Recent content by Chatterton

That's also a possibility. But I had thought that the ring would be multi-functional, though, including a shipyard. Mine stuff on the moon, run it up to the ring on the space elevator, refine it, send the product to the shipyard. Fewer rockets, minimize fuel costs.

Thanks, Buzz Bloom. Sorry for the confusion. I borrowed the terminology from the SFIA YouTube channel: The orbital ring is a continuous megastructure around the equator in whatever the lunar equivalent of geosynchronous orbit is (lunasynchronous?) likely tethered by a series of space...

I'm working on a story set on the moon post-industrialization. The moon has an orbital ring with a spinning exterior to simulate Earth gravity. People work on the surface in lunar grav, then go up to live on the ring under conditions more favorable for human bodies. Two questions I need to...

I know where to find guns on the ISS (a 9mm in every Soyuz capsule, just in case things go way wrong on re-entry), but I can't justify guns in orbit of Mars. Complicated relationships, though. I got you covered!

My idea for the story is to have the POV entirely from the perspective of the people on the ship. So, if you're on a ship millions of miles from home with depleted fuel and food reserves and it looks like home just went back to the dark ages, from their perspective the amount of advance warning...

Well, let's discuss that point, because I'm getting conflicting answers on that. There are some saying that if it were big enough it could fry the whole power grid. There's speculation that if the CME of 2012 had been a direct hit it would've taken 4-10 years to get everything back online.

Thanks, rootone. And yes, things do start to get not as planned.

Hi! I'm playing around with an idea for a story set on an orbiter around Mars. While Mars and Earth were on opposite sides of the sun, Earth got hit by a colossal coronal mass ejection even bigger than the Carrington event of 1859. So they see Earth rise but can't pick up any radio signals...

I like the Cosmic Macaroni idea. Maybe the multiple rings are a single continuous band woven into a Celtic knot.

Every time I see the sun that hangs over the map of Westeros (https://i.stack.imgur.com/pqf90.jpg) I find myself imaging a system of Niven ring megastructures around a star. I know it's preposterous, but just how preposterous is it? Also, if it is remotely hypothetically plausible, would the...

So, to do it right, my team of commandos will have to de-orbit the old fashioned way, spinning around the globe a few times before hopefully landing in relatively the same area, which would make even clumsier and more random than WWII paratrooper action and oh my God I think that cold be wicked...

I know when a Soyuz capsule returns from the ISS it has to orbit Earth a few times before re-entry due to all the momentum it borrowed from ISS. What would happen if your ship was in the Clarke zone? Assuming we have the radiation shielding covered already. Would it be conceivable that a ship...

Regarding tides on a tide-locked oceanic moon: Would the tides simply follow the gravitational pull of the sun, thereby making them fairly straightforward to predict?

Am I correct in assuming the orbital periods of the sister moons would be way too long if they were only orbiting the world? I imagine they would disappear for long stretches of time when they were on the other side of the gas giant. If the gas giant had rings, is it possible you could see part...

You're the Galileo for a developing society on a remote archipelago on the far side of a tide-locked moon orbiting a gas giant. How do you figure out your place in that solar system? How do you convince others, who believe your world to be the center of the universe, of the truth? Will a road...