I actually thought that was “realistic”, in the sense used by the OP. If most of the strength of your ship comes from force fields then structural strength is at best a secondary consideration when designing your ship. That just made me think of the Martians from the webcomic A Miracle of Science; they use “vector fields” to hold their ships together, and as a result theirships and other machines often aren’t even a single object; they are multiple components held close to each other by the vector fields.
Also, given how common nacelles-sticking-out designs like that are among various Trek races, I always figured there was some major advantage in doing so, probably related to however the warp drive works.
I liked that. I think you mean that it would be an engineering nightmare because the thin spindles need to hold up the large naceles. But the Enterprise is built in space and can’t land, it never has to hold itself together under gravity. Building the supports thick enough to hold up the weight of the nacels would be pointless.
Compare the ISS, which is also a bunch of large heavy bits connected by relatively thin attachment points.
Other than the FTL and artificial gravity the ships (well at least the Colonial ones) in BSG seemed pretty realistic. I always liked how the Galactica basically had no windows, except for that one loung we saw once in a single episode. Which makes alot of sense. They even implied that artificial gravity was a relatively recent invention (at least on civilian ships). It’s a shame the budget never allowed an episode set on that ring ship.
Small craft would be useful if they can carry weapons powerful enough to destroy large ships, and are maneuverable enough to evade weapons on those large ships. The latter probably isn’t true in the Star Trek universe - phasers can target small craft fairly effectively. This seems realistic - if you assume beamed energy weapons (which presumably propagate at c), it’s logical that maneuverability is not an effective defense. So you build big ships with powerful shields, not small fighters.
As for the nacelles - I always thought their purpose was to create a warp field that encircled the whole ship. Their placement and lengths are probably dictated by the properties of the warp field, just like as the length and shape of radio antennas are dictated by properties of the electromagnetic field.
Not only that, but it had the pilot lying down flat in the cockpit, perpendicular to the direction of thrust from the main thrusters. Which seems logical (best way to withstand acceleration).
If you think about it, Galactica’s CIC was extremely realistic and logical; it’s consistent with how large warships work today, because it’s how a large warship would work. There’s no reason to have windows. The logical way of arranging the command center of a big warship is to have a central planning area for the captain with all the people he needs immediately around him.
The bridge of Enterprise, by comparison, doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. The wasted space is ridiculous, and the captain is separated from almost everyone; the people closest to him have no specific job on the bridge, and everyone’s looking at a big screen that might or might not have relevance to what THEY need to know.
Yes, the various technical manuals have sections on warp fields, and the dual-nacelle setup is, while not strictly necessary, the best way to get a proper warp field, due to field geometry and physical mass of the ships, relative to the field. (Unfortunately, some of the information from the tech manuals got contradicted by All Good Things… when the future Enterprise in it had 3 nacelles - which is specifically stated in the tech manuals as an unstable setup.)
I like the Art Deco style 1930’s spaceships (“Flash Gordon”). Exposed rivets, phallic noses, and clunky controls are neat. And the sound-like an old radio out of tune.
Woldn’t an interstelar ship be a sphere? No need for aerodynamics in space.
The crew quarters would probably be a sphere, as would the fuel tanks, to get the most volume per skin area (skin is mass, after all). But it would probably make