Posts tagged science-fiction
Suppose you have a regular old Stanford torus space station with a 'glass ceiling' rotating at 1.3 RPM. Put it in orbit around a star such that its axis of rotation intersects the star (in other wo...
The Coriolis effect on a ring-shaped space station gets the most attention, but disregarding that, would the rotation of the starfield be too disorienting? A 1km radius station at 1G simulated gra...
This will be a companion question for How plausible is my monster?. My previous question dealt with a story treatment for a hard science and realistic take on Kaiju/ giant monsters. While that sto...
What is the largest planet I can get, while still remaining within Earth-like parameters? My concern is with gravity, water pressure and atmospheric pressure. Escape velocity is less of a concern. ...
I'm struggling with the physics here a bit since I'm a complete novice at this. I'm making a character who's main ability is to subvert/play around with the 3rd Law of motion (For every action, the...
I'm struggling with the physics here a bit since I'm a complete novice at this. I'm making a character whose main ability is to subvert/play around with the 2nd Law of motion. Somehow I understand...
If I terraformed a moon to have enough artificial gravity/atmosphere to support life, would they end up just crashing into each other? Is there a way to not have this happen, e.g., increasing dista...
DISCLAIMER: Any resemblance to other starships (living or dead) is purely coincidental. The starship 'Exciting Undertaking' is a brand new ship about to set off on a five and a bit year mission to...
I need ideas for a chemical or disease which kills the victim upon holding it in the palm for about 4 or 5 seconds. The death isn't necessarily immediate, as it might take days to kill the victim i...
Alright, so I've been meaning to write out a planet with golden/yellow fields and a violet / purple ocean. What I was thinking about is having the water of this world is so clean and nourishing th...
Alright, so the primary inspiration for this is 55 Cancri e, the speculated carbon "diamond world" and to a degree, Nkllon, a planet in Star Wars that is essentially what Cancri is, but "confirmed"...
In my sci-fi world, mankind has begun colonization of the large asteroid Ceres. There are several established towns on the surface, but most of the population live underground in icy/rocky caves. T...
I'm currently writing this story where an intelligent lifeform, instead of human eye-sight, is able identify the chemical composition of their surroundings, by detecting and "mapping" all the atoms...
In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode The Die is Cast. A planetary bombardment scene occured where 17 shots was stated to have destroyed 30% of a planet's crust. Now obviously that's a HUGE amo...
As the title say, can a planet have a different gravitational pull depending on its location in orbit around its sun? Is this explainable without magic?
I have followed this forum for quite some time. Now is the time to ask my first question :) I'm currently working on a story in which a future, civilian luxury submarine is used to research some li...
What would the appearance and structure of trees be like if they used chitin, instead of lignin, for cell walls? This is assuming that all other properties are basically unchanged. These trees wo...
My question is based on the following excerpt from an article I read recently: Since the early neurological work of Karl Lashley and Wilder Penfield in the 1950s and 1960s, it has become clear ...
To be very-very simple: The very main setting of my world is a very special and very small galaxy, the galactic core of which is a quasar - with the "iconic" light beam in the middle, serving a sp...
Something in orbit around an inhabited planet blasts it with a hefty dose of gamma rays/x-rays/something else, killing everyone within a relatively short time frame (hours or days) but leaving no o...
My planet is a 20% larger than the earth, assume a similar atmosphere, but it can be changed to fit the narrative. My ship is not so large as in the original question, a cylinder shape, about a mi...
This is my first question on this site, which I recently found and can't get enough of. In many time travel scenarios, the machine is static in space. My question is how to explain this. For exa...
I've answered a few questions with this process but I wanted to see if I could bounce/refine this off the communities more biologically adept members. Basically, it goes like so: As a means o...
Okay, so I'm working on a novel and I'd like to have a dense asteroid field, something akin to the old ESB Hoth field, though it doesn't need to match that exactly. The notion is there is an advan...
In figuring out the rough timeline for my sci-fi, I've run into an interesting dilemma. As it stands right now, There are about 90 years in between one of my civilizations discovering space travel ...
