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Setting The US is waging a failing War on Drugs where cartels are quickly gaining power. Scenario In the near future, say 2030, with current technology, the Texas state government is implementin...
Arising from the comments in This Question, which started to stray offtopic into the question of whether men are needed at all. In Short: Could you create a fertilized human (necessarily female) f...
This is inspired by What single element could destroy the world?. Injecting sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere has been proposed as a mechanism to relieve the symptoms of global warming by creatin...
In How large a bioengineered mobile lifeform could exist on Earth?, I asked how big my nanoassembled war beasts could be, and it was suggested that I make my question more specific. I am designing...
When looking to design armor - how can I determine whether a given ballistic object would completely stop, deflect into another direction, or penetrate another object given complete physical inform...
For my story, I need to know the following: I have a (long exposure) analog (as in "not digital") picture of the night sky taken on a random planet somewhere in the Milky Way galaxy. I know it i...
Given that a laser beam is made up of coherent light waves running in parallel in the same direction, and that space is not a complete vacuum (dust, radiation, electromagnetic forces etc.), what ki...
I want to play with the idea of a sapient species evolving on a world where at least part of the world experiences a permanent day. The obvious way to doing this would be where part of the world f...
As a source of food, would it be possible to have fish and/or plants living inside a water tank situated between the fusion or fission power plant and the crew quarters of a ship? The ship in ques...
So I'm writing a setting featuring asteroid mining à la Deep Space Industries, where the material mined is used for construction in space rather than brought to Earth. To maximize efficiency, I'm ...
In many movies we see super heroes creating walls of ice to block explosions and bullets. How realistic is this? In the Incredibles Frozone shoots ice at a police officer just before he shoots a ...
In this question I asked about the possibilities of what a boundary might be like, with emphasis on the storytelling. Now I'd like to investigate what a hard boundary would mean in quantum mechani...
I gave this a quick test on sandbox, and agreed with the comment that I should steer away from the physics part and focus on the geology, etc. Assuming Europa's ice crust is 10km thick as some spe...
Imagine someone from the modern day somehow gets transported back in time around the same time of WW2 without warning ahead of time. He has with him a laptop, graphing calculator (and a hand full ...
I've built a device, it's capable of turning matter to energy and energy to matter with perfect efficiency, I've got the resources to build a space station in secrecy, and I want to get off the pla...
A large solar flare event ignites the atmosphere of Earth, but luckily, humans have been preparing for an event like this for some time. We have a fairly large shelter around 2.2 kilometers undergr...
Okay, so now that we've established that the badger folk (or Melinae sapien, if you want to be politically correct) are trading their ore to the humans for cat food. Now we need to determine what ...
Lets say I have a space fleet flying to attack an installation. The enemy knows I'm coming but not my numbers or exact disposition. Since I'm moving much slower then C the light from my fleet wil...
As the legend goes, Coca-Cola was planning on shooting lasers at the moon to project their logo. Unfortunately, the FFA said no (they didn't want planes to be blinded). I haven't been able to confi...
The Halo video game's extended universe book Halo: Evolutions describes the Battle of Psi Serpentis, in which a superjovian planet is converted into a brown dwarf via massive nuclear bombardment of...
In the game Portal, there are glowing light platforms. These platforms are (supposedly) made of solid, compressed light. How can these realistically be made?
Anchor one end of the cable to the side of the moon that faces the earth. Drop the other end of the cable to earth so that it drags along the ground. The earth's gravity and friction contributes a ...
In the Warhammer 40k universe, there are planets where the population hasn't developed so far and are left in the feudal stage, (or the technology has degenerated so much it is back to the point). ...
Imagine that God has many universes to deal with or just needs a break sometimes. He has a pause control. What plausible mechanism does God use to perform the pause without breaking the laws of ph...
It's the far future. Humans are still! increasing in population. We have developed habitable orbital structures and terraformed any planet we possibly could. We reached the maximum potential for h...
Mars is a cold, inhospitable, slightly damp ball of rock that would be very difficult to do things like grow crops on. However, it's also very far away. Far enough that, presumably, it would probab...
