Posts tagged ships
I was trying to think of a way to land a spaceship. The best I could think of was a ridiculously long airstrip for landing, and lots of catapults for takeoff, but then there was the problem of havi...
Say in the later 1700s/early 1800s handwavium is discovered. It's a metal that when heated causes more way more upward lift than hot air or hydrogen/helium produces in similar volumes. Air travel (...
Established rules for the universe: FTL travel exists with special drives, special artificial generated wormhole like tunnels where space ships can break the laws of physics. Engines runs hot, bu...
An interstellar spaceship carrying a thousand personnel was attacked by a group of space pirates while crossing the nebula. The nearest habitable planet is several light-hours away. Help will onl...
I'm an aspiring author, aiming to determine the physical realism of certain fictional concepts within a constructed universe identical to our own. There are many contingent ideas which I must expla...
Setting So for generations a ship has been traveling through space. After reaching their desired destination you are left with a group of people who have been used to their largest spaces being no...
Forgive me for misusing any terms. This is a subject I'm not knowledgeable in at all aside from doing some online research. In the novel I'm writing, I have an abandoned scientific polar research ...
I'm trying to come up with a the most economical design for artificial gravity. The simplest design for a space ship is to have a spinning ring structure around a central body. People living in the...
(This question is not about getting scrap metal out of orbit and recycling it: please see the second and third sections of the question text.) Consider an object which was not designed for, or ha...
In a previous question, I established an area that creates megastorms. Unlike a bunch of my other questions, this one is incredibly straightforward: Just how deep does a submarine (Or aquatic life...
So, if Humanity wants to conquer the galaxy one star at a time, it is going to need a massive fleet. This fleet will require massive resources to build. If I want to build a fleet to take over the ...
Let's just take antimatter off the table right now. As I've learned recently, it's hard to make, expensive as hell and even more volatile, and you can never get more energy out of it than you put i...
The setting I'm thinking of is in the not-so-distant future where humanity has become an interplanetary species using conventional propulsion. The solar system is largely colonized with human settl...
Would a starship that was propelled by magnetic monopoles fly faster and longer than ion engines (assuming magnetic monopoles exist) of course.
Is there any way for a large civilization to get objects into space without using rockets or explosions? I'm considering a planet roughly equivalent to Earth, where (for whatever reason) rockets ...
Inspired by this question on putting massive capacitor-banks on spaceships I have been wondering about alternative ways to store excess energy from ever-running reactors. In this question I would ...
I've hit a wall in my tale of humans attempting to escape the Singularity or a fate worse than death by running off into the depths of space. And I only have myself and my accursed hard sci-fi lean...
How do you check if a room behind a door aboard a spaceship has an atmosphere and pressure? This is so that you would not accidentally open a door to a room which is open to space. I imagine ther...
A civilization is very good at bio-engineering, and I was wondering if there was any kind of chemical an organism could produce which would produce viable rocket fuel. It has to do a of couple of ...
Scientists have just released details on their discovery of inter-galactic baryon material - "Dark Matter" that turns out to be regular matter, except that it is 'dark' - dispersed throughout the i...
I was wondering if it is plausible for a civilization to go from the end of the stone age to the space age from 6,000 years to 10,000 years. I was thinking this planet's star was starting to die, a...
The Humern Empire is a vast, well established empire that spans the galaxy. Despite having no FTL travel they have kept their empire together with a series of subluminal transport methods. Heavy c...
I'm really in doubt if a fusion thruster could be used inside a planet (populated places). As i saw in the TV show "The Expanse", their fusion engines are really, really hot, hotter than the surfac...
The current topic challenge is apocalypse, so I figured I might as well come up with a question about surviving one. A man named Noah somehow learns that there will be a large flood within one yea...
You are on a generation ship in interstellar space, between star systems. We know that there are rocks whizzing around out there - escaped asteroids, bashed planets, we have even put a few artifici...
Imagine a spaceship constructed for merfolk and it is completely filled with oxygenated water instead of air. Since they can swim around effortlessly in the water, do they even need artificial gr...
