New answers tagged space
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Static Floating Objects in Zero Gravity
Water filled cubes acting as momentum stabilisers
... and also gyroscopic stabiliser.
If I size up the cubes in the scene right, they seem to be about 3m wide (I'm being a bit generous with the size ...
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Static Floating Objects in Zero Gravity
Yes, you absolutely can use magnetic fields to do this. By manipulating the magnetic fields on the boundary of your construction zone using an array of electromagnets, you can create more or less ...
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When are Turreted Railgun better than Spinally-Mounted Railguns?
Why build any long barrel, why any big gun?
Your question sounds as if it were irrelevant how long the barrel or how big the gun is, but it absolutely is not. I don't even need to go into any reasons: ...
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Static Floating Objects in Zero Gravity
A high density core.
These objects are way heavier than it seems and the player jumping off them would not give them enough momentum to move them.
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Static Floating Objects in Zero Gravity
Dynamic redistribution of internal mass for a more-than-rigid shell
The "star" has to be heavy so as not to move around. But the weight is not distributed uniformly in the interior, nor in ...
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Static Floating Objects in Zero Gravity
What if you just made them REALLY heavy to minimize movement from students? And reset their position at the end of each round?
It would be less resistant against rotation but that is easily solved ...
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Static Floating Objects in Zero Gravity
Dynamic position keeping: you define a position for each object, give it a mean to check it and means to keep it against external influences, probably something similar to rockets.
In this way when a ...
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Can moon people generate electricity using a gravity dynamo that is turned by the gravity of their host planet?
Energy conversion
Electricity is produced by conversion of some other form of energy (mechanical, chemical, solar, thermal etc.) into it. Tidal waves have mechanical energy.
Tides
Tides are produced ...
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When are Turreted Railgun better than Spinally-Mounted Railguns?
Railguns are heavy
Railguns need to be very strong. Whenever one is fired, the two rails create enormous magnetic forces which try to push them apart. To avoid bending the rails need to be strongly ...
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When are Turreted Railgun better than Spinally-Mounted Railguns?
Size of ship
My small, lightweight, fast-moving ship can only support a spinal mounted railgun because the kickback of any non-spinally-centered shot would induce a spin. I also need the potential ...
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When are Turreted Railgun better than Spinally-Mounted Railguns?
Rail gun is a projectile weapon - meaning there is a physical object being thrown at a target. How it will be used depends on what your world (and universe) looks like and, specifically, what tech ...
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When are Turreted Railgun better than Spinally-Mounted Railguns?
Since it’s a railgun, I would go with a mass driver gauss rifle design. It essentially speeds up an object pushing a payload (which is your ammunition) and stops the object pushing the payload, ...
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When are Turreted Railgun better than Spinally-Mounted Railguns?
Rail torque.
Rotating the turret with long protruding railgun puts torque on the rails because forces are applied only to one end of a long structure. They wind up bending out of true. At best this ...
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Magnetic Flux Pinning Whipple Shields?
You definitely can use magnets to keep the layers of the shield in place but what benefit does an active system like this over a passive system?
In a passive system you get a significant reduction in ...
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Accepted
When are Turreted Railgun better than Spinally-Mounted Railguns?
This question asks a trade-off between traversement speed and projectile energy. In a turret, your ability to point the weapon is limited by the speed at which you can turn the turret. This gives the ...
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What observable traits set the MilkyWay apart from other Galaxies?
Since we're bringing this question up again, I feel I should offer the counterpart to Daron's answer
The Shadow Path
(Milky Way from the ALMA telescope, Atacama desert, by Miguel Claro)
The Milky Way ...
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What observable traits set the MilkyWay apart from other Galaxies?
The most notable observable trait is that the Milky Way can be observed.
The vast majority of other galaxies is too faint to be seen by the naked human eye. Andromeda is 3x the apparent diameter of ...
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What observable traits set the MilkyWay apart from other Galaxies?
Nothing
Cosmology demands, that no spot is special. Milkyway is just another galaxy, it isn't more special than others. Only because it is home to humans, they think it is special because of that. But ...
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What observable traits set the MilkyWay apart from other Galaxies?
The Milky Way is notable for being one of the largest galaxies in the Local Group, smaller only than Andromeda. It also has several satellite galaxies, so alternative names for the Milky Way could ...
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Is the universe old enough to have an ecosystem of feral self-replicating spacecraft?
No reason not to
There is literally nothing stopping you from doing so.
Spaceships
Literally anything that’s vacuum-tight, ranging from Mercury rockets to Saturn V to the Millenium Falcon.
Self-...
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Would a hollowed out world be mechanically stable?
No, but it does not matter.
First of all Mercury is a planet, and by definition it means hydrostatic equilibrium, meaning its shape is supported by internal pressure.
So if you start to hollow it from ...
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Would a hollowed out world be mechanically stable?
If humanity had Dyson Sphere level technology, then we would be capable of manufacturing huge quantities of extremely high strength materials. If you are capable of building a ring-world, then you are ...
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Would a hollowed out world be mechanically stable?
In theory a perfect and homogeneous hollow shell is stable, because its spherical shape ensures that the inner tensions are balanced.
In reality, due to the inevitable small local inhomogeneities and ...
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Would a hollowed out world be mechanically stable?
No
It will collapse, a world needs to be by tiny before it can be self supported, small enough it is unlikely to be a sphere to begin with since planets are sphere because gravity is sufficient to ...
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Accepted
How would I calculate the greenhouse effect based on atmospheric composition?
I've found a way to calculate a surface temperature, but it relies on a constant, $\epsilon$, that doesn't appear to have an easy way to generate it.
The function is:
$$
\frac{S(1-A)}{4} = \sigma \...
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What might case cause the development of biological nuclear weapons as a natural evolutionary adaptation of a species?
Start with an electric organ
A number of different species, such as the electric eel, have electric organs where many cells are stacked, which pass ions at one side to add up to a strong effect. In ...
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What might case cause the development of biological nuclear weapons as a natural evolutionary adaptation of a species?
An insectoid like species that uses nuclear isotopes as fuel.
This is a species with different types of insect in different roles. Workers, soldiers, queens, etc. Some of them use nuclear isotopes as ...
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What might case cause the development of biological nuclear weapons as a natural evolutionary adaptation of a species?
Evolution needs the individual bearing a certain feature to be able to survive and procreate.
Of course it's highly unlikely that anything alive and kicking might be able to be a nuclear bomb and then ...
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Accepted
Political Concerns of Laser Propulsion System
Kare Sailbeam
Jordin Kare developed a significant improvement over the classical beam sails. One just accelerates small sails to near the speed of light and uses nuclear pulsed propulsion concepts (...
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