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 to explain the warp gate looking like a giant funnel in space but its working principle is a spherical wormhole?
In many sci-fi tropes, a warp gate or artificial traversable wormhole almost always resemble a funnel however in reality its working principle is a wormhole. I would like to know how does it appears ...
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Is delta v relevant for interstellar travel for generation ship?
Imagine I have a generation ship that is heading to a nearby star system say 10 light years away, the average lifespan for the crew is 150 years on Earth and is expected to increase by about 5 years ...
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At 1.5 g of constant acceleration, how long does it take to get to 0.93c?
I just finished reading Andy Weir’s “Project Hail Mary”. He crafted a situation where a ship with was able to travel to Tau Ceti, some 13 light years distant. Having crew, he limited the ...
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Interstellar Evolution [closed]
Is it possible for a species/ecosystem to travel the stars?
I'm curious what this would look like. How many generations would it take to adapt to a planets atmosphere and propel a seed colony carrying ...
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Interstellar Space Travel via Time Travel
Building upon the questions from @States Time travel from stationary position? and @Travis Time travel from stationary position?, would it be possible to travel to other star systems within our galaxy ...
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A Repelatron Spacecraft
In one of my favorite books, Tom Swift in The Race to the Moon he uses a spacecraft which is propelled by devices called repelatrons which are attached to the hull of the craft. They can be programmed ...
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Differences in mindset between people born in space and people born planetside
In my world, humanity has populated the stars and now lives in isolated groups in single star systems. Most people never leave the system they were raised in [interstellar travel is very unusual, but ...
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Could an object traveling at a significant fraction of light speed create a black hole?
Nothing with mass can reach the speed of light because the closer to the speed of light it gets the more mass it has tending toward infinite mass as it approaches light speed & the more mass it ...
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Would spacecraft suffer from fevers?
Spacecrafts produce a lot of heat, which must go somewhere if the inhabitants don't want to die. And in space, the only way to get rid of the heat is to radiate it away
One way of achieving this would ...
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What would cut off a Mars base from Earth's support for an extended period of time?
Consider a Mars base, circa the 2040s. A joint NASA and SpaceX mission proved successful in the 2030s, and now a real colony is starting to develop. SpaceX has brought a good number of people to the ...
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What phenomena can explain not detecting a planet while detecting a more distant planet?
Humanity detects a very suitable planet, lets call it Vaung, that is roughly 80 years away from us with their current technology. A ship is made and sent to colonize it, same old stuff.
The issue is ...
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Plausibility of Low-Pressure Breathable Atmospheres?
My question is inspired by the fact that in the computer game Elite:Dangerous, the player's spacecraft is capable of landing on planets with "tenuous" atmospheres, measured as being 0.1 ...
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What's a practical use for a gravity based magic system? [closed]
My magic system operates thusly -
Using some kind of material, probably a special clay, maybe it's been changed by some kind of process, a magic user can shape the clay into balls of varying sizes, ...
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How would space exploration develop among people who already have access to other planets by magical means
In the world I've been writing, the population has the ability to access other planets, by going through the dimension/plane known as 'the Warp'.
However, these people are, for the most part, fairly ...
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Does a space government make sense?
Mothership to space vehicle EU W2775LV be like "pay taxes!"
Space vehicle EU W2775LV be like "no!" And flies away in the distance.
On earth we are kind of stuck living with one ...
user89947
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How would you build an emergency launch rocket?
I'm thinking of something akin to a space lifeboat designed to rescue crews of ships that are disabled in orbit and that would need to launch in a hurry without a lot of warning but that would also ...
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space - Is there a minimum safe distance to watch a supernova?
Consider that humans now have technology to travel around the galaxy at will.
Hyperspace, warp speed you name it.
There is a distance in which they can watch a supernova as a form of entertainment AND ...
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O'Neill Cylinder atmosphere on Moving "Day"
In short what effect would thrust induced pseudo-gravity have on the atmosphere of a sealed cylindrical habitat that was already generating spin induced pseudo-gravity?
Assume that the thrust is along ...
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What’s better than a hyperdrive for intergalactic travel? [closed]
I’m trying to write a Star Wars story about someone who figures out a way to travel FTL between galaxies. Hyperspace doesn’t work in the Intergalactic Void, and there is a hyperspace disturbance at ...
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What would two planets connected by traversable wormholes trade that is worth the travel risks?
I've posted here before about the realism of my wormholes and such, but I feel this question better fits the forums context of how it wants questions.
I have multiple wormholes that are within the ...
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Landing humans on Venus - MacGuffinite
NASA, SpaceX, CNSA... all organizations in space right now seem to have their eyes on the Red Planet. But what if that were to change, and the main goal of manned spaceflight redirected towards Venus?
...
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Would interstellar space piracy be possible under these conditions?
It is a scifi space opera setting skewing more towards realistic consequences of its breaks from the reality - quite similar to The Expanse.
Considering the situation outlined below, would it be ...
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What is the most plausible way to lower cost to orbit?
Of the general options that exist in terms of hypothetical space launch systems, what is the most plausible option for a relatively near future SF setting? The focus here is on Earth to LEO, as the ...
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How big do a fusion reactor and bank of capacitors following it up have to be to power a mass driver into space?
(Hi, please be kind - first poster. Also, didn't know if it'd be allowed to put hard-science on something like this, so going with ...
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How would natural gene-editing ability help a species to the space age?
I've been thinking through the feasibility of a species; I won't give a ton of details since it's all pretty fluid at the moment.
