Posts tagged engineering
In my previous two questions regarding temperature regulation and Rotations I set up the idea of creating a multi-layered shell world consisting of planetary crusts stuffed inside one another creat...
In its heyday Earth was a great interplanetary trading post on account of its low gravity moon which was used as a warehouse for all kinds of goods. The Moon was covered almost entirely in large w...
Background A McKendree cylinder is a rotating cylindrical space habitat comparable to the more well known O'Neill model. It was proposed by NASA engineer Thomas McKendree in 2000 as an update of O...
I am a post-human adapted for permanent life in vacuum and micro-gravity. How might my physiology and biochemistry overcome the following challenges? Please note I have a strong cultural aversion ...
In my colonizing business, some colonists build a underwater base on a all-about nice planet. They are using food storage right now; but now they need to start farming. Ive looked up some farming t...
In the scenario I'm envisioning, my group is in a city. They've got a source of hydroelectric power, but a few downed power lines/utility poles are making it difficult for them to transmit the ele...
In the relatively realistic (hopefully), near future, scifi book I am writing I am at a point where I am describing the observation deck of a large ship belonging to a wealthy "business man" (see s...
What realistic mechanism could be utilized to allow my drone to hover and move around in a visually pleasing and non distracting way? I am currently working on a short sci-fi film, which, among ot...
Some areas of the evil meant lair are not for the eyes of the average minion. There is only one way in and out of this area, there is no door blocking the way, but a lava waterfall pouring from the...
So I'm the owner of a startup which is going to make our lives easier with custom-DNA creatures! Our few first products are selling very well and nothing was wrong until last week's events. Anothe...
I am wondering if it would be possible to make very lightweight and small steam engines for airships. Said airships engines are actually electric, but the boiler generates the electricity (via a ge...
The Humern empire is vast, unbelievably powerful and (in certain matters) brutally authoritarian. One such issue is that of reproduction. In order to ensure that all subjects of the Empire remain ...
Let's say that a patient is in hospital suffering a terminal disease or at least a physical injury that's very expensive to treat. The only hope of salvation is to have artificial, or cybernetic, ...
It's been a good year for me as an Evil Overlord. Lots of princess kidnapping turned into sizable ransoms, several of my Doomsday Devices were sold for high prices at auction, and my Minions have b...
This is a partial extension to this question: What kind of natural armor would stop bullets? I was wondering if a creature could grow armor in such a way which would allow for it to detach a porti...
Background It is the near future. After a major world war and limited nuclear exchange, the nations of Earth have consolidated into a few blocs. The threat of further war and the cumulative damage...
Giant dome concepts are beautiful, but I can't help but wonder how they could be so fragile. If there is even the tiniest rip, the whole thing would rapidly decompress. How would you protect agains...
So, the Mediterranean Empire has succeeded in separating the entire Mediterranean Sea from the rest of the world's oceans. See this question for background and premise. There are now dams making su...
Spaceships are a peculiar thing; as are the Humies - the hardy folks working and living inside these hunks of metal for weeks or months at a time. Ironically in space living-space is at a premium. ...
Some Context I watched a generic Da-Vinci-Code-like french movie that, in a certain point, featured a secret society trying to find an item of great value that was lost in a vault built centuries ...
Magnetic fields behave in many of the same ways as electric fields. Could a society develop a magnetic based system of computation before they invent an electric method like modern integrated circu...
I'm writing a Colonization story, and I'm trying to determine which propulsion system would be the best option. The destination is Kapteyn b, 12.76Ly from Earth, and our 40K colonists will be in Cr...
Basically I want my character to have only gotten their powers through the luck of two parents with the right genes mixing. Technically, given enough time and enough generations of breeding, couldn...
Here's the problem I'm having. I need a solution for the following situation. I have a sci-fi starship drive that needs 140TJ of energy every 6 hours. I have a Fusion Reactor that can produce 200T...
