New answers tagged science-fiction
6
votes
Accepted
Is there a way for a Super-Earth have Earth-like Gravity?
It has a thicker crust and mantle, but an Earth size core.
To achieve 1.25-1.5 G your planet needs a mass somewhere between 5 and 6 Earths, but it has a volume of 8 Earths. Earth has a density of ~5....
- 76.4k
4
votes
Is there a way for a Super-Earth have Earth-like Gravity?
Changing the metal buildup of the core
When considering the overall mass of a planet (especially when it's solid), it's what's under the crust that matters. This is because the crust of Earth relative ...
0
votes
Would a laser resistant (heavily heat resistant?) armour for space ships have unfortunate consequences and would it still have to deal with heat?
You can't put an end to using lasers except if you handwave it to a large degree. The thing is that current Earth-based pulsed lasers are already powerful enough to be useful to blast missiles out of ...
- 1,161
3
votes
Would a laser resistant (heavily heat resistant?) armour for space ships have unfortunate consequences and would it still have to deal with heat?
The way you make any weapon useless is to make them too costly to use. Cost in battle can include many things, but here's an idea that would make it extremely difficult to justify firing a laser at a ...
- 6,760
3
votes
Would a laser resistant (heavily heat resistant?) armour for space ships have unfortunate consequences and would it still have to deal with heat?
Frame challenge:
Lasers as a primary armament are difficult, if not impossible, to justify using. Heat management, energy requirements, EMR signature, weapon dispersion with distance, and targeting (...
- 1,001
3
votes
Would a laser resistant (heavily heat resistant?) armour for space ships have unfortunate consequences and would it still have to deal with heat?
Heat radiation
Heat is probably the worst thing you can have in space. The reason is simple. There are precious few ways to get rid of it. As you're basically going through a vacuum there is too ...
- 31.8k
25
votes
Would a laser resistant (heavily heat resistant?) armour for space ships have unfortunate consequences and would it still have to deal with heat?
Frame Challenge: Lasers are a no-go because laserboats are flying radiators
Just bring in proper heat management to your universe, and earn the realism points that even The Expanse didn't.
Modern ...
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5
votes
Would a laser resistant (heavily heat resistant?) armour for space ships have unfortunate consequences and would it still have to deal with heat?
Retro reflective shielding
While using a smooth polished reflective surface as shielding is one option, an alternative is to use reflective surface with a cubic pattern that will additionally reflect ...
- 51
17
votes
Would a laser resistant (heavily heat resistant?) armour for space ships have unfortunate consequences and would it still have to deal with heat?
This blog post from ToughSF is a great read on defending spacecraft from laser warfare, with a specific focus on mirror armor, which I will be mostly basing my answer on.
In short, there's no perfect ...
- 5,325
1
vote
Would a laser resistant (heavily heat resistant?) armour for space ships have unfortunate consequences and would it still have to deal with heat?
Frame Challenge:
I'm going to cite Dune here as a good method of making insert Weaponary unusable.
In Dune - people have personal energy shields, these sheilds when hit by 'directed energy weapons' ...
- 7,236
7
votes
Would a laser resistant (heavily heat resistant?) armour for space ships have unfortunate consequences and would it still have to deal with heat?
It might work...
There are advanced insulating materials today that are fantastic at rejecting heat. But lasers aren't just beams of heat. They're beams of light — and that means you need to deal with ...
- 107k
10
votes
Would a laser resistant (heavily heat resistant?) armour for space ships have unfortunate consequences and would it still have to deal with heat?
"I want to decisively put an end to any idea that lasers could be used in my space combat in any large degree"
You could do that going the opposite way. You could say that ablative armor is ...
- 54.2k
0
votes
Would a laser resistant (heavily heat resistant?) armour for space ships have unfortunate consequences and would it still have to deal with heat?
Thrust by ablation.
There are two types of laser shield (without going into force-field-shields and other things Star Trek); reflective shields and ablative ones.
We've recently had several questions ...
- 23.7k
3
votes
Could a supernova powered starship work/survive?
Maybe you could cheat. A lot.
Here's what you do. You figure out a way to create a stable wormhole where at least one end doesn't have to be fixed (YOU don't have to do this, you can just say the ...
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0
votes
How would a "universal language field" work?
Have an AI manage it.
Have a super advanced computer which has a record of every language manage all the translation. The AI can have sensors which can detect sound, smell, motions, radio waves, ...