The big thing I'm curious about is whether their bodies having a ...
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Decelerating a relativistic, beam-powered starship at its destination without pre-established power-beaming infrastructure at said destination
Some background
As most of us know, accelerating to relativistic speeds requires truly astronomical amounts of energy. I have internalized that a ship carrying enough energy/fuel to accelerate to near-...
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Estimating thrust and kg fuel for a generation ship's journey to Alpha Centauri
Premise: A generation spaceship leaves Earth around the year 2060 on a journey to colonize Alpha Centauri A (ACA). In this fiction, fusion power is achieved in 2040, improved over 20 years, and used ...
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"cloaked" stars and gates viable to stop causality paradoxes
So I was lying in bed this moring(summer break, yaaaay) when it suddenly occurred to me that most causality paradoxes are caused by the exchange of information, so if when moving FTL no information ...
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Can we have a civilization living at close to the speed of light?
Imagine many ships traveling close to the speed of light. If they diverge paths to explore distant galaxies, they could calculate their travel so that the same amount of time passes for all ships. ...
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Usefulness of launching probes to verify the existence of a hypothesized planet
In a parallel universe, humans have a 95% confidence that Planet 9 exists with the parameters given on Wikipedia. However, they have not directly observed it and plan on launching many space probes to ...
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Does a ship traveling faster than c0 (speed of light in a vacuum) emit Cherenkov radiation?
A Space Whale has been traveling from point A (let it be Sirius) to point B (let it be Vega) faster than light (FTL). Did it emit Cherenkov radiation while traveling?
Cherenkov radiation is radiation ...
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Do these 'Magiholes' break physics?
The Magiholes are effectively wormholes, except for the fact that the mass of their ends is fixed and unchanging, and that it can be freely moved through space. Would this cause any problems for known ...
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Using a wormhole to get propellant in space?
Would it be possible for a spaceship to fly through space with the propellant stored off-ship through a wormhole? The propellant-tender end of the wormhole wouldn't need to move, so the ship-end ...
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Can my 3-Dimensional-Space character orbit around a 4-Dimensional-Space planet?
The setting is as follows: a 3-Dimensional-Space(3-DS) character/Spaceship has entered the 4-DS and has encountered a planet (from far away).
Now he wants to orbit around it, but the planet is a 4-DS ...
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Decent present or near future propulsion system for moving around in orbit or changing orbits
For the world I am constructing, I trying to come up with a spacecraft that could be reasonably be built with present or near future technology that could travel around and change orbits relatively ...
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Anatomically correct Shadow People
What would a realistic space-dwelling humanoid species under these guidelines look like? It's for a setting I am working on. They are sentient and live on asteroids, typically converted into ships.
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Rockets and spacecrafts cannot fly: why?
Building up from this question, let's say that we have a lighter situation where:
The Earth has lost its magnetic field
Solar winds are interacting with the atmosphere
Molecules are split up due to ...
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How long would a human have to spend in zero gravity to no longer be able to return to Earth?
In the early days of space exploration, the crew of a prospecting mission gets stranded in the asteroid belt when their ship malfunctions. In addition, the group that sponsors the expedition has a ...
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Is this space empire plausible? What flaws are most obvious? How can it be improved? [closed]
Humanity has access to a stargate of unknown origin. Each gate leads to a solar system from which other gates can be accessed, creating a kind of highway spanning some 300 systems. The travel time in ...
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Is My Moon Realistic?
Okay, I have this tropical moon that orbits a gas giant, and is suitable for human life. It has a radius of .9 Earth radii, a mass of .8704 Earth masses, a density of 6585 kg/m3, and a surface gravity ...
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Probability of a spaceship stumbling upon a random planet?
In an intergalactic federation, space ships are extremely common. They run supply routes, defend planetary bases, and transport colonists to new worlds. To aid in these adventures, most ships would ...
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How far could humanity spread through the universe?
Assume we developed a perfect rocket, say a ramjet using a very efficient matter to energy conversion drive, within a few centuries. How far could settlers get with such a technology? The local group? ...
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How plausible is this spacecraft design?
The idea is that the spacecraft would not have a propellant tank on board, but instead would have a huge, spherical propellant tender which the spacecraft could climb around in order to turn. This ...
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Could aliens be more technologically advanced than us, but still know less physics?
What my question is really trying to ask, is if it's possible that some alien race possesses technology far more advanced than our own, but also have an interpretation of physical results that is less ...
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Heat shields made in space out of rocky source material - cheap way to get cargo to Earth?
Let's say there's an operation one day producing items from asteroid and lunar material in orbit, and they want to ship goods to Earth. They try making cheap heat shields by processing rock and ...
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How does a ship scout out how to navigate in a new star system?
The scenario: In the not too distant future, someone ran just the right genetic algorithm and figured out how to make a warp drive. It can travel to distant stars! The only problem is that optical ...
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A planet with flying witches on broomsticks - or are they?
NOTE My question is different from this previous one.
What could be the physics behind witches flying on broomsticks?
It is different because the phenomena in my question are not actually witches - ...
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Cryo-Pods For Unaltered Humans
OK, faster than light isn't possible & a merely significant fraction of it can begin to stretch the bounds of reasonable reality as that fraction increases // so a less unreal way to allow us our ...
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Using transfinite numbers in a scifi story
I have been bandying about some exotic mathematics ideas as the basis for a hard scifi setting, and I wonder what technology/alien life would "make sense," here, given the physics arising ...
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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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