Recent content by Bab5space

Same as normal chess, only you cannot see what the identity of your opponent' pieces are, although you can deduce it by movement.

So I mixed Stratego and Chess. How? Step 1. Take a chess board and an amount of opposing stratego pieces equal to the usual chesss setup. Step 2: Make or find stickers to put behind the stratego pieces that ID them as chess pieces, at least to you. The other player will have to make educated...

Plants on mars? I will tell you what I have read and seen. Read: Plants using martian dirt are plausible, but they are also likely toxic due to the abundance of perchorlates (probably misspelled it) in the martian soil. Now it is possible to filter that junk out, but in all likelihood it will...

Was wondering this for a scifi alien race I have in mind, is it chemically possible to have a race with combustible blood.? The answer: Yes, but I wonder how close the blood will be to our own? Since oxygen carrying blood like ours is preferred since it can deliver more energy for the work the...

Hmmm... it's all in the details, especially the honeworld environment. A somewhat Earth-like world is not a bad start, especially considering that oxygen provides a lot of energy for lifeforms. Yet differences can easily crop up from there. For example, a world with more oxygen that was very...

Better efficiency would be nice, but the easiest way I know of doing that is by running through lots of propellant and mixing it with antimatter. Granted you can fly for days at 1g that way, and a magnetic nozzle is likely a must as well as plenty of radiators. Magnetic nozzles are bad in the...

Interesting, but the handwave is the fiction part, just like so many scifi media spacecraft s have fiction working in league with known science to make them work. Unless you guess or assume it will be possible to get 95% efficient radiators some day. It just might be. Either way it favors...

There is a difference between being informed, misinformed, or being ignorant of the science behind common scifi staples. Ignore that if you wish, but it won't change anything.

Strenghths and weaknesses eh? I guess that comes with the territory. For me scifi aliens must be distinct in their behavior from common humanity. As far as strengths and weaknesses, my SF aliens take a concept and answer the what if question of how far they take the concept. In several ways...

The challenges of fusion I have discussed at length and won't do so again. But the main reason or showstopper, even if we had a ton of antimatter and a safe way to store it (we have partially a safe way to store it), we are not out of the woods yet. Why? Radiator mass. The greater the heat...

I suppose you prefer scifi hard corrosponding to IRL limits and current understanding? If so know this: Neither antimatter nor fusion are the panacea scifi makes them appear to be, as both require a healthy helping of fiction to even work at all as commonly depicted in scifi media.As for...

Thanks. The reason the sherpas are like that is because their blood is thinner (has less oxygen) and can work with less. Now I suppose maybe after breeding a few new generations on an Earth world the descendents of the humanoids might adapt naturally. Or it may even be an engineered given...

Scifi Humanoids by their very nature are'nt very alien. Where they compensate is how well they can interact with human characters. However, there are internal ways to modify them. Main question: I researched oxygen and learned that less oxygem breathed makes humans fatigued faster, while too...

Turns out creating life from nonliving matter is hard. Like really hard. So far impossible even for humans. Which is ironic given the popular ideas of our time. Yet if intelligent effort continues to fail maybe we should throw some DNA and nanobots in a deep hole and let it sit for several...

Antimatter particle beam. SF makes it possible to be cheap enough to produce to use as a weapon. SF also allows a spacecraft to fire it at near lightspeed velocity... without the massive radiators that would dwarf your vessel that IRL current science entails. A gram of antimatter hitting...