Questions tagged [megastructures]
For questions about extremely large artificial structures, including buildings.
204 questions
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Overland Ekranoplan Highways?
Supposing the world had access to these technologies at the same time, how viable would creating large, flat highways for large ground effect vehicles for the fast transport of cargo or passengers ...
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How close could solar systems be in ideal conditions
Let's say a god had wiped the universe clean and filled it with copies of our solar system. How close could those solar systems be to each other with every version of Earth still more or less being ...
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Orbital Ring/Space Elevator
This is more of a "is it technically possible" sort of question so here it goes!
I'm envisioning Earth with an orbital ring roughly 2,000 km from the surface attached by a series of tethers/...
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How would plate tectonics work in a shellworld? [closed]
For anyone not in the know, a shellworld is basically an artificial crust (or multiple layers of one) situated on top of some massive body, like a gas giant, a star or even a stellar fragment. The ...
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Prevailing Winds and Circulation cells on a Discworld
Imagine a flat disc, over 10,000 kilometers in radius, made of some impossibly strong material, and tethered to a rogue terrestrial planet such that the planet's rotation causes it to experience 1g of ...
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Atmospheric composition/segregation across the gradient on an Alderson Disc
The original design for the Alderson Disc has a huge, but very gradual, pressure gradient across the surfaces of the disc. The atmospheric pressure starts with near vacuum somewhere near where the ...
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Giant War-Marbles of Doom: What's the Biggest possible Spherical Vehicle we could Build?
I had a concept for Giant War-Marbles of Doom rolling across a giant Birch Planet with Earth-like gravity. The floor of this world would be incredibly thick steel, intended as armour against ...
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Parasols on an Alderson Disk
Parasols on Earth are designed to stop light coming from above, as the sun moves over the sky and its light is more powerful when it is higher in the sky
On an Alderson Disk, the sun is stationary ...
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What's the maximum size limit for an Earthlike shellworld?
While the title does look similar to this one, it's actually not.
For anyone not in the know, a shellworld is a popular sci-fi megastructure in which a hollow shell envelops a planet, a star or--in ...
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Is the proposed solar sailing race course possible?
This is an idea that's been banging around a couple of universes in my head for quite some time, the idea is to have solar sail racing yachts that have to traverse an asteroid field. This could be ...
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How many Consciousnesses could exist in a Matrioshka brain built around an O class star [closed]
(Note I am both autistic and new to this platform, I might not word or ask questions well and I might make questions confusing so if I do something wrong please tell me how to fix it)
So a ...
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Calculating Living Area on a Concentric Shellworld
I'm not sure if I should be asking this here on on the Maths Stack Exchange, because this is a sort of mathematics problem but here goes:
A civilization lives on multiple concentric shellworlds, each ...
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How many miles/km of tunnels would be required to replace all airports in the world
Assume that we wanted to replace all air travel with underground, high speed tunnels like Hyperloop. How many miles/km of tunnels would be required?
For example, according to wikipedia there are 1200 ...
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How would humans on Earth detect a Shkadov thruster on other side of the Milky Way Galaxy?
Apologies if the title is confusing - I've been trying to figure out how to word it for a while now.
Essentially I am writing a (relatively) hard science-fiction story set in the present/very near ...
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How would a dyson swarm actually work? -Orbits
SO HOW WOULD A DYSON SWARM'S ORBIT LOOK LIKE?
we are all familiar with the concept of a dyson swarm,
a series of orbital stations' reflective satellites that serve to collect the energy given off by ...
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