Questions tagged [space]
For questions related to outer space, stellar systems, stars and other astronomical phenomena.
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Can we hit the spaceship
Setting: close to present day. Aliens in ships about the size of the Pentagon are detected at about 10 AU, moving at about 100km/s, and will therefore take about 6 months to arrive.
Realistically at ...
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What would the effects of a space based laser weapon system capable of tracking and destroying any projectile posing a threat to human life?
Imagine a constellation of satellites equipped with sensors capable of identifying any object posing a risk to humans and targeting it with lasers to neutralize it. The constellation covers the entire ...
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Reality Check: Meteor Shower buried supermetal in the earth's crust, that is now being mined out
Centuries ago, a localized meteor shower deposited rare "supermetal" in the side of a mountain range. Due to the force of the impact, it created a pockmarked area with the metal at varied ...
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Space station maglev junction design
I'm designing a city building game in a huge 3D (without any notion of "top" or "bottom") space station (or rather, a space city). There are various functional buildings (vertices) ...
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How to increase the structural integrity of comets (for the purpose of moving them)?
Suppose there is a comet of radius 500m made of mostly ice, with the rest being rock, dust, and other frozen gases. The comet is being hollowed out in order to use the water as reaction mass (giving ...
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Can you climb a ladder into space? [closed]
Can one climb a ladder into Space?
If you have a heavy sphere traveling in Earth's orbit and attach a super-strong, superlight cable to it, down to Earth, could you travel via some sort of carriage ...
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How much liquid hydrogen is required to veer a manned probe off course into an escape trajectory in deep space?
I am working on this horror-scifi story based on the lost cosmonauts theory, where the Judica-Cordiglia brothers detected an SOS from a manned probe veering off into space before Yuri Gagarin ahem... ...
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What would it take for a spacecraft to travel to the sun's nadir and stop?
In a science fiction future universe, spacecraft routinely travel from a distance "above" a star's north or south pole to rendezvous with planets orbiting in the star system's orbital plane. ...
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How well would various forms of data storage survive in the vacuum of space?
In my story, some personal effects get jettisoned from a spacecraft airlock. Some time later (months to years), other characters discover one of these items drifting in space. It holds information on ...
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How can we have a three-way space race?
I want to have a setting for a thing I am doing set in a world with a three-way space race between countries X, Y, and Z. Each country has a space program roughly on par with the 1960s US and USSR. ...
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How to calculate the expected rotational speed of a star
I am working on fictional stars, and I want to have as many points about them as I can, and most things I found relatively easy, except for rotational speed.
I am not sure exactly how to find at what ...
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Auroras of a planet around an active M7 red dwarf
A planet the size of earth around a pretty active M7 red dwarf (think of M to X level flares almost every day) has a decent magnetic field of 0.5-0.8 Gauss, orbiting at a distance of 0.0443AU, with a ...
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Expanding a modular space-station for 100 years
The Mir, ISS, Tiangong, Skylab, the numerous Salyut-missions...Space-stations are one of the most impressive and interesting feats of modern engineering, which in my opinion, makes it even more tragic ...
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Can a Super-Earth have a large moon?
I'm writing about a Super-Earth which is habitable and has a large moon, but I want to get one thing out of the way: can a Super-Earth have a large moon?
Wouldn't the Super-Earth pull on the moon, ...
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Catching a fast slug of metal in space
You have a mass driver which throws a 1 kg slug of iron at your spaceship. The slug reaches your spaceship and at that time it is going 30 km/s relative to the spaceship. You intend for the spaceship ...
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Is it possible to mine a close asteroid without being noticed? [closed]
Technology level, close future.
A scientist observing 101955 Bennu calculates the rotation it should have according to the Yarkovsky–O'Keefe–Radzievskii–Paddack effect and finds out that it does not ...
