, but partial pressure of oxygen is comparable to earth, the rest is mostly nitrogen. Planet is tidally locked and insignificantly heavier. (for simplicit...
Any story about an independent, self-owned tramp spaceship crew tends to implicitly or explicitly raise the question of how the crew got a spaceship, how it afforded it, and why it doesn't just sel...
I've been looking at the altitude boosted SSTO designs from the 90s that were designed to be lifted to launch altitude by modified jetliners and thinking about bumblebees and wondering if bioships ...
I have a spaceship that can get to speeds very close to the speed of light. How can this ship measure how fast it is going near the speed of light? I would think one would measure how fast other ...
I've been puzzling over the logistics of orbital spaceports, and this has been the one sticking point I keep coming to: radiation control between docked, or even neighboring, ships. Mass limitation...
A big problem with Steampunk airships is how to propel them. Steam engines tend to be too heavy to be useful. And sails cannot be used, because unlike sea-going ships, airships are in contact with ...
Alright so I'm not really a physics person by any stretch so forgive me if I butcher some physics jargon on this post. So I'm making this hard sci-fi interstellar ship with a rotating habitat that...
During a space cold war, a ship from the ideological enemy is not allowed remain in orbit while some of their investigators visit a crash site. The reason why is narrative "“ to separate the char...