To make a long story short, the previous ice age resulted in not just massive glaciers and building snow from appearing, but larger landmass as well due to most of the water being frozen from the c...
I've been working on a project and I'm trying to make it as scientifically plausible as I can get it to be. Since space is large, and it's physically impossible in this universe to reach the speed ...
This short story, which I've already written, is set in the FAR, FAR FUTURE, where a robotic space probe is exploring as much of the known universe as it can, despite its AI not knowing if its crea...
My idea is a device that gives its user great power over the ocean, its currents, and presumably temperatures. Could this be used to dramatically (and in relatively short time) effect the climate o...
In this scenario, humanity has managed to colonise some of the solar system, including Mars, some of the moons of Saturn and Jupiter and some of the larger asteroids of the belt. In most places th...
I know that chemical rockets would allow for some minor loads to escape the gravity of a planet with higher gravity. My question is, what kind of technology would possibly allow a dominant specie...
I have some research I want to do about a planet for a novel I'm writing. It is a fiction/science fiction novel, but I do wish to actually have some parts of the world correct in the scenes I depic...
I have created a planet which is a clone of Earth. Except I messed up where wasps, cobras and scorpions were concerned and they have turned out to be the size of elephants (everything in proportio...
Researching for a science fiction novel. My character loves math + I have dyscalculia = Problem. Therefore, I need your help. In my story, there are aliens we can see, but we can't hear or touch. ...
While the vampire is a monster of folklore, modern technothrillers (e.g. Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency, Ultraviolet, Blade, Underworld, Daybreakers) have portrayed vampires as humans infected b...
Is it possible to directly convert radioactivity to turn it into electricity? If yes, then what is the conversion rate?
A creature in my story was largely inspired by the xenomorphs of the Alien franchise. In wondering how long it would take one of these creatures to grow from conception to maturity, I decided to lo...
FTL (Faster than Light) travel exists,taking around 88 hours 48 seconds to travel 1 light year. FTL communications also exists and takes only 53.28 seconds to travel 1 LY (Light Year). Jumps longer...
In my world, humans encounter an alien species. They want to communicate verbally with each other, so I'd like to know what sounds could be shared by both species. The species has no/very thin li...
In my universe a race of humanoid beings caused 3 planets: Earth a larger rocky planet and another earth sized rocky planet to crash and collide into each other, but still allowed the humanoi...
I am currently working a humanoid roughly deer-like species in a sci-fi roleplay setting, and one of the developments I have had with such species has me stuck trying to explain it in a way that ma...
So, I'm writing a sci-fi story, which has a setting which involves human colonists crash landing on a massive, icy hellhole. The weather is extreme on the surface, and because of it, wireless commu...
continuing from the question I had asked yesterday, I have had another query come to mind. For my humanoid alien species to possess horns, it would surely put forward the risk of being the shortcut...
I'm building a moderately hard scifi future setting that focuses on space and land warfare and I'm trying to decide what would be the most realistic from an engineering standpoint of artillery tec...
I was thinking about the classic beanpole design for interstellar travel. Wouldn't the Whipple shield need to be at least twice as wide as the ship is long to fully protect it from collisions with ...
There is a popular belief that the muscles of our body are controlled only by electrical impulses. This is not entirely a lie, but ... From what little I have researched, the nerves send a command ...
A black hole is supposed to suck in everything by nature. Micro black holes are theorized to "fizz out", so for example if one was on Earth it would not grow until Earth was consumed. It would seem...
I have my eyes on this new Porsche but all I have is an unlimited supply of ice and a molecular distillery. How can I convert this ice into gold? The molecular distillery can disassemble and reass...
I'm thinking up a Mars or Venus type planet where the poles (or one pole) has a forest growing out of it due to a device that is used to make the planet more habitable by creating a oxygen friendly...
I know it may be a bit of a silly question and not really something of great importance to a story, but how would you secure a spaceship when you leave? For example; when the Millennium Falcon lan...
