Activity for Ash‭

Type	On...	Excerpt	Status	Date
Question	—	Wings for orbital transfer bioships? - The ascent I've been looking at the altitude boosted SSTO designs from the 90s that were designed to be lifted to launch altitude by modified jetliners and thinking about bumblebees and wondering if bioships used for surface-to-orbit cargo transfers could make use of insectile wings to gain altitude before usin... (more)	—	over 5 years ago
Question	—	Life on the Broken Ring - an issue of size One of my ongoing projects is what I think of as the "constructed worlds gallery", a series of Megastructures as settings for stories and games, including things like the "Flying Pie-plate" a world sized dish as suggested by Larry Niven as the starting point for the construction of the habitat in Rin... (more)	—	over 5 years ago
Question	—	Of strange atmospheres - the survivable but unbreathable Most gases that are toxic to breathe also do nasty things to the skin when they're in the atmosphere at dangerous concentrations - and one is walking around without sealed protective clothing; sulfur and nitrogen oxides cause chemical burns when they mix with the water in perspiration, or on one's ey... (more)	—	over 5 years ago
Question	—	Macro-life, colonisation or continuation? Larry Niven defines a macro-life civilisation as one that lives in interstellar spacecraft, independent of planetary resources and culture, full time and by implication keeps moving. This could mean small but self-sufficient generation ships or could entail something as vast as a ram-jetting Ringworl... (more)	—	about 6 years ago
Question	—	Could a new species wipe out the rest of an established ecosystem? I'm not asking about an exotic species in the modern world we know all too well the havoc that can be caused by the introduction of an alien species into an existing ecosystem. I want to know if a novel evolutionary adaptation could create a species which wipes out the rest of the ecosystem it evolve... (more)	—	about 6 years ago
Question	—	Long-term effects of leaving everything you know - the aging issue My current ongoing science fiction project has FTL travel that is instantaneous for the ships and their crews, but still, usually, takes years of real-time in the rest of the universe. This is going to have an effect on crews as they are going to lose every contact they make off-ship with every jump ... (more)	—	about 6 years ago
Question	—	If we can have "all the comforts of home" in space why would we settle planets? This is something that is starting to bug me, I'm creating a universe in which space travel is cheap and comfortable and space habitats can be built roomy enough that no-one actually needs to live on a planet anymore. If we can live in space, with gravity, open spaces, fresh air, and grow sufficient ... (more)	—	over 6 years ago
Question	—	Quick solutions to a modern warning placed on the surface of a planet for future generations In response to Write once perpetual storage, is such a thing possible? Separatrix pointed me at How could an ancient race warn the future in a universally understandable way? and How might modern humans leave a message for 50,000 years?. While neither question addressed my concerns they have made me ... (more)	—	over 6 years ago
Question	—	Write once perpetual storage, is such a thing possible? Is it possible, with modern, or easily foreseeable technology, to build a compact digital data storage device that cannot be erased without removing the data store? The storage in question to be used to blackbox data on a spacecraft. Answers should use examples of any and all of: currently prototy... (more)	—	over 6 years ago
Question	—	Restricting antimatter - practical rather than legal measures Antimatter is relatively easy, but heinously expensive, to make using modern technology. I have two universes with the same problem; energy is free and for all practical purposes infinite, this should make antimatter dead cheap. I want to keep antimatter weapons out of my settings despite this situat... (more)	—	over 6 years ago
Question	—	The worlds between, the consequences of instantaneous FTL For some time I've been working on a universe with non-instantaneous Faster-Than-Light travel, but I've decided to open a new universe with instantaneous travel. So I'm working on the differences that the two modes of transport necessarily enforce on the societies that use them. The first question t... (more)	—	over 6 years ago
Question	—	A brighter moon that's harder to see In honour of the full moon an odd moon question for you all. The idea is to create a situation in which the inhabitants of a world believe utterly that the moon only exists at night. I'd also like to create a different day-night cycle with the moon providing enough light to extend the hours of dayli... (more)	—	over 6 years ago
