Posts 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...
After watching this brilliant video by Shoddycast about Stimpaks in the Fallout universe: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CLY-FMxsb2U I started to wonder. Just how many of science fiction's most me...
Not a tank that could survive being shot with a 1 GJ railgun (pretty sure nothing can survive that), but a tank that can withstand the recoil of a 1 GJ railgun that's been mounted to it. Obviousl...
I need to know if it'd be possible for a underground ring-like structure of immense proportions and alien design to go unnoticed by modern day sonar, radar, and geological surveying. For an idea ...
Soft sci-fi uses inertial dampeners. Harder sci-fi uses stuff like advanced crash couches, robotic exoskeletons, or (my personal favorite) drug cocktails filled with stimulants and other medication...
A lot of people are probably familiar with this sort of handwavium in fiction when it's asked where a shapeshifter's extra mass comes from. Most choose to ignore that question. In works that preten...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
And I'm not talking about the wimpy 32"‰MJ kind we have in the real world, I'm talking about the superweapon kind. Anyone familiar with Knights of Sidonia and their flagship's Heavy Mass Cannons wi...
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 ...
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 ...
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...
Flux pinning (also known as quantum locking): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flux_pinning This technique has been discussed on this site before as a method for creating nearly indestructible supe...
Could you power a starship by feeding matter into a black hole and collecting the plasma produced by the tidal forces ripping apart whatever you fed it, or is this impossible/impractical? I keep re...
An O'Neill cylinder for those not in the know is basically a space habitat consisting of a rotating cylinder 32km long and 8km in diameter. I want to turn one into an actual spacecraft rather than ...
Let's assume the reactor takes up about 4 vertical kilometers and has the same radius as the ship (4km). This gives you a volume of about 2.01e11 m^3, which given about 3-5% of the reactor's estima...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
