What should a sci-fi spaceship REALLY look like? People making sci-fi movies have it easy. If you’re designing alien technology, not even the most determined pedant could claim with any authority to know how a real Imperial TIE fighter might look. tie_fighter The TIE fighter (as imagined by George Lucas). If you’re making a film about war, or journalism, or (especially …
...of a fantastic joke from Futurama, when the ship is being dragged underwater by a giant fish and starts to creak under the pressure.
Professor Hubert Farnsworth: Good Lord! That's over 5000 atmospheres of pressure!
Fry: How many atmospheres can the ship withstand?
Professor Hubert Farnsworth: Well, it's a spaceship, so I'd say anywhere between zero and one.
that spaceships are big objects made of metal - or its unobtanium meta-equivalent - has held film SF in a retro-conservative loop for the past few decades.
Real spaceships, if they exist, are probably invisible and/or made of something so strange it has no familiar properties.
Once you crack light speed, all bets are off with supporting technologies.
Big metal boxes - or spheres, or blocky shapes with pointy aerials or glowing nacelles to indicate how technological they are - won't be on the menu.
Alien technology probably won't even look like technology at all. You're more likely to experience it in totally unexpected ways than as something you can pick apart with a spanner.
(And it won't have hexagonal corridors, either.)
The stunningly beautiful Cygnus from 'The Black Hole' - it's like the Crystal Palace has been fitted with a warp drive.
http://media.photobucket.com/image/cygnus%20black%20hole/redrockerjr5150/cygnus_1.jpg
And if I'm allowed just one more? The Orion Spaceplane from 2001 - so beautiful, so very nearly possible.
http://www.scifiairshow.com/ships-orion.html
need something like the stealth bomber, which is what most aurora vids look like, ships need stream lining for a electro magnet force field, if you are picking up speed, the force field will just be a pocket of plasma from sun and all other gravitational fields and aero dynamics are needed if you want to fly through atmospheres
The hull was indeed NFG around antimatter; but it was perfectly functional when it impacted the neutron star. Then same, however, could not be said for the contents, which crushed into neutronium at the nose. Also, the reason that craft crashed was the tidal effect from passing too close to the neutron star.
Not just a flying saucer, but *gasp* one of ours.
Also in the vein of that big bugger in Avatar is the Athena in Soderbergh's Solaris, which looks suspiciously like the offspring of the British Interplanetary Foundation's Daedalus probe and an Orion capsule, with the addition of an entire Maplins' catalogue of LEDs in the cockpit.
I'm upset to to see "serenity" lumped in with a load of unrealistic looking ships, including the enterprise , because:
a) that ship, like some of the others , lands on planets with atmospheres, therefore may be due a little aerodynamics
b) those engines arnt on sticks for the sake if it , its so they can be rotated to change direction
c) It's the only TV series , and probly one of the only films to acknowledge the "no sound in space" law.
The Death Star. Just THE DEATH STAR. (OK it was an oblate spheroid, but close enough)
The Borg cube is very efficient in terms of volume usage, but if the DS were that shape, the audience would likely not accept it as a spaceship. (Though given how weird most stuff in SW is, who knows?)
How have you not mentioned a design that (allegedly) NASA have expressed actual interest in producing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfury#Real_world_interest
Can't find the relevant quote, but it was something to do with the design actually taking in to account the difference in how a spaceship would handle in and out of atmosphere.
Mentioning that the station itself was realistic because it revolved to generate gravity is not enough. The Starfury space fighter was also complimented by NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab for being an absolutely spot on design for a small, manoeuvrable craft for use in zero gravity.
I heard, back in the 90s, that JPL had actually asked JMS if they could use the Star Fury design as the basis of an actual orbital maneuvering unit prototype, and he told them, yes they could, but only on the proviso that they officially called it a Star Fury. I don't know if they ever went ahead with it or not, or even if it was just an urban myth, but I found it interesting at the time.
Has anyone thought of Red Dwarf yet? A behemoth of a ship, designed to never touch atmosphere, collect hydrogen from a frontal scoop and took so long to build in space that the exterior hull is a mass of different design styles and new ideas thought up while the ship was being built.
It was also designed to consume astroids whole by attaching them to the exterior of the hull and have it be processed there.
As for up or down, that all depends on what angle on the six sided ship you approach it from and is mearly a matter of perspective.
would be able to alter its appearance in order to fit the mission profile. For example it could land in, ooh, let's say 1950s/60s London where it would assume the shape of, maybe, a Police Call Box. Problem is, the circuit that achieves this might well get stuck.
I would have thought the fighters and cruisers of Babylon five would have been more realistic for what Earth will come up with, or the Stargate earth destroyer etc. Or those ships from space above and beyond. Lets be honest when we get round to making them, we will go for form over function and like ship design for the passed hundred years we will get large ugly looking rectangles that serve a purpose.
Though for me the Avatar ship and the explorer vessel from B5 look the most realisic option for long range deep space missions, far more realistic that star trek etc.
The Reg have pictured the Nostromo correctly. Roke has linked an image to what the Nostromo was towing- i.e some sort of planet / refinery thing.
http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/324661/alien_the_history_of_the_nostromo_by_ron_cobb.html
and link at bottom of page for Chris Foss' version of the same events.
And speaking of mining ships, JMC Mining Ship Red Dwarf, apparently some kind 'Hydrogen Funnel' design, hence its shape. No need for streamlining. Not sure why Lister has to paint it.
-'STOP' icon, because there's no 'Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers'
... but Homo Sapiens certainly does.
This is basic cognitive science and psychology: humans evolved to walk on the crust of a planet. We haven't been brachiating for a very, very long time. This is bound to have an effect on how we design vehicles for any medium.
Aliens would likely have followed a different evolutionary path, so that will have a huge bearing on how they design their own travelling machines.
The TARDIS is a good example of the kind of lateral thinking you might see: why send the entire ship hurtling about the multiverse when you could achieve exactly the same results by keeping the ship tucked into a hidden dimension or 14, and move its cosmic user interface around the usual time-space frame of reference we're all familiar with instead?
Why SF has become so fixated on unfeasibly large boxes farting about through "hyperspace" (or some effectively synonymous equivalent) is beyond me. Doctor Who is actually quite refreshing in that sense. An alien is as likely to appear in a child's bedroom cupboard as in a giant spaceship with gigawatts of flashing, blinking, lights.
I spent considerable time trying to work out a user-interface for a fictional spaceship for a space-born species that had no sense of up/down (or preference for left/right). With only the fore/aft reference frame left it was beyond me. I eventually had to reinstate up/down (in preference to reinstating a right/left bias) to get anything usable.
Possibly a failure of immagination on my part. Suggestions welcome :-)
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