Questions tagged [space-travel]
For questions about the process of traveling through space, including in orbit around a planet or moon. Consider also [spaceships]. See also the tag information (click "info") for more details on when this tag applies.
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How can I move a planet?
There are a lot of answers on Worldbuilding about how to destroy planets - just as an example - and they seem to be the method of choice for many people intent on destroying the world. My objection to ...
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Are there any ways to allow some form of FTL travel without allowing time travel?
Faster than light travel is a really cool thing to have in sci-fi settings. It allows humans, in relatable time scales, to travel the galaxy and see a variety of worlds. It allows for conflicts ...
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Space Whales, how to survive?
We have escaped the galactic government, and now our greatest endeavour yet, life in space. How will these gargantuan space entities eat and survive in space?
The whale or other in question is the ...
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How to avoid objects when traveling at greater than .75 light speed. or How Not to Go SPLAT?
After asking my question about seeing black holes in your path between the stars, I also wondered abut other more mundane objects. Black holes affect large areas of space so even if you didn't get '...
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FTL travel is impossible. How is interstellar trade possible?
Assume a universe depressingly like ours, in which special relativity holds. No hyperspace, no warp drive, no wormholes, and even the limited get-out clauses offered by real world physics either don't ...
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Is there any way to truly hide a spaceship?
Space is two things: empty and (mostly) dark. This makes it really, really hard to hide in it, because to do anything in it, chances are, you'll be shining a big bright light through it.
Even if you'...
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Is space piracy orbitally practical?
I'm considering a story set about fifty years (2065) in the future. It takes a rather optimistic view; space exploration has led to colonies on the Moon and Mars, as well as several space stations ...
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How can I know where to point my spaceship?
Let's assume we have a working FTL drive and thus interstellar travel is possible, either by traveling at very high speeds or by instant teleportation (the two main subtypes of FTL drives in sci-fi). ...
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Can a human crew handle cyclic extended high relativistic speed operations?
This question hopes to make a space tug crew's life tolerable.
A supply pipeline links two civilizations. Due to the long travel time between the ends, cargo is "thrown" at the other side in ...
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What would be the most effective way of keeping a psychopath with a spaceship from wreaking severe havoc in a suicide crash?
Any spaceship over several hundred tons is an extremely dangerous weapon in the wrong hands, particularly if it's intended for reentry. Made mostly of metal and possibly shaped to be able to breach ...
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Alcubierre Drive without FTL?
Would the principles at work in the theoretical Alcubierre warp drive apply to a slower-than-light starship? I'm building a setting in which FTL communication and travel is impossible, (due to ...
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Motivations for interstellar colonizations
Question is ultimately asking why would we do this? A few parameters first...
Technological:
Our current knowledge of physics is correct and there is no such thing as faster than light travel, nor ...
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Would an alien lifeform be able to achieve space travel if lacking in vision?
Think of this alien life form as something resembling earth bats, placed in a planet with Earth-like conditions.
Micro-bats have small and poorly developed eyes. Similarly, this alien species is ...
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Stellar Navigation for Dummies - Finding your way home
Average Joe was an amateur astronomer. While he was out in the wilds one day with his telescope he was kidnapped by aliens, carried off and kept as a slave on a world somewhere in the Milky Way. ...
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How to “set” the lightsail?
Suppose a starship is being powered by a lasers beamed first from the departure star, and then from the destination which is a moving base. The ship is moving in the regime of 10–30% of light speed.
...
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Is it statistically likely and physically possible to have two civilizations in the same star system?
With our current technology we're able to travel through our Solar System (and beyond) during at least a human lifetime.
Is it physically possible that a star system has more intelligent lifeforms in ...
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What does the physiology and biochemistry of a vacuum adapted post-human look like? Part 4: Movement
I am a post-human adapted for permanent life in vacuum and micro-gravity. How might my physiology and biochemistry overcome the following challenges?
Please note I have a strong cultural aversion to ...
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How Would Limited Space Travel Change Late Medieval/Early Renaissance-era Warfare?
In my book series, the various planets of the galaxy, give or take, generally have access to late medieval to early renaissance era technology in terms of warfare. That means full plate armor, siege ...
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How to add tactics and maneuvering into space warfare
I have a setting with space fleets fighting, the include both capital ships and human flown 'space fighters', which I already put some work into justifying: How to keep humans pilots instead of AI in ...
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What does the view outside my ship traveling at light speed look like?
World Rules:
Travelers are able to move at the speed of light without disruption of their lives. Time passes "normally" for them. They think, breathe, love, cry, and steer the ship as if they were ...
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What is the feasibility of a floating city on Venus?
I've read that the atmosphere about 60 km from the surface of Venus is very similar to the atmosphere on earth (the oxygen/nitrogen/CO2 levels and pressures are about the same). If there was a way, to ...
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How long before we're stuck on Earth due to Space Debris? (Kessler syndrome)
Every time a rocket is launched into space, debris accumulates. Every time an old satellite runs out of juice, it goes derelict and turns into more junk. Over the years, paint-chips, broken off solar ...
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Could an aquatic civilization discover space travel?
Building from this and this, given an aquatic civilization somehow manages to forge tools and build computers, could it build space-faring devices?
Also another development that would come earlier (...
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Energy source for a generation ship
A generation ship was sent out a long time ago, to colonize a far away planet. However the ship failed to reach its goal due to navigational issues (which also means they didn't have any clue where in ...