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The interplanetary cold war
A cold war, the tension between well-armed powers that doesn't directly lead to an all-out war, but to an era of tension, espionage, proxy-warfare and propaganda. In our own world, the most famous ...
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Can lenses defend against lasers in space combat?
You have a spaceship, covered in steel armor. The enemy is shooting a laser at you in pulses intense enough to vaporize the steel. But you have a brilliant idea: float a big glass lens in front of ...
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How possible is a habitable, liquid ocean-planet at temperatures below 0°C?
I plan on having an ocean-planet with a breathable atmosphere built into my current setting, orbiting its host-star (a K4v main-sequence star) a short distance beyond its frost-line, with oceans that ...
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Does the inclusion of common non-humanoid alien species make rare humanoid alien species more believable?
In a Sci-Fi setting, if there is a vast amount of non-humanoid intelligent life in the universe, like perhaps 20 or 30 species, would this make 4 or 5 species that look similar to each other, or ...
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how to decelerate small probes in space? [closed]
How could I decelerate a probe in space?
I'm working on a world in an alternate near future, the first part would be (small) asteroid mining probes at ~3 Astronomic Units distance.
No organic life ...
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How to make a Stanford torus start rotating?
The notion of using the so called Stanford torus to generate artificial gravity is well known, but once you build the mega-structure how do you make it start rotating? Do you rotate somehow from the ...
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Preexisting wormholes: How to find aliens?
Setting
The future, but not too far. No antimatter and no teleportation. Space travel is relatively reliable, but it's not cheap and it's powered by fusion. Space travel outside of the solar system is ...
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How feasible are nukes as a spotting system in space?
In the semi-realistic space combat I design, the following rock-paper-scissors relation holds:
lasers beat rockets
rockets beat armor
armor beats lasers
The level of technology is not too futuristic:...
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How close Earth must be to Milky Way's center to undergo a modified 2012 film's scenario?
The 2012 apocalypse film features a premise that there are neutrinos from the sun that heat the Earth's core and thus leading to the end-of-the-world scenario.
Inspiration
Recently, a paper was ...
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Missile Heavy space combat: Do you want fire and forget, or SEAD and destroy?
Missile combat can be immediate and intimate, requiring EW support and even escort, or distant and very impersonal, where you're lobbing yours immediately before running away from your enemies, ...
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Reverse engineering the Hill Sphere?
I'm wondering if anyone has run into the issue of "I know the general idea of how big my moon is but not the parent planet" and how to sort of reverse engineer finding out the mass/radius of ...
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Would a nebula cause resistance and disrupt sensors on a space ship?
If a ship is moving through a nebula, would it slow down due to the gases and dust in the cloud, and would it prevent things like radar from having as much range as they usually could?
I want to ...
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Alt-history continuation of Dynasoar program
Just hopping over from SpaceExploration
I'd like to know how realistic a use-case the DynaSoar spacecraft would be for a Titan descent craft, in terms of in-universe realism.
I'm assuming no far-...
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How small can a nuclear weapon get?
Context
I am writing the section following a critical space battle where a rogue UNN Pearl of the Stars is taken down, and its CIC, reactor and, most importantly, its payload of 4 planet buster 15-...
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Could I figure out the sun's size in the sky based on the planet's radius and its length of year?
I know the planet's radius and how long it takes to orbit it's sun, could I use this information to then work out the size of the star itself and how large it would appear in the sky or would I need ...
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Elemental Foundry - Quasar powered post-ferrous material fabricator
What is this and what does it do?
(this has got to play in the background)
The the belief that most matter is concentrated in galaxies is false. A relatively huge portion of the matter in our universe ...
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Maximum acceleration of minimally modified humans in acceleration fluid
I've been looking into viable accelerations for minimally modified humans in an acceleration-gel-type chamber. Minimally modified means no permanent or significant changes to the human body. Examples ...
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Frozen Star- Red dwarf goes supernova, just because I froze it?