Is there a way to design a river system in an O'Neill/McKendree-style cylindrical habitat to passively feed into itself in an endless loop, from one end of the habitat to the other and back again? ...
Let's say a genetically engineered organism (as large as a whale), capable of swimming and breathing underwater, have an EMP field as a form of defense against man-made watercraft like warships and...
Before we get into the question, I'd just like to say that this isn't specifically for Spider-man, but more of a general "character who moves around a lot and finds themselves upside-down quite oft...
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...
Background: I am working on a super soldier transhuman/posthuman concept for my fictional world. It takes the base human genome then uses genetic engineering to augment, delete, enhance, add, and ...
I want to know if this is physically possible. So at first I thought I was nuts. Then I started reading about Hill Radii, and googled left and right. Turns out a Hill Sphere is the region around an...
An advanced civilization collects enough Magnesium and Oxygen, from all over the Galaxy, to equal the mass of a star, and then reacts the Magnesium and Oxygen to produce Magnesium Oxide. The civil...
If you were tasking with creating a genetically engineered flying creature, capable of full powered flight on a (newly terraformed) planet with a surface gravity almost twice that of Earth's, do yo...
A civilization creates a supermassive black hole with an electric charge such that the radius of its inner horizon is 3/4 the radius of its outer horizon. In nature, a black hole with this much el...
...and while I'm at it: You've another 47 seconds to finish up and get back here before I gotta throw her in reverse... Acting Navvy on the Marube @63kph and ~4km distance from a forthcoming t...
I'm building a world where all continents are Islands. Since I was interested in giving a little bit of science backup on this particular thing, I decided that the weather was mostly windy and st...
I mean in the far future megascale be advanced enough to allow the construction of a ring world around Earth or around a low mass star( a red dwarf for exemple). If yes, how big Earth would look f...
It would be cool if this entire planet could use zeppelin roadways instead of tarmac roads. Especially for countryside transport away from cities. A zeppelin for one person is about the size of a l...
In my world, Southern Europe, Northern Africa and all the territories surrounding the Mediterranean belong to a single empire. The Emperor and his Council have decided that they are going to drain...
In my world, a scientist and engineer by the name of Guoliang Guan successfully uproots and moves a quarter of a million tons of habitat, industry, miscellaneous chemicals, storage containers, rock...
I'm thinking of constructing a flying machine in the comic story I'm working on. Since I'm not an aviation expert, I'll try my best to describe this aircraft and you guys can tell me if this mach...
My post-post apocalyptic society (200+ years after the fall) is extremely technologically stratified, with the haves hoarding near-future technology and the have-nots making do with pre-industrial ...
Piggybacking on this question: Can you simply scale up animals? how CAN we scale up living creatures to be giant sized? What would need to done to make truly giant animals (Dragons, Kong, Godzilla,...
I was not entirely sure how to word the title question, so allow me to put my question into more detail here: Suppose there was a planet with just the right conditions to allow humans to live ther...
Inspired by this question, so credit to them for the core idea. How might a slow fire energy weapon reliably neutralize its target? Here are some details about the precise design I had in mind: I...
Here's the full question: What's the most plausible way to bio-engineer an underground ecosystem, without using photosynthesis, so a mine system would not need an active air exchange system? (It w...
Asked a similar question before but didn't think it through and mangled it. Anyway would it be possible to build a structure between two star systems? Basic scenario is that you have two stars su...
The Context I have a group of genetically engineered people known as 'crows'. Their genome has been meddled with significantly enough that they are unable to successfully reproduce with humans, bu...
I'm writing a story about a group of humans (or humanoid people) that are living on a spaceship that's orbiting a planet with high gravity; the force is too much for direct human involvement. There...
I've been trying to create a water planet with certain aspects. I wanted it to have a breathable atmosphere and to be a microgravity environment. I'm developing humanoid characters that can breathe...
How could complex life like humans of or other animals evolve to exist in temperatures in excess of 100 degrees centigrade. This does not need to be natural as long as it can in theory be achieved ...
