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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...
My planet has an increased axial tilt, resulting in crazier winters and summers and higher temperatures. For most places, the temperature never drops below freezing - even in the winter, but the da...
It seems to me like one of the major obstacles to terraforming a planet is to give it a magnetosphere. In our solar system, this is accomplished naturally either by a hot iron core (for example, Ea...
In this article, scientists are investigating river channels on Earth, Mars, and Titan to see how rivers modify their landscapes. The following quote caught my eye: Rivers are, in a way, topogr...
Climate is not my priority because I prefer to develop the culture and the languages. However, climate has a strong influence in the culture, so I need to know the basics. So, I have a country loc...
Ten thousand random adults have been magically transported from Earth to an Earth-like planet with a surface gravity of 1.5g. The planet is otherwise completely habitable (enough sun, the right te...
I'm trying to think of ways that a habitable tidally locked planet could have something that resembles a day/night cycle. Shadows caused by any moons being out of the question. Hypothetically, cou...
The island of Sanctuary is a flat disc about 200 miles in diameter. Sanctuary lies within a pocket dimension, so it has an artificial sun. The artificial sun is roughly 100 miles above the island...
In my space western setting, I went nuts with the time scale, so now I have a faction living entirely in space stations (with planets used for transit and agriculture, but that's irrelevant for now...
The Scenario: A technologically advanced mother culture wants to manage mass outbreaks of virulent disease in its technologically regressed colonies, who are inclined to resist most of what the mot...
In the setting I'm building up, there are starships ranging from several meters in length to 1.6 kilometers. I'm trying to devise a means to determine what sort of manpower each ship would likely n...
So I'm not sure this is possible but I was hoping someone might be able to figure out a way for it to work. My planet is smaller than earth. I'd say about 75% the size. However for plot reasons, I...
Let's say I'm a superhero or a magic space-wizard with the ability to change the color of any object I touch i.e. change what wavelengths of light it emits. If I want to become invisible, I could t...
Imagine a civilization developing on Planet X that is orbiting a black hole (or a similar gravitationally massive object). Given the time dilation near such a massive object, do the inhabitants of ...
I'd like an alien to be warm-blooded, but have external gills. Imagine a kind of giant crab or woodlouse (pillbug) which spends part of its time on land and part of the time in the sea. However, ex...
I want my world to be set in early to mid Industrial Age but for various reasons that I won't go into here I don't want there to be any gunpowder based weapons. Is it possible for a society to adv...
In this world, there are certain genetically engineered creatures, that are able to tolerate the side effects of mouth breathing (like sore throat) without increasing the normal air resistance in t...
Is there a real life chemical or compound that exhibits the characteristics of stereotypical movie acid? From what I know of most acid, it is usually clear or just a little cloudy, but I'm looking...
Tech level: more or less comparable to contemporary. Location: forsaken, habitable planet with population of approximately 10-20 milion. Wealth level: first world equivalent Covering capital, ma...
I'm creating a species of humanoid creatures that live their entire life in couples. From birth to death, they are bound emotionally, they work together as if they were only one individual but the...
I was thinking about a story where the sun light intensity decreases by 1/100 from its full intensity every day. So in 100 days, the sun just stop diffusing light. I was wondering if the green pl...
My understanding of special relativity is that a clock that flies one lap around the earth then returns to its starting position measures less time than a clock that "stayed put" relative to the ea...
I have an idea about a planet that is cold and dark, but very loud. Constant rolling storms, crashing glaciers and icesheets, earthquakes, volcanoes and so on. Instead of photosynthetic plants, as...
How do I calculate the spectrum of light experienced on the surface of an alien planet? I need it to decide what color the local photosynthetic life will predominantly be.
Question: Could a planet contain all of its (vast) oceans underground? I imagined a planet with no surface oceans - and no water cycle above ground - but where life was still possible. My initia...
