Recent content by BastianQuinn

I need someone vastly more knowledgeable to tell me how ludicrous something is, and I did not see that happening on the science fiction forum. This thread was also not moved, so I felt supported in that choice. If I was wrong, I can stop posting. I'm getting results here, and I'm learning quite...

Wow... I think this might be the only example of a loop which will always close itself. The source of the extra energy is the point in the future, which will have been a universe with the extra mass-energy to spare, because it manifested when it came from the future. If Tp is the moment in the...

All exactly the kinds of questions and criticisms I'm looking for. Can you elaborate on what makes the fission and fusion processes suspect, or should I start a new thread in atomic physics.

Impractical I can live with. I can finger-wave furiously enough to make impractical okay. The ship does not gather osmium. Remote sub-ships fuse other materials into osmium. Practical or not, all this would take is time, assuming the two technologies exist. I'm not designing something for people...

This is true. Time travel generally fails to specify what exactly is being transported through time, and the more detail a story gives about what is being transported, the more obvious it is that it would not work... at least not as described. Most instantaneous time traveling such as Back to...

In my experience, a paradox isn't some kind of magical error in space-time that can be harnessed by the plot of a scifi story like "pure chaos" or "reversing the polarity." A paradox generally only signifies that the person performing the thought experiment lacks the knowledge to complete it...

It is the densest-packing radioactively stable atom. I considered gold or lead, since they are important elements in industry, but I chose osmium for its density and I thought a scarcity of gold and lead would put interesting socio-economical stresses on the resulting community. They have ready...

Believe it or not, an answer like that is what I need. Something to tell me I need not consider this option further because there is no way to make it work. I'll need to come up with a different configuration. The system is a sub-light generation ship which can divide like a cell. This...

Yes, I'm hoping to somehow suspend the ring withing the Lagrange points L4 and L5. I've done some more calculations, though much of it is something like fermi estimation. With my initial guess at the dimensions of the ring, the inside has a radius of 139km, outside radius 557km. From what...

Here I've attempted to illustrate the movement as I picture it (not to scale) The ring is intentionally tilted along the axis of the orbit. The speed of the ring's rotation effectively offsets the torque acted on the disk by gravity, for reasons similar to why the globes don't just smack into...

I am by no means an expert, but I figured a reply from someone similarly interested would be better than no reply at all. Heuristics in algorithms is entirely about defining the metrics of "good enough," how often those metrics are calculated, and the "time" wasted making those calculations...

Hello. I'm a science fiction author with a degree in computer science and programming and I'm here because I need to avoid writing things that are obviously wrong in my books. I am currently working on the specifications of the Eco Shell, a sub-light space arc which I managed to describe...

I'm having trouble conceptualizing the variables involved with this system, and I was wondering if some expertise might make the problem much simpler than I believe it to be. Two massive spherical bodies (Osmium, minimum radius 900km, 5.08m/s^2 surface gravity) orbit each other with a solid or...