. . . edit: Although I kind of think I get what you're saying. Sometimes they invent a working system but then forgot to rule on the side effects? However I think that would be very obvious if your drive was using known physics to begin with. For example if cargo mass affected acceleration i.e. it ...

My standard substitute for a smart phone, watch, etc. is eyeglasses that include a computer, communications system, etc., with the glasses as the display. For concentrated work it can make the display opaque, but normally it operates as a heads up display. Input can include speech, typing onto a vir...

A different way to look at the distinction between hard science fiction, fantasy, and the continuum between is the attention paid to self consistency. By that measure, game rules tend to run harder than novels, and novels tend to be harder than movies -- often even game rules based on movies. Anothe...

. . . But if each world is 8 digits, a name and a map-cordinate, then given half a day you could write some computer program to generate them until the machine melted. Given a bit longer it wouldn't look so random either; high tech clusters etc. Detailing all the worlds beyond this is hard work. . ...

GURPS Traveller did have Social Standing, in the form of advantages and disadvantages. It just isn't an attribute in the same way as Dexterity, Intelligence, Strength, and Health are.

I designed ships to cross the Rift, including a point where a Jump-8 gap is crossed with a Jump-4 to deep space, a pause to check equipment and another Jump-4. It's expensive, but cheaper than detouring through Corridor or the Jump-5 route through Aslan space. It can be built in whatever edition of ...

Here's one of many articles on the subject of adjusting the Earth's orbit by transferring orbital energy with comets or asteroids: "Nasa aims to move Earth Scientists' answer to global warming: nudge the planet farther from Sun"https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2001/jun/10/globalwarming.climat...

Part of my Traveller coin and currency project is finding decent art. I know there are are portraits of Stephon, Iolanthe, Ciencia Iphegenia, Duke Norris, and a few others, but with one exception they're all by J Andrew Keith or in his style, and owned by Far Future. Example Keith artwork: https://w...

On a slow, "our system's star is warming and we need to move farther away" time scale, the job can be done without superscience.* The idea is to send rockets with fission power plants to comet sized iceballs, use the ice as reaction mass, and change the iceballs' orbits so that they pass close to th...

I was actually thinking about making such a thing myself. I did make some a few years ago but they weren't very nice. I stalled on the project to do it right for several reasons. 1. Getting art that doesn't look cartoonish requires money to pay good artists, even if I do the graphic design part of t...

I'm tempted to do an illustration. The geometry is easier than a lot of things one might draw.

I would imagine that highports would have warehouse spars that consist of long spars with lots of docking clamps, maybe a pair every four meters or so, with each pair offset 90° from the pairs before and after. To use them, pay for a clamp reservation, clamp a stack of 10, 20, or 100 shipping contai...

Self-drive is close but will likely need designated zones until the next breakthrough. There was recently a report on self-drive disengagements (the computer asked for a human, or the human intervened). . . . The best one was Waymo (Google) with 1 disengagement every 11,000 miles (17,700 km). That'...

That makes sense. Just knowing that there are guidelines can be a story seed: seeing something out of the ordinary is a sign of something up.

As another back story option, you could describe it as a surplus or retired military transport ship, decommissioned by a subsector navy because the ship class had become a nuisance to maintain. The original design had rapidly been found to be flawed, but rather than order a class-wide revision to fi...

The estate of Paul Allen owns some of the world's largest yachts, and besides being luxurious yachts, they're also some of the most advanced research ships in the world. He lent one of them to researchers who found a battleship lost in World War II, and researchers aboard another one found a lost WW...

There's an entire branch of medical science that involves going to strange places (including places like subway door handles, not just wilderness), taking samples of microscopic life, and testing them for classification and potential for pharmaceutical value. About 90% of all observed microorganisms...

. . . "Diseases are caused by living things that are too small for us to see," . . . Well, the Roman scholar Varro warned in his Rerum rusticarum of "certain minute creatures which cannot be seen by the eyes, which float in the air and enter the body through the mouth and nose and there cause serio...

I just noticed that the new Behind the Claw covers Deneb, not just Spinward Marches. Very cool!

And Hivers get a new book? Excellent, even if they have to share a volume with some others.

I think the larger problem for civilian supersonic aircraft is the sonic boom. If executives could fly New York to Los Angeles in 2½ hours instead of 5½ hours, they would make a market for the planes. But being able to fly Los Angeles to Sydney in 6 hours or New York to London in 3 hours isn't going...