Z.Schroeder‭

A large railgun mounted on the spine of a mega-scale starship (20-32km) or an antimatter-powered missile launched outside the ship? For clarification's sake, when I say "safer" I'm referring to "sa...

5 answers  ·  posted 8y ago by Z.Schroeder‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by Z.Schroeder‭

Is there any practical g-limit for unmanned spacecraft, or could you theoretically push a missile to significant fractions of c in hours or minutes while pulling hundreds or thousands of Gs? I need...

6 answers  ·  posted 8y ago by Z.Schroeder‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by Z.Schroeder‭

Basically what I'm picturing is a slight variation of the usual model that relies on flux pinning (a.k.a quantum locking) to resist damage. The swarm has a macroscopic "core", some sort of electrom...

1 answer  ·  posted 8y ago by Z.Schroeder‭  ·  last activity 8y ago by Z.Schroeder‭

Okay, so while I'm fairly certain this is possible to do, I wanna know if it actually makes sense to do so. Imagine you have a fleet of ships, each of them so large it takes megatons of antimatter ...

3 answers  ·  posted 8y ago by Z.Schroeder‭  ·  last activity 8y ago by Z.Schroeder‭

I wanna have a scene where the protagonists see the gray goo excreting human skeletons because they can't use the calcium in them for anything. But is this true? Would a self-replicating machine re...

2 answers  ·  posted 8y ago by Z.Schroeder‭  ·  last activity 8y ago by Z.Schroeder‭

I have an asteroid. I want it to hit Earth. The best way to hit Earth is from behind the Sun, which makes it harder to detect you if you're an asteroid. Now, I have a basic understanding of things ...

3 answers  ·  posted 8y ago by Z.Schroeder‭  ·  last activity 8y ago by Z.Schroeder‭

Specifically, will ferrofluid at the bottom or on the sides of a shot glass perturb the fluid above it to any significant degree? I want a character of mine who is a sort of Bill Nye/Neil DeGrasse ...

1 answer  ·  posted 8y ago by Z.Schroeder‭  ·  last activity 8y ago by Z.Schroeder‭

Pretty simple question. Whether you're launching a spy satellite, building a top secret orbital missile weapon, or investigating a mysterious alien artifact in orbit around Earth heralding the retu...

4 answers  ·  posted 8y ago by Z.Schroeder‭  ·  last activity 8y ago by Z.Schroeder‭

Assuming you already had sufficient money and resources to build a tower stretching from the top of Europa's ice layer down to the bottom of the seabed, could you build it on top of one of its geys...

1 answer  ·  posted 8y ago by Z.Schroeder‭  ·  last activity 8y ago by Z.Schroeder‭

3-D printers, replicators, nanofabricators etc. are all technologies that, when pushed to their logical limit, seem to make the transport of finished goods obsolete when all you need to do to obtai...

10 answers  ·  posted 8y ago by Z.Schroeder‭  ·  last activity 7y ago by Z.Schroeder‭

https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2016/Q3/thermal-metamaterial-innovation-could-help-bring-waste-heat-harvesting-technology-to-power-plants,-factories.html http://www.nature.com/articles/nc...

1 answer  ·  posted 8y ago by Z.Schroeder‭  ·  last activity 8y ago by Z.Schroeder‭

Moreover, could a culture of microorganisms form a collective hive-intelligence similar to ants or bees? I'm trying to design a scientifically plausible hive-mind, and I'm trying to decide whether ...

5 answers  ·  posted 8y ago by Z.Schroeder‭  ·  last activity 8y ago by Z.Schroeder‭

I need someone to fact-check me and tell me if there's anything immediately bogus or physically impossible with the scenario I'm about to propose. Billions of years ago, under the ice of Europa, t...

6 answers  ·  posted 8y ago by Z.Schroeder‭  ·  last activity 7y ago by Z.Schroeder‭

Let's just take antimatter off the table right now. As I've learned recently, it's hard to make, expensive as hell and even more volatile, and you can never get more energy out of it than you put i...

5 answers  ·  posted 8y ago by Z.Schroeder‭  ·  last activity 7y ago by Z.Schroeder‭

Let's say you have a cyborg who's replaced their whole body, everything but the brain, with machinery. Next, you put them on a spaceship pulling dozens or even hundreds of gs. How are they going to...

5 answers  ·  posted 8y ago by Z.Schroeder‭  ·  last activity 8y ago by Z.Schroeder‭