Question	—	How flat is "Flat Space"? The idea of "Flat Space", an area of space-time with minimal, preferably zero, gravitational curvature, is an important concept in many Sci-fi universes, often those with "jump-drive" based FTL travel. I'm working on one such universe at the moment. The gravitational "edge" of our solar system is tho... (more)	—	over 6 years ago
Question	—	Could a sedentary organism develop intelligence, or even sentience? Similar to Could Plants Develop Sentience? but slightly more general: I'm not interested in plants in particular, but want a more general understanding of the effect of motion on intelligence and vice versa. In general intelligent lifeforms on Earth, like hominids, cephalopods, and cetaceans, are h... (more)	—	about 7 years ago
Question	—	How short can Milankovitch Cycles be on a world with a stable orbit? Okay so there's a project I've been thinking about for a long time wherein humans colonise a world where the climate appears warm and benign only to discover that the local climate oscillates from something like the height of the last Ice Age to something like the Medieval Warm Period on a decadal ti... (more)	—	about 7 years ago
Question	—	Signal language, how long can we stay in touch? I'm working on a universe where FTL exists but arrival times can be unpredictable to say the least. On average FTL trips are conducted at 4C but ships can take much longer to arrive than that speed would suggest. No ship has ever been confirmed to be entirely lost but very rarely ships thought long l... (more)	—	about 7 years ago
Question	—	So we glassed it, now what? "Glassing" a planet is a common ultimate tactic in Science Fiction, basically it consists in using high power energy weapons to destroy all life on the planet and reducing the soil and rock of the surface of the world to several centimeters of a fused material, not dissimilar to this glass though gen... (more)	—	about 7 years ago
Question	—	Gravitational flatness, the topography of Lagrange "points" Just how gravitationally flat are real Lagrange Points? Many classic "jump drives" require "flat space" in order to fire, the classic diagram of Lagrange Points as shown below suggests ridges or plateaus of flat space with null gravity around the Lagrange Points but it deals with a simple three body ... (more)	—	about 7 years ago
Question	—	Diamond as a building material So lots of Sci-fi works use mono-crystalline diamond as a wonder material used to build all sorts of impressive and in some cases seemingly impossible structures, I'd like to ask about the science of this particular assertion that diamonds are the building material that makes anything possible. Of pa... (more)	—	about 7 years ago
Question	—	Hulls and hard suits, what actually has heavier armour in space? I may not have been paying as much attention as perhaps I could but I have the impression that, in fiction and reality, most civilian space habitats, whether ships or stations use a relatively thick single hull. Meanwhile spacesuits and armour use heavy armoured shells of some kind of unobtainium, ei... (more)	—	about 7 years ago
Question	—	Contamination of orbital warehouses So I'm thinking about orbital warehousing of raw materials but I'm wondering whether one would actually need an orbital structure to store the goods inside or could you just strap a booster to the goods to keep them in their orbit and be done with it. So does anyone know where I could find some hard... (more)	—	about 7 years ago
Question	—	How deep could we bury the world in artifice? I've been reading a few books lately, principally the Warhammer 40,000 descriptions of Earth and the Night's Dawn Trilogy, and it's got me wondering just how far down we could bury a planet under arcology type cities. I'm going to assume that artificial carbon allotropes are a viable and in fact wide... (more)	—	over 7 years ago
Question	—	Could coral float? I've been thinking about worlds like Keplar-62e, thought to be covered in deep oceans, and wondering about floating reefs. Could a bio-structure substantially similar to terrestrial coral hold enough gas pockets, preferably in the form of bio-generated Hydrogen, to float neutral-buoyant close to the... (more)	—	over 7 years ago
Question	—	Human response to an existential threat that isn't This is possibly not quite the right place to ask this question but it's fundamental to the world I'm working on so here it is; if faced with a potent existential threat, in the form of an outside force, how will the human race respond? The current scenario I'm working on looks a bit like this; huma... (more)	—	over 7 years ago