Posts by Ash
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 sho...
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...
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; sulf...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 mea...
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 ...
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 goin...
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 ...
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 h...
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 us...
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 ...
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 t...
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...
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 tra...
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 v...
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 ...
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...
"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 ...
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 pl...
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 thic...
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 a...
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 eno...