So as I mentioned in my previous question in the series, the parent red dwarf star of a one-planet system, Eridanus, has frozen over due to an unknown reason. By a "frozen red dwarf star", I ...
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How to make intragalactic space navigation difficult
Say there are two factions in a cold war with each other. Each faction controls huge amounts of the known galaxy, but there is a demilitarized neutral zone in-between them. Both factions have access ...
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How close can two planets be within the habitable zone?
I am aware that similar questions have been asked but these variables are different. I have tried to calculate it myself or at least find an equation that could help find the forbidden zones for these ...
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What would happen if a Europa-like moon "thawed"? [closed]
I have a planet and moon system orbiting a high mass star, something like a type A main sequence. Everything is only a short two billion years old, but the star is already starting to expand, warming ...
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Trojan Planet Skies
A few questions here have broached the possibility and survivability of life on a Trojan planet, a planet that exists at the Lagrange point of a larger celestial body. In this particular question, the ...
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How to develop (and justify!) a nation born out of a lawless region of space? [closed]
I am here once again for I am stuck on writing this part out... Long story short, a region of space, nicknamed the NCIZ 2 (second iteration of such thing happening); or "Non-Controlled Inhabited ...
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KBC Void Stupendously Massive "Vacuum Hydrogen" generators- How to convert the Anti-Hydrogen into Hydrogen?
So, let me get this straight right here.
According to Wikipedia:
"The KBC Void (or Local Hole) is an immense, comparatively empty
region of space,...... The underdensity is proposed to be ...
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How far in between a K-Type Star and a Planet would there need to be in order for there to be a very rare eclipse inside a S-Type Binary System?
Here I have posted a diagram I have made for my planet's solar system that I think may be correct.
For background understanding: My Main Planet is orbiting a G-Type Star in this binary system, whereas ...
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Does my binary planet make sense?
I have a binary planet as the setting for a sci-fi story, and I would like to know if this system makes sense or if there are any major flaws. I am also open to suggestions for improvements.
Here is a ...
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What are the repercussions of two asteroids in the asteroid belt colliding?
As the title states, what would happen if two asteroids in the asteroid belt were to collide? Specifically, two the size of 45 Eugina impacting with each other. In my story, I am thinking about having ...
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Could standard aircraft(planes, helicopers, etc.) work as spacecraft in this world?
Ok, so I have this world(or maybe it will just be a dimension depending on how things pan out) called 'The Weird' that has air in space, like Earthlike air(for the most part). Also, the 'planets' or ...
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Would a laser resistant (heavily heat resistant?) armour for space ships have unfortunate consequences and would it still have to deal with heat?
Basically, I want to decisively put an end to any idea that lasers could be used in my space combat in any large degree. One of the solutions I've thought of is a world having advanced armour (either ...
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How to map arms of the galaxy?
Some background:
My interstellar civilization(s) have fled our home Solar System, spreading throughout the nearby systems in the Orion Arm. They possess FTL, but for plot reasons, they have only just ...
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What would happen to the Moon if Earth was annhilated? [closed]
Sometime in the far future, the Earth gets destroyed. Before the Earth is destroyed, humans formed a small colony on the Moon which is capable of self-sustaining itself for the next decade or so. What ...
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Practicality of building a space station in the tail of a comet
In my novel, I want to feature a large (>5km) centrifuge space station that was built on/into a comet, and is in the comet’s tail whenever it passes close to the sun. It is home to many criminal ...
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In a universe with loop dimensions how is the density of a massive body calculated? [closed]
In ordinary 3D space one can calculate the density (average density) of a massive body by dividing the mass of that body by the volume it inhabits
D = M/V with M in say kg and V in say m^3 so D = [kg/...
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Would a rogue planet experience more asteroid collisions?
I'm working on a novel where the characters inhabit a rogue planet. Would that planet get hit by more asteroids due to the fact that it isn't orbiting a star? I have a feeling that the distance is ...
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