Posts by Werrf
The Scenario: A group of scientists on a research space station are conducting tests on a Bose-Einstein condensate. They can't figure out why it is that every time they get their condensate to for...
When building a city, one must consider why one is building a city. It's all very well imagining a city perched on top of an inaccessible mountain peak, but a believable world requires that we cons...
Yes...probably What was really important to our development of technology was not oil, but coal. Access to large deposits of high-quality coal largely fueled the industrial revolution, and it was...
The Precursors are looking for recruits for their interstellar army. Obviously they don't need primitives who can only just bang rocks together, so they've set up a test - a beacon, lying above the...
I'm designing an FTL system for a new universe, and I'm trying to figure how 'plausible-sounding' this thought is. The idea is that space is tangled and twisted in twelve dimensions, so that dista...
In populating a fenland region similar to the Somerset Levels in England, I'm finding a need for an aquatic ambush predator to haunt the region and snack on the occasional disrespectful traveler wh...
Given the complexity of colouration that cephalopods are capable of, one can easily imagine their language being vastly more complex than a spoken or written language. You'd begin with the obvious...
Some more-than-usually clever boffins have knocked up a system that allows them to form portals into a region where the laws of physics are rather...different. An object that is fired through one ...
Short version - some physicists have created a pathway that appears to permit near-instantaneous travel between two distant points. Objects propelled through one side on the correct vector will eme...
I'm designing a sentient, aquatic creature, and trying to decide how many eyes it should have. This creatures biological strategy is one of redundancy - it has multiple mouths, multiple tentacles,...
I'm building a Dyson sphere - a real one, like Freeman Dyson originally proposed, made of swarms of solar collectors in independent orbits that fully surround the star, something like this: Each...
Suppose that I have come into possession of a substance, technology, or spell that functions as a perfect insulator and reflector. No energy can pass through it, and is instead reflected back the w...
I'm designing a city built to take advantage of valuable mineral deposits in a large polar desert. The city is built around a Yellowstone-esque region of hot springs and geysers, where underground ...