Our Heroes are a small group of people around the level of the heroes of The Skylark Of Space. Operating on a budget of maybe ten million dollars, they've built a spacecraft with a mass somewhere a...
The classical rigid airship uses a heavy envelope which accounts for the large buoyancy balloon. This comes on account of aerodynamics. My first concept was a thin and long "cigar" where the cockpi...
In my Sci-Fi universe, I want humans to, initially, have two traits to their spaceship building: Really good drive systems, at least compared to other races. Complete and utter lack of any sci-fi...
In my story, I have a slower-than-light starship (traveling at 0.6 $c$) going to Alpha Centauri A. There are several planets around the star. The target planet is a terrestrial, habitable world orb...
How could you feasibly extract hydrogen from a star to power a plasma fusion reactor, with as little handwavium as possible? This takes place in a sci-fi setting, but isn't necessarily hard science...
What planetary conditions would make flight easiest for both lighter than air and heavier than air craft together? The planet is earth like and habitable, but the conditions can be adjusted to sui...
Inspired by this question, and this article, activating self-destruct mechanism disengage coolant system for the ship's main reactor, which then increases the core temperature and triggers explosio...
In this scenario, light-bending camouflage is already in use to prevent civilians from seeing any spacecraft as they enter the atmosphere. The question is whether it is realistic to visualize this...
In space-trading games like Escape Velocity, Elite: Dangerous & others, cheap FTL exists, but lags in other advancements results in a playable environment that is politically fractured and not ...
Is there any real technology, experimental or conceptual, that can prolong a person's survivability in outer space in case of sudden life support failure? Something that is also easy to wear or imp...
Realistically, if we are ever going to mine asteroids, it would be drones and robots that do it, not humans, because of safety and cost reasons. What reason could justify the participation of human...
I have always wondered if a kind of blimp-like spacecraft would not be our answer for some kind of futuristic spacecraft design. Imagine this: a blimp-like spacecraft is loaded with cargo on the g...
I'm looking for some reasons that could force a spaceship to land at the nearest planet and cut all connections with the homeland planet, so all the crew will be force to settle at the planet for a...
Enter Iaeptus - A million man mission born on a fleet of ten thousand ship to the outer solar system. Their commander : Minevera, a brain-in-a-vat super computer. With a weight of 5 tons, a neuron ...
In a world where torch ships sometimes will accelerate over 10Gs for hours, maybe sometimes days on end. Is there any way to keep the crew alive and preferably fully functional in during such hars...
take me out to the black, tell 'em I ain't comin' back DaaaahWhoosh - 2min ago Merfolk live in the deep, plenty deep exactly, around 800m below sea-level. At these depths we talk about litt...
While trying to figure out a way that individuals could own spacecraft in my sci-fi setting without having access to things that could double as weapons of mass destruction, I settled on the widesp...
What other ways are there to save a human for a very long time. I know only about cryostasis. Let's say we have a spaceship traveling several hundred light years to a distant galaxy.
In my world ... Actually, in every hard sci-fi world with casual interplanetary travel, the G-force involved in acceleration would becomes so high that no unmodified human being could realistically...
Would it be possible for a spaceship of some sort to descend from space and through the atmosphere of an Earth-like planet, not land, then turn around and head back into space? In other words, coul...
I may not have been paying as much attention as perhaps I could but I have the impression that, in fiction and reality, most civilian space habitats, whether ships or stations use a relatively thic...
This question is really about best possible travel times between celestial bodies. In my current sci-fi setting, the Human race is spaceborne, but incapable of FTL travel. Their thrusters are exc...
A group of ships I've made are supposed to be modular in design with each modular hull segment being self sustainable both in terms of power needs and crew upkeep (oxygen, food, water, etc.) I've ...
Imagine a very long bridge (Visbi Bridge - named after the designer) across an immense canyon - really almost a wide deep gorge -use on an earth-like world. My concept is that part of the support o...
