Posts tagged ships
For a book under construction, I need a starship to make a 180 degree turn rather quickly. Give him sub-light speed in a star system (no relativistic effects) and on a path to the system primary. ...
Exactly what the question says. What if a spaceship the size and mass of a space shuttle with a full fuel, that has an Alcubierre Drive on it crashed into the Earth at 8 km/s? ( And no, I'm not tal...
I have a handful of immortals that have spent the last 6000 years stuck on planet Earth. They really, want to get out of here. They missed their chance back in Egypt before The Fall of the Pharaohs...
Say we have a large cargo spaceship and a small pirate spaceship. The pirate ship is the only one with any sort of weaponry (lasers, missiles etc.), but for the pirates to safely retrieve the cargo...
I've noticed in recent scifi shows/movies such as the Expanse or Star Trek that the lighting inside spaceships have two characteristics: Punishingly blue lighting Dark/dimmed miscellaneous lighti...
The NASA Vehicle Assembly Building and the proposed Nazi Volkshalle are cited to be "big enough for weather systems to form inside them". The building has at least 10,000 tons of air conditioni...
In a Victorian society, an engineer has come up with a clever boat lift for his canal, using counterweights. In order to work correctly and most efficiently, the operators will need to know how muc...
I'm making a fairly hard Sci-Fi story, and I was wondering what the most scientifically plausible 'energy shield' (for ships and stations) would be. My world tries to remain true to basic physics, ...
So, out in Kansas, in the DEC Oil Refinery, a group of people, called simply the Disciples, have set up a community. From the outside, it seems like a utopia, one where man and mutant get along pea...
Eskimos in space! Let's say, just for contextual concerns, that a band of water-rich comet miners want to use water-ice found in the outer Solar System as the main structural and functional compone...
Okay, following my previous core question, after the apocalypse, one of my sets of survivors in this setting, the Usnay, managed to live in a fleet of ships for over a thousand years. This is pro...
I'm looking for a weapon a ship can carry that can disable a ship without any permanent damage to its subsystems or significant hull breaches. This will mostly be used by pirate factions (capturing...
Imagine we have a faster-than-light drive which costs ~$250,000 USD per drive and can propel an ISS-sized craft at 1000 times the speed of light. It is reliable and has safeguards that stop it from...
Solid Core Nuclear Thermal rocketry has existed for a while and I was thinking about using it as the primary propulsion in my setting. Now most Solid Core rockets still have fairly long transit tim...
User Interface Customization for Spaceship Controls; "In theory, practice and theory are the same. In practice, they're totally different." We often find that what we plan for isn't what actuall...
This question relates to an attack on a biological space vessel. My vessel is a space station made from wood, with an oxygen-rich atmosphere inside it. It is under attack and the attackers have de...
When flying a big spacecraft, one needs to keep several things in mind when designing the "user interface" used to control the spacecraft's flight path, or ultimately, the output of the thrusters/e...
This is not a very hard-science-fiction tale, but more about human relations and adaptability, but I still want it to sound plausible. A space faring civilisation that descend from humans uses bio...
Space is filled with all kinds of things that are unkind to cloth, such as dust and radiation, and they are the reason why sticking a nylon national flag on the moon isn't permanent. In my world I...
The ships would be permanently extra planetary and manned by 4-5 crew. All life support water, food, oxygen and propulsion being produced by bacterial cultures (not necessarily the same). With all...
I've never been satisfied with how this has been handled in any sci-fi story I've read, watched, etc. It always seems to get handwaved away with "we have sensor packages of various powers" and "the...
The title says it all. How would one go about creating a planet with aliens that have medieval grade technology (windmills and carts and stuff.) No high level technology. However, I want the aliens...
OK, here's the problem: I want to have a spaceship that is built for transporting large machines (in particular, heavy mining equipment). It does not and is not designed to leave space; transport d...
Could a untethered blimp be built strong enough to with stand a thunderstorm? Could wind generators be placed on it to transfer turbulence of shifting wind into wind power? Rain could be collected...
I've seen many sci-fi scenes that feature a ship underway on a deep space journey. As the ship passes the vantage point we can see engines burning during sub-FTL speeds (The Expanse most recently)....
