Also ...
Mummie Tardis has is a fully functional AI that isn't insane. She's fun, curious and adventurous. And as well as sometimes taking you places where you DO want to go, she sometimes has other ideas.
Perfect starship. Perfect relationship.
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 …
It was made of the "same plastic they make doll's heads from", on account of them always surviving plane crashes intact. (thus making the same point about editors of photojournalism as did season 5 of The Wire).
One Iain M Banks novel (non Culture) features very long narrow ships, for use through wormholes.
@ Captain TickTock: Why 'FAIL'? SGI are no longer synonymous with computer graphics as they once were, but there's no reason why their recent HPC boxes can't be used for rendering. However, I don;t think anyone uses Amiga VideoToasters any more (Terminator2, The Abyss, Babylon5)
I hope nobody calls me out for pedantry on a thread like this, but nearly every flying saucer I've ever seen in film has had to operate in atmosphere.
As for up and down being irrelevant — as are left, right, back and forth, presumably? Again, I seem to remember relative space being incredibly important in pretty much every sci-fi film I've seen. People don't get into space and go "that X axis was really pissing me off!".
There have been a few distictive ship designs I can remember not mentioned yet so what the hell...
Gunstar - The last starfigher..
Max or whatever you want to call it from flight of the navigator..
Was battle beyond the stars before or after space raiders, cant remember off hand which one came first but both used the same ships.. both films probably equally as bad but hey ho..
The ships from elite/frontier are fairly distinctive too..
I agree: The Starfury design is as hard sci-fi as it gets.
I bet it could be built today, borrowing one thing or 234 from the Space Shuttle.
It makes perfect sense, even to use the cockpit portion as an escape pod.
But its surface controls would have to be borrowed from some other craft, like Helicopters, or more adequately, Harriers, because of the extra means to maneuver it.
PS. The game Descent was truly 3D. You could move your ship in all 3 directions, and rotate in any axis. It was a nightmare to pilot it. Waterfalls within the game helped with the "up and down" concept a little, to avoid disorientation. I never used all buttons and sliders in my joystick, prior to that game. And they were not enough.
Not that strange really. There will be a need for a 3-dimensional grid and since there is no real center to the universe we probably will use Earth, or maybe our Galaxy's black hole as the center and two other galaxies to fix op the 'north' and 'west'. Position in space will probably be given in an angular notation (ascension and declination) + distance from 'center'.
So 'south of' isn't really that weird.
"Geoffrey Landis is a scientist at the NASA John Glenn Research Center, where he works on Mars missions and on developing advanced concepts and technology for future space missions. Helpfully, he’s also a Nebula and Hugo award-winning sci-fi writer. If anyone knows about this stuff, he does:"
The important point to take away from this is not that this guy does knows about it, but that currently nobody has the first clue about how to design an intergalactic spaceship. So as far as visual apperance goes, we don't have scooby. Streamlined design may or may not be important, for reasons we don't understand. Likewise 'up' and 'down'. So there is no point in pretending this guy, or anyone else, has a better idea what it should look like.
The Eagle spacecraft seemed to me to be both functional and practical. I liked the exposed superstructure that allowed multiple add-on modules to be quickly bolted on. There was a central cargo hold, manoeuvring thrusters at each cardinal point and several different marques for different missions.
In case you're looking for a pic:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/48/S99-Special_Effects_Team.jpg
Sub-c starships that work will be the size of coke cans (or smaller), packed with virtual reality and (maybe) hardware for bootstrapping real reality from a comet after arrival. Note: one subjective year in VR equalling tens of thousands of real years is an advantage - the journey is fast enough not to get boring.
A variant is dumb machinery that bootstraps a big computing substrate and interstellar comms upon arrival. Then you just beam your virtual self to another star system at the speed of light., while also going nowhere at all. You can build a galactic-scale civilisation this way. I like the idea that you press a "send" button and then have to look out of the (virtual) window to find out if you are the copy that stayed at home or the copy that travelled thousands of lightyears.
Then there's the generation ship the size of a moon, but I have grave doubts that one can keep its inhabitants from destroying their ship in interstellar space, given that the journey will be hundreds of generations long. And if they can invent tech that will look after itself over millennia, they'll surely hit on the VR trick before building a generation ship?
Super-c starships can be anything you care to imagine, because they're about as likely to exist as time machines (for much the same reasons).
The best story about time travel (impossibility of) used the idea that the universe has to intervene actively to prevent causality violation and its own unravelling. One side in a war has worked this out, and tempts the other side to get itself destroyed by trying to build a time machine. Too late, they find out that the universe's idea of minimal local intervention is to make the sun explode prematurely. It's a big universe.
Greetings Regies:
--When I was a lad, I suspended any disbelief months before a movie even came to town. I remember a Japanese Space Oater, The Mysterians, I think, where a man is a metalized rubber suit played a giant alien robot. I would watch and think "Gee, how can those terribly clever Japanese Boffins do this, it is completely believable. What genius."
--A few years later I remember Harlan Ellison on the Tom Snyder Show, talking about Close Encounters and saying something like "Then a giant chandelier comes down and starts spitting out Pillsbury Dough Boys" What a hoot.
Best Regards
Clear Ether
I thought this question was answered by the BBC series "Space Odyssey - Voyage To The Planets" where the most realistic design for a spacecraft was used. For those that didn't see it, think 2001, but with a whopping big colision shield on the front instead of a ball.
http://www.amcsorley.dsl.pipex.com/space_odyssey/pegasus.jpg
In fact the design was so spot on, that it was practically re-used again in the series "Defying Gravity"
http://scifiandtvtalk.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/dg60.png
Suggest you torrent both if you never saw. I thought both were great series.
As has been written about in numerous books, the most practical means of construction of a large star-faring vessel which does not bleed the home planet of scarce resources is to hook a few engines onto a hollowed out asteroid...
..end result is totally random configuration to account for the variability in shape of the original lump of rock... it could be anything from a flattened disk to an elongated peanut... pure spheres being unlikely unless the original rock was so massive that its internal gravity was strong enough to pull its sides in equally...
ergo - discussion of 'design' is pointless until we get to the point of selecting a rock...
He seemed amazed by a simple act of human kindness, like an optician (and a pricey high level one at the time) fixing his glasses, giving him spare screws and not charging him a penny
His mate Norman Spinrad was slightly nicer, if more easily confused
When you have enough resources and technology to create something like the Death Star, shape is irrelevant. Might be good to adhere to a few functional designs but honestly, it doesn't matter that much.
And I don't care about this subject since no one will ever reach near-light traveling speed anytime soon. I am more interested in the Higgs Boson right now. Much more relevant and achievable.
Paris: because for her shape is less important than speed...
I always thought that a space only fighter (i.e. just does dog fights in space) would be more spherical than any other shape. After all, just as 'up' is pretty irrelevant in space, so is 'forward'.
You'd want an even 360deg propulsion, and weapon arcs, after all, why would you want to waste time doing a Immelmann to face the bad guy?
Not sure how you'd control it though...wouldn't be a joystick for sure...