Posts tagged air
I want to have air transport as the dominant means of public transportation in my fictional city. But how would such a system operate to handle many commuters with maximum efficiency? Specifically ...
When I say all-metal airships, I'm referring to something like the above from Jakub Rozalski's artwork - the design is more akin to a naval destroyer or battleship and less like a zeppelin. We'v...
What needs to be improved or added to the structure (device) of human lungs to be able to filter toxic chemical compounds in the air (for example, in mines the air may contain nitrogen, methane, ca...
I have a post-apocalyptic scenario, set in the ruins of an American metropolis with flooded streets. Boats are used most of the time, but aircrafts have advantages, for battle or if you have to get...
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...
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 ...
it's my first question here, I'll try to be clear. I'm creating a story where there is a steampunk style civilization that has to face advanced civilizations in planetary and spatial battles. I'm...
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...
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...
For practical purposes I think about something in line of Cessna 172. As it was the most produced aircraft, then it must have hit some sweet spot or be near it. atmosphere with barely noticeably ...
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 ...
Alastair Reynolds is a contemporary sci-fi writer whose works often demonstrate a strong grip on science as it presently stands. Recently, I picked up his book On The Steel Breeze for a quick re-re...
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...
I am trying to design a single seat fighter capable of achieving (or getting close to) hypersonic velocities at high altitude. In this universe I am assuming compact fusion is a common technology. ...
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 ...
In my world, both lighter- and heavier-than-air craft exist and are rather useful devices. However, problems tend to occur when confronted with storms. Steering through a storm is not a problem in...
In my conworld I've got heavily armoured airships majestically floating through the skies with help of a science-defying lighter-than-anything material. While I don't mind introducing a pinch of p...
While similar to other questions they mostly focused on what impacts required in the past to keep airships as a popular air transport method today, this question is about how to make airships the d...
I want to achieve the following. Jet + secret base underwater + blow up water with bomb to gain entry to tunnel at bottom of the sea, see image: Say that the depth is 1000m, then Based on calcul...
Airships are cool, and one of the only vehicles that benefits of the square cube law as it can carry more weight if it has more volume of lifting gas. This got me thinking about what other advantag...
Setting: In my world I've introduced some science-defying material. I use it to grant the ability of flight to airships that are less Hindenburg-y and more ship-y. They are not literally ships that...
So I'm incubating a few alternate histories in my head. Many of them will butterfly away the Wright Brothers and many other familiar parts of history, and at least one has aircraft development as a...
So in my world it is the future and ALMOST ALL NATURAL METALS are gone. They needed power to get delivered in some form. One scientist thought up a solution: Human hair. The science community was ...
Sometimes old, discredited or impractical ideas come back to favor, because a new technology has evolved. Let us imagine a future Earth-like world (not early 20th century or steampunk) that would ...
In the first question I posted here on Worldbuilding Stack Exchange, I asked if lifting gas would be more effective on a world with 1/3 of Earths gravity but with the same atmospheric composition a...
As many of us probably know airships were one of the great forms of transportation in the 20th century but a great hindrance to their development was weight. In a world I am currently constructing ...
Airships are a hallmark of countless steampunk and dieselpunk constructed universes. Of course, in our world, they were around for a short while. I want to know what effects geographical circumstan...
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...
So I'm writing a story and decided to use Hida Furukawa as the location. It has a high school with a field of 650 ft that theoretically could be used for a small aircraft to be use to take off. In ...
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...
While working on my story, I just came up with this doubt. Is it possible to know or to detect something like a submarine in an ocean from an aircraft with our current technology? I mean to detect ...
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...
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 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...
It turns out that a single strand of human hair measures 17 to 181 millionths of a meter wide. But anyone who creates or reinvents a fictional species of humanoid has the freedom to change the dim...
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 ...
What would happen to an airplane in space? Or to be more specific, would anything interesting happen to the plane itself, and would the passengers and crew be able to survive for longer than a few ...
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 (...
In my setting, fossil fuels do not exist. I'm handwaving an alternative behavior of radioactive material, and alternative magnetism-like forces. These are explained below. My question now is: Can ...
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...
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...
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...
A society lives on geostationary platforms at some vast height above the ground. The platforms themselves are not affected by gravity, wind, etc. Their technology has only just reached the point wh...
I'm working on a science fiction story which includes the following premise: Tony Stark invents an unobtainium reactionless engine, and the protagonists want to build a spaceship around it, big eno...
I know that humans can naturally have more than 1 hair color, whether that is in a transition from 1 color to another or they are born with it. Like for example there are babies with both red and b...
On a tidally locked Earth-like planet a big part of long distance air routes would have to approach the hurricane eye and some may even benefit from it. On Earth aircraft are able to save time and...
This is question #1 regarding the background art of Worldbuilding.SE One of the first things I noticed when I found this site was that amazing background picture. I like to think a great story can...
Obviously, it's not a good idea. The premise: An advanced species has a plot to remove everything in our airspace and place it 1.5 million kilometers away from Earth. Their purpose is a misguide...
Venus is being paraterraformed with floating cities. Mechanical machines collect material from the surface and send it floating at an altitude of about 50 Km where conditions are more Earth-like. H...