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How to get across the galaxy moving slower than light - in a single lifetime?
All the recent talk on Worldbuilding about the vast energies available to higher-level Kardashev civilizations, the need for 50,000 year message-systems, and so on, got me thinking. With enough energy,...
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Proper combat distance scaling for a sci-fi space opera tabletop setting
I'm making a completely homemade tabletop system with the intent of generating a hardish scifi, more sim-like experience for my friends. I've settled on no FTL and all space battles would be ...
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Can this version of the Alderson Drive be used to violate causality?
I'm working on a simulator-type game which I want to be at least internally consistent, and which I'd like to work as close to reality as possible. That being said, it's set in space, which means to ...
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Powering the interplanetary trade ships of the 23rd-24th century
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 into ...
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Calculating G-Force and Velocity
Simplifying a larger problem.
Building a sci-fi text game and I don't want the science to be too wrong. Imagine I have two points in space which are 111,125 kilometers apart and it takes 17 minutes ...
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Why would technology dictate graphical interfaces to be rare on spaceships?
This question differs from that question in that the other question is asking about a change in history while this question is looking for a change in the future.
In a near future setting I am ...
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What could prevent a sentient species from going to space?
I am still puzzled by the original The Planet of the Apes movie from the 70's. How come that sentient species invented weapons, but was unable to develop powered flight, or spacecraft. Thus, the ...
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Society rules for marriages and love on multigeneration ship
Earth, far future: We built multi generation ship which can get 20 000 people to another solar system in next 20 generations (600 years)
For scope of this question assume that ship itself is well ...
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How to avoid FTL as a plot device?
Many SF stories feature faster-than-light travel as essentially a trope: Roddenberry has stated☡ that the Enterprise travels at the speed of plot. As an allegory of the south seas, or some throw-away ...
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What is the maximum size of a planet that a chemical rocket can leave it?
I encountered sci-fi stories about planets of the twice the mass of Earth, and the characters were able to leave them in spaceships.
I wonder, whether it is possible at all?
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Could a civilisation exist as 'space-nomads'?
In a civilisation similar to humans (although not necessarily humanoid) living on a planet the size of Earth, could the whole civilisation (no limits on size, although I was thinking a few thousand at ...
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Spaceflight without transistors and nuclear power - how to bend the history of physics?
As stated in the topic: I would like to have Project Olympus-style space stations served by Apollo-like spacecraft in a world where neither nuclear power (and weapons) nor transistors were developed ...
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What is the most effective way to brake from interstellar speeds?
In my story, I have a slower-than-light starship (traveling at 0.6 $c$) going to Alpha Centauri A. There are several planets around the star. The target planet is a terrestrial, habitable world ...
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How can a spaceship unknowingly interfere with tides on a planet?
I've asked before about my polytheists with competing moon gods. I now have a better understanding of how tides -- a very visible manifestation of lunar influence -- work with multiple moons (thanks),...
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Minimizing the Side Effects of Breathable Outer-Space
There exists a Universe in which all of outer-space is filled with some form of human-breathable air. Theoretically, you could fly a Zeppelin up there and explore other worlds, with a sufficiently ...
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movement of space animals
Animals on planets are so 20th century - let's herd us some space animals!
In this story I have the need to move a herd of pesky space animals. They like Suns for their juicy solar energy and ...
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Gravitational slingshots: could they be used to decelerate a spacecraft traveling at a small fraction of light speed?
I have heard of gravitational slingshots being used to theoretically accelerate a spacecraft using a planet's gravity and momentum in orbit. But how about decelerating a ship? If it is at all possible,...
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How would a blind intelligent species navigate space?
I am writing about my own fictional cluster of solar systems where one planet had many environmental circumstances that lead to the majority of the planets species evolving to be blind and rely on ...
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Does the sun provide enough energy to accelerate a large ship to a decent proportion of the speed of light?
This came up when running some numbers on the hard science possibilities of interstellar colonization and I mostly want to know whether I made some major errors and am off by a few orders of magnitude ...
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How to estimate a star's heliopause?
Is it possible to calculate/estimate the size of a star's heliosphere? If so, how?
I am working on a semi-near future, sci-fi novel. As part of the technology base, humans are able to travel between ...
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What is the smallest planetary mass that can prevent 'me' from flying off into space?
I have a series of astronauts landing on an asteroid. I'd like to know the threshold of mass for them to not fly off into space. Specifications:
Assumption is all astronauts are under 180cm, 80kg.
...
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Would it be possible to ride a gravitational wave?
I'd like to travel really really fast, and I've got some scientists proposing a novel new way of doing so.
They've developed the technology to generate extremely powerful controlled gravitational ...
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Mars as "Earth sister"
Lets pretend that Mars was a bit larger, so the gravity could hold on to the water and possible atmosphere, and then play along with the accidents that happened on earth happened at a similar tact.
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How fast can a ship with rotating habitats be accelerated?
Alright so I'm not really a physics person by any stretch so forgive me if I butcher some physics jargon on this post.
So I'm making this hard sci-fi interstellar ship with a rotating habitat that ...
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What do stranded astronauts eat in space
As a background, a team of seven astronauts embark on a journey through space. Their aim is to find the source of radio waves that have been attributed to communication from a distant planet (...
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The Colonist - Part II: Landing
This is the second part of a series of questions I'll ask about a self-sustaining colonization ship. I'll keep editing this post as things unfold.
If you can, check out the other questions of this ...
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