Questions tagged [spaceships]
For questions involving implemented theory or technology for travelling through space. Consider also [space-travel]. See also the tag information (click "info") for more details on when this tag applies.
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Why would newer spaceships still have core ejection systems despite the proliferation of fusion reactors?
Set in near future Space tourism becomes a thing, the older spaceships have some issues with their nuclear reactors that occasionally suffers from positive void coefficient whereby the saturation of ...
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Why can't escape pods be opened from the inside?
Set in the near future Space tourism is a thing, all commercial and non-military spaceships must come equipped with multiple escape pods. The minimum specs for each escape pod are as follows:
min ...
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Calculating drop time from a spaceship to a planet
In my story, we have a spaceship orbiting at "LEO" around a foreign planet.
The planet has 0.6g gravity. same atmosphere density as Earth.
The ship orbits at 600km with an orbit time of 100 ...
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What would space equivalent of trucks look like? [closed]
I'm writing a story and the peoples' given profession is basically "space truckers": delivering small-to-medium containers of cargo across long distances in the galaxy. Because the journeys ...
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How large a mass could a spacecraft tow between solar systems?
For the purposes of this question, let's assume space travel does not involve 'shortcuts' through other dimensions (like so-called hyperspace) and that 'tractor-beam' technology exists.
Provided the ...
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How could one defend against a concentrated neutron beam in a hard sci-fi setting?
I'm thinking of adding a neutron beam cannon to my hard sci-fi setting (basically works by accelerating a bunch of ions and then shooting them at a beryllium foil target (see here).
However, I don't ...
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How could a spacecraft defend against a train of small hypervelocity impactors?
Hypervelocity (30 km/s) impactors tend not to penetrate that deep, even though they can have an enormous amount of kinetic energy. The penetration depth can be approximated by $l_i \sqrt{\rho_i/\rho_a}...
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Realistic protection for spaceships against kinetic projectiles
With relatively current technology (i.e. no force shields, etc) what are ways to protect a spaceship (or at least mitigate the amount of damage) against hypervelocity kinetic projectiles? I'm a ...
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Can a spaceship "hitchhike" on an explosion to escape a gravity well?
Common in sci-fi tropes but absolutely climactic nonetheless, a spaceship faces impending doom after encountering a gravity well such as a stellar black hole. The spaceship's captain gives the order ...
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How would you get a ship out of a gravity well?
Context
I'm helping a friend with a hard sci-fi story and we ran into an issue. In this setting the technology for absurdly powerful and efficient fusion drives which seem not to have heat managment ...
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Avoiding time travel or causality stuff
How to avoid blatantly time traveling or breaking causality in a big way when getting my characters to places quickly (Faster than light)?
The method used is a tunnel in some sort of different space ...
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Necessity of army and navy in a space warfare setting
I'm writing a realistic sci fi story involving interstellar conflict , where space warships (assume something like star destroyers from star wars) are the norm, These warships are capable of orbital ...
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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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Possibility of solar powered space stations around a red dwarf
I have an earth-like world orbiting an M7 red dwarf on the outer edge of the habitable zone(0.0443AU). Since red dwarfs emit more infrared light than visible light, solar panels would probably not be ...
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