Posts by AndyD273
The smallest warhead created for the US military was the W54 Davy Crocket which used 23kg of Pu239 and had a yield equivalent to 10-20 tons of TNT. Video of the Davy Crocket being fired. Accord...
This is based off the information found in the link provided by Juraj. The answer is 2,862,106 earths in the goldilocks zone How to get 2,862,106 earths in habitable orbits: Rules, they have to a...
This is a kind of alternative to KareemElashmawy's answer. As they point out, the best you can do with a single station is to put it in one of the Lagrange points, but these have problems. The Ear...
Thermal convection is your friend By heating air in the center you can draw air down from the sides. Because of thermal stacking, thermal power generation towers can be as tall as 1000 meters.
So as others have said, air is a poor conductor of electricity compared to water, and so you would need unrealistic levels of electricity to make this work. Most super powers are essentially magic...
Late answer, but another possibility... The kind of spud guns I've seen around here didn't use compressed air, but instead used a flammable liquid/gas like alcolhol or aerosol hairspray to propel t...
What you're looking for is parthenogenesis. Scientists from Japan have done it with mice, back in 2004 by changing one egg to behave like a sperm cell genetically. With enough genetic engineering ...
Yes they do! We are really close to having this using femtosecond lasers. One cool thing about these projections is that you can actually feel them. Who knows, in a century it could turn into so...
Painting the moon with lasers wouldn't work, as the light of the sun would overwhelm just about anything, the power needed would be prohibitive, it would only work for short amounts of time while t...
Earth -> Mars trade is going to be "almost everything" for a while, with emphasis on things that can't be done on Mars. Over time as corporations begin to develop Mars, heavy equipment and thin...
Edit: When I first wrote this I didn't grok the "single element" statement fully. I'm not really changing my answer, just changing the execution. With the right planning and equipment, you could wi...
Weave a mesh basket like a tea infuser out of channelium with a long chain or wire handle. Put the stone inside the channelium basket. Use the handle to lower and raise the stone into and out of w...
This is a supplement to @SF.'s answer just because. Atmospheric electricity can be used to provide you some power, and technically could be done even without a space elevator. In 'fine weathe...
It seems like you could do it without even getting close to the speed of light if you could bend space. The whole "Imagine the universe is a 12 dimensional piece of paper. Fold it in half so that t...
It could be a matter of resources. Missiles are expensive, flak is cheap, and has the added bonus of deflecting lasers. So if one ship can surprise another ship then a missile might take it out, bu...
Your planet could be really low on iron. There is a tree condition called chlorosis that is caused by low iron in the soil, and leads to light green/yellow leaves. It could also be that the PH i...
One effect could be the illusion that the craft is moving backward, as the light from the vehicle being close to you reaches you before the light of the vehicle being further away. This would only ...
This is an addition to Willk's answer; Giant pupils would be a very good start, with the addition that the iris would have to be able to get the pupil small enough to allow function in the dayligh...
The dragons are ruminants with multi-part stomachs. They eat organic material, and in their first stomach burn the material at 800C until it become graphene oxide. In the second stomach the graphe...
Make them sweaty. Bit of background: SpaceX is redesigning their Starship Super Heavy (aka BFR) to be made from stainless steel, and plan to have it sweat as a heat shield. The basic concept is th...
Like sharks replace teeth. The plates can be put on the armor in an overlapping scale pattern, with one plate visible, and another above it, protected by the overlapping scale. If a scale takes a h...