I understand that there is wide range of bullet calibers. I am interested in the ones that is 50 caliber or less, and if you can be high enough in a blimp to be safe either by to far to see or to f...
I'm doing research for a space opera with some hard sci-fi elements. One faction does use radiators (dusty plasma particles held in magnetic fields- which would create the effect of glowing wings o...
The basis of my story revolves around a single survivor escaping a massive colony ship gone critical above the skies of an alien world. After his escape via escape pod, the ship crashes halfway acr...
I'm creating an Alien race based on Silica-Quartz crystals. While their planet is inhospitable to humans, the tectonically and volcanically active surface has created an abundance of crystalline fo...
I have been wracking my brain with this one. I'm writing a story where a number of alien races who are unable to leave their homeworld for one reason or another send probes into space out of sheer ...
One of the worlds I'm creating has a planet-wide communal sentient Biosphere (similar to Avatar). They have evolved the ability to bio-engineer whatever they need, and they have decided to send a p...
A disclaimer: There is a lot of real Science involved. Imagine a world which is exactly a copy of Earth (at least in terms of power as a species and technology). There is a company that aims to m...
So I'm working on a story that at its groundwork has a lot of sciency things, and then has a lot of unsciency things attached to it. The story has an FTL drive which is the good old "fold space, pu...
Assume that you are in an alien star system. Your ship is currently being hit by a phenomenon called solar overflow, which messes up your electronics and can kill you without good shielding. It is ...
When in space, the amount of force required to move goes down drastically, due to the virtual lack of drag. In this environment, would be feasible for engines in space (more specifically belonging ...
I am writing a Sci-Fi story that involves space ships shooting each other, as is the custom. I'm using a lot of handwavium, e.g. reactionless drives, FTL, gravity plating, etc., but I'd like the ac...
In my universe, there exist molecular level machines that can behave as a single entity. The humans use them for many purposes, including faster than light travel. The concept is as it follows: T...
To generate heat electrically inside a balloon for lift would a 20 watt LED light or a 20 watt heating element make more heat to lift a small closed hot air balloon droid and solar cell? Having a ...
Ok I have a moon, or cored out moon, that is a generation ship. I really do: I built it by mining out one of the rock/ice moons around my solar systems gas giants (not earth's solar system). Its...
I had in mind a sci-fi setting where humans have begun terraforming nearby planets without the benefit of faster-than-light travel. For example, Wikipedia lists a handful of terrestrial planets wit...
Crude Oil, is a term used to describe petroleum products harvested from geological formations beneath the Earth's surface. As a fuel they maybe called hydrocarbons, hydrocarbons can be found/creat...
I'm in the middle of creating a RPG one-shot for some friends, and I'm thinking of doing an Aliens meets Space Hulk style "Big-Gribbly Aliens VS Humans" game. Is there an upper limit to the size ...
Spaceships are a peculiar thing. We've got them in all forms, sizes & colours. They are everywhere and go everywhere else. carrying with them anything from music, over tractors, to foodstuffs a...
Current Settings Humanity could no longer access earth for some reason (it could be anything from alien invasion, third world war, ecological disaster, etc) starting at 2028, and they know about t...
So I'm writing a story about a crew of scientists that explore the universe searching for a hidden knowledge in embed in the fabric of the space itself. More like to the Destiny's crew from Stargat...
I am working on an alternate history where the USSR won the Moon Race (by upgrading the NK-15, starting development of the N1 earlier, and making cybernetics/computer science not a "bourgeois pseud...
Based on The Expanse TV series I wonder how people should build their ships to avoid spreading of highly contagious lifeform. Protomolecule's features: infectious agent with extra-terrestri...
I am creating a history for my galactic civilization, and was thinking that the first colonization ship might be launched around the year 2200. World War Three Just a few years from now, a third ...
Question If a ship went through an asteroid belt where the asteroids are mostly ice, could the ice in any way transfer onto the ship and give it coatings of ice in various places, or would there b...
In the science fiction setting I'm working on, I had a thought on how to reduce the detection ranges in space. On a previous question, I suggested the idea of capital ships and other support ships ...