- 33.9k
0
votes
Visibility in a ringworld atmosphere?
There are a number of factors that would influence how things actually look from the inside surface of a ringworld:
The diameter of the ring affects how noticeable the curvature is at short distances,...
2
votes
What is the Distance needed for gravitational lensing for offensive lasers?
Your black hole has a horizon radius round about $1\times10^{-15} $ meters. That's round about 100,000th of the width of a Hydrogen atom. The mass you suggest, $3.98 \times 10^{11}$ kg is, on a ...
- 3,062
3
votes
Can the mass of a rocky Super Giant be artificially reduced?
The people on planet A don't really have any chance of reducing the size of planet B. The only way to do so would be to ship mass off of the planet and it simply would not be practical to ship enough ...
- 34.9k
5
votes
Could a supernova powered starship work/survive?
We don't use hydrogen bombs to propel cars.
We won't use supernovae to propel starships. Not even in science fiction.
For basically the same reason: a major efficiency mismatch. The energy used to ...
- 1,391
3
votes
Could a supernova powered starship work/survive?
In addition to all the problems already pointed out you have the detail of acceleration. Let's suppose you have some handwavium shield between the detonation and the ship and the ship is strong ...
- 30k
3
votes
What is the Distance needed for gravitational lensing for offensive lasers?
Blackhole does gravitational lensing at any distance. Better, because it can easily bend light by 180° or even more, you can hit target in any direction, provided you can aim with sufficient precision ...
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15
votes
What is the Distance needed for gravitational lensing for offensive lasers?
I'm maybe not properly up on gravitaional lensing or laser weapons.
I don't understand why lensing the laser to hit would particularly change anything. The black hole is already bending all the light, ...
- 390
6
votes
Could a supernova powered starship work/survive?
By Slowing Down Time
About as realistic as an answer can be, because as others have said, there is no surviving a supernova unless you are many light years away. Freeze time around the supernova when ...
- 2,111
3
votes
What is the Distance needed for gravitational lensing for offensive lasers?
After some consideration, I think there are a couple of fundamental flaws in your concept, that will make the laser ineffective or at least greatly reduce its effectiveness.
First flaw: laser are cool ...
- 263k
1
vote
What to do so the sun (light source) appears to be following a daily cycle on a McKendree cylinder?
Use an internal moving mirror.
A McKendree cylinder is simply a large enclosed O'Neill cylinder, spinning for gravity. Because of the speed it spins, any light entering from 'windows' along the length ...
- 20.4k
1
vote
Can the mass of a rocky Super Giant be artificially reduced?
Mining
The only way to make it smaller is to mine the hell out of it.
Planet A sends self replicating robots to mine the planet and build space stations, Dyson satellites, ring worlds, ark ships, ...
- 44.7k
7
votes
Could a supernova powered starship work/survive?
As I said in a comment: You would die from neutrino radiation (!) alone, and you can't shield against it.
Such a bold idea needs bold science: You'll have to slow down time, bend space, or generally ...
- 2,174
31
votes
Accepted
Could a supernova powered starship work/survive?
It cannot
As Randall Munroe once wrote: "what would be more bright: A megaton nuclear bomb detonated against your eye, or a star going supernova as far away as the earth is from the sun?" ...
- 31.8k
9
votes
Could a supernova powered starship work/survive?
It would need to be
$$\huge \text{ BIG}$$
Huge I mean.
Like enormously. Mind-bogglingly. Big.
So big that in fact. That you quite can't wrap your head around it.
We have loads of questions around here ...
- 60.9k
11
votes
Could a supernova powered starship work/survive?
Your main problem is dealing with the extreme radiation. Like Cadence said in their comment, however big you think supernovas are, they're bigger than that.
Hard EM. Hard everything. Hell, even hard ...
- 5,325
8
votes
Could a supernova powered starship work/survive?
It survives with copious amounts of Handwavium, with a liberal sprinkling of Sci-Fi super-material with borderline magical properties.
E.g Super-duper-Special-Reinforced-nano-Carbon-steel-polymer-...
- 7,236
0
votes
Why is Hyperspace more hostile to computers than human brains?
Daemon Powers are Strongly Dependent upon Atomic Mass
Just make it so that Daemons powers are stronger/amplified in heavier elements.
It is easy as pie for them to split a heavy U-235 atom but nearly ...