In 2015 we can rewind the TV, our CCTV footage and, if we wear an action cam, our latest adventure. However if we walk down the street and something happens we didn't quite catch, the annoying fact...
I have a story where a powerful outside force killed (next to) all humans on earth some decades ago. The way I want to build it is that it required that the human outposts on the moon to die as we...
Okay, so some space miners fly into space to get Helium-3, and then fly it back to earth to sell to non-space people. Flying into and off the earth is rather expensive, so they want to simply take ...
I want to get a shuttle from place to place in a reasonable amount of time. Say, 6 to 8 hours maximum, with a short break at the midpoint to turn around. Assuming constant acceleration to midpoin...
My question is simple: How many nested moons are physically possible? If our moon had a moon, that would be a nesting of 1. I'm assuming it's easily possible for a really big moon to be orbiting ...
So, imagine a team of space marines, fighting some sort of space bug zombies on a planet's moon. Things are going pretty bad for them, and the last surviving protagonists are running for their live...
Considering our topic challenge, and the fantastic eclipse last Sunday a question came to me. Could there be a stable (relatively speaking) planetary system where a(n) eclipse/alignment would actu...
In Ribbontails Series Aman5 there are creatures called Kuutamian animals. These animals are sapient and can have any form. The creator uses the excuse that they have three DNA strands, but how real...
The Biblical story of the Flood describes how over a period of 40 days the earth is flooded so that the peak of the highest mountain is 15 cubits/22.5ft/6.858m below the new mean sea level. The fl...
An alien race decides to test the hability of humans to survive and engage into space travel, for whatever reason. The planets The aliens prepares a pair of Earth-like planets revolving around a ...
It seems that my ability to create interesting creatures is limited by the need for sexual reproduction, which is absurdly useful, but also rather limiting, method of sharing genetics. I acknowled...
In my story, I have a small extended family of 30 to 40 individuals ranging in age from 0 to 50 who are on the run from Chinese and Japanese forces in 1400AD. No place in Asia is safe for them. By...
Well, I ask the question because apparently I am going to aim for NaNoWriMo. I am calculating the density of a planet with 1.8 Earth masses and 0.9 Earth radii, but last I checked, the calculation...
After writing this question, I came up with a new question. Consideration The considerations are mostly similar to the linked question (reading it is highly encouraged, as I am trying to post as...
So we have had multiple questions on having multiple moons and this is another. I did check and didn't find questions that covered this specific setup. I have an earth-like world I am working on, ...
Earth is more massive than Mars, so people on Martian soil would definitely suffer some health issues due to weaker gravity. Blood circulation is badly affected as heart muscles starts to deteriora...
In the year 2099 A.D, humans made a major discovery. There is a rich source of fossil fuel buried beneath layers of Martian soil. It is estimated that the coal deposit that was discovered could fil...
This has been considered other places on the net, but I thought it would be good for the hard-science challenge, since it is often an example of the subtle difference between soft and hard science....
Throwing big rocks at planets is so passe and any asteroid tug can do that now. The Intergalactic Arms Reduction Treaty forbids the intentional bombardment of a planet's surface with large asteroi...
An alien spaceship the size of an Empire State Building experiences a technical issues with its cloaking device, their duty technician needs 24 hours to repair and meanwhile the alien wants to avoi...
I'm currently exploring a setting where humans have managed to create traversable wormholes with one critical flaw - something in the wormhole both kills multi-cellular life and destroys electronic...
I'm seeking a hard science setting for a piece of xenofiction with a decidedly non-sciencey feel. That said, there is no magic or magic technology. The idea is as follows: A red dwarf star has a...
The spud gun uses air pressure to shoot a projectile - unusually a potato - at high speed towards a distant target much similar to todays revolvers. The only difference is that there is no gunpowde...
You won't miss and definitely won't be among the stars. Set in late 22nd century A.D. we are constructing a space elevator that would physically connects Earth and the moon, the lift will be using ...
