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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 (...
Mars has an inactive mantle and core and thus little magnetosphere to speak of. Assume that a lunar mass object is placed in Mars orbit at 300,000 kilometers out (one light-second). Given the tidal...
Let's say we have a binary star system, with a high mass star and a low mass, red dwarf star. High mass stars emit their light mainly in the ultraviolet while low mass stars emit mainly in the infr...
In an upcoming writing project, I will be focusing on an autonomous drone that picks through space wreckage. It has access to intermittent star light, but has no source of chemical propellant. The ...
First, I guess the conditions of the world are in order. It's approximately 85% the mass of earth and there is going to be a full ecosystem with all the usual types of bugs, insects, trees, and pre...
In my world, dragons are big, and require lots of energy just to support their massive bodies and huge brains - and of course, to fly, using enormous oversized wings. Rather than causing mass extin...
Suppose we have a world that saw a sudden collapse of civilization, not so violent that humans are suddenly struggling to survive but severe enough to cause humans to revert to a mix of city-state,...
A futuristic entrepreneur wants to start a cruise line company and needs to build a cruise ship that will not only float on a gas giant, but be habitable throughout a 7 day trip (for the uber-rich ...
A sandcrawler is is a tracked vehicle about 40 meters long, 20 meters tall, and 15 meters wide. It has a thick outer hull for protection from the elements. It has eight sets of tracks, four abreast...
Out in the desert wastes of my planet, there are living multiple tribes of psychotic raiders who have acquired a number of harmful mutations due to naturally high radiation in the areas that they l...
The admiral of a space fleet that belongs to a Type 3 civilization has been given orders to obliterate all planets within the habitable zone of a Sun like star. Some of the planets have been ident...
BACKGROUND I'd like my earth-like world to have a naturally formed narrow strip of land that bridges a major sea. Now, before anyone rushes off to comment about island chains and land bridges, I'l...
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 ...
In my book I have a city which is constantly dark. The sun doesn't reach it. This is because it's a city of waste, so all the waste gets thrown into this city and lit on fire every single day, whic...
On an alternative Earth live the people of Tcelonia. One of their founding myths goes that, in the dawn of times, when they were under the menace of being attacked by an enemy population, for an e...
Bob is older than he looks. Specifically, even though Bob looks like he's in his twenties or thirties (it's hard to tell), he was actually born in Europe about ten thousand years ago, long before ...
In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war. The world has become a barren wasteland that is inhospitable to the the human race, which has been forced to take residence in hive cities...
I'm exploring a post-apocalyptic world and want to build a realistic scenario for the condition of abandoned ruins. What would you estimate to be the lifespan of the following building types? And...
Judging by the majority of answers from this question: What would be a logical reason to explain space based families having more children than an earth based one the spacers are going to have lots...
So I am interested in doing a kingdom building novel in a sci-fi universe. I was thinking of having a English aristocratic government. With the king at the top and various nobles ( Dukes, Earls, Ma...
Assuming we are unable to see the black hole via any way such as gravitational lensing, accretion disc or whatever. This is hand wave approach just to make my setting work, due to this answer whic...
I am looking for a good reason to make radio communications on a planetary scale unfeasible or impossible. Short-range use is acceptable, but no transmissions should make it to orbit or over the ho...
This is a follow up to a previous question that I thought should be a new question instead of just discussing in the comments of that one. This is an idea for a space station on the surface of ...
This is something that was just offhandedly mentioned in a Sci-Fi book I read once and as I am now writing one myself I thought I might use it. The scenario is that I have a ship approaching a wa...
I am trying to find an explanation to a planet in which the gravity is not constant, thus allowing some continents to be situated 2-3 km above surface while others are "grounded" on the surface. T...