0
votes
What to do so the sun (light source) appears to be following a daily cycle on a McKendree cylinder?
Just to clarify (because the original question is kinda vague)- when you say the McKendree cylinder is "open to space", you don't literally mean its open to hard vacuum. You mean it has ...
- 353
2
votes
Frozen Stars - Can my planet's inhabitants use U-238 reactors for 10,000 years, till their star thaws out?
Uranium 238 is Fertile
People still do not consider that modern nuclear technologies are very primitive. Current fission reactors extract only a tiny percentage of the energy available from the ...
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0
votes
What to do so the sun (light source) appears to be following a daily cycle on a McKendree cylinder?
This is difficult to achieve as you've stated it. I'll begin with how the system works by default.
Because the habitat is rotating to make artificial gravity, it will be acting as a gyroscope which ...
- 4,117
2
votes
Why is Hyperspace more hostile to computers than human brains?
Electronic computers are something we designed and so their operation is comprehensible, because we needed to understand them to design them. You can look at a part of a computer and say, that's an ...
- 4,807
4
votes
Why is Hyperspace more hostile to computers than human brains?
Quantum tunneling is impossible at cellular scales.
The transistors in modern CPUs are much smaller than brain synapses. What we still call "microchips" would be much more accurate to call &...
- 76.4k
11
votes
Frozen Stars - Can my planet's inhabitants use U-238 reactors for 10,000 years, till their star thaws out?
Non-fissile decay of radioactives (including uranium and thorium in natural isotope ratios) is believed to be the primary source of internal heat for rocky planets like Earth (or, presumably, Taurus, ...
- 44.6k
7
votes
Frozen Stars - Can my planet's inhabitants use U-238 reactors for 10,000 years, till their star thaws out?
From Wikipedia about Uranium
Around 99.284% of natural uranium's mass is uranium-238, which has a half-life of 4.468 billion years.
The above means that your decay heat will practically be stable on ...
- 263k
5
votes
Why is Hyperspace more hostile to computers than human brains?
Computers Are Dumb
People think that computers are exceptionally smart because they are able to perform rapid mathematical calculations and initiate complicated processes in the blink of an eye.
As a ...
- 4,170
5
votes
Why is Hyperspace more hostile to computers than human brains?
As much as I like some of the other answers, they’re missing something somewhat fundamental: biology heals.
Silicon computers can’t heal themselves from Daemon damage. Flaws and failure will persist ...
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0
votes
Why is Hyperspace more hostile to computers than human brains?
Brains are non-deteministic. You can enter the same information twice but the brain will not respond the same way each time. There is no repeatability. The most these Daemons could hope for would be ...
2
votes
Why is Hyperspace more hostile to computers than human brains?
Computers are like photographs, while brains are like holograms.
From Wikipedia:
When a photograph is cut in half, each piece shows half of the scene.
When a hologram is cut in half, the whole scene ...
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1
vote
Why is Hyperspace more hostile to computers than human brains?
Could be as simple as the fact that a human brain can fail to understand something but accept it. Computers on the other hand fail at this miserably. If in an FTL hyperspace realm, natural laws were ...
- 111
3
votes
Why is Hyperspace more hostile to computers than human brains?
There's too many protons.
You wanna trick an atom into doing something different? Great! There's lots of tweaks you can make to individual protons, neutrons, or electrons that might lead to the ...
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27
votes
Why is Hyperspace more hostile to computers than human brains?
The thing about a brain is, it's already got a daemon in it. After all, what are we but tenuous wisps of information inhabiting a physical substrate?
If a daemon wanted to inhabit a brain it would ...
- 4,395
11
votes
Why is Hyperspace more hostile to computers than human brains?
It's for a story where you want demon-infested electronics?
Tin whiskers. And various other metal whiskers.
Under strain (from temperature, vibration, induced magnetic fields, whatever), tin and other ...
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19
votes
Why is Hyperspace more hostile to computers than human brains?
Human brains are not - and let me be completely clear here, not even a little bit - like computers.
(And before anyone complains, I'm not the one that tagged this as neuroscience!)
Computer hardware ...
- 6,760
2
votes
Why is Hyperspace more hostile to computers than human brains?
There is nothing to daemons to manipulate on brains
Computers work with bits and bytes, and almost any disruption on these bits cause computers to fail, or worse, to malfunction.
Think of these demons ...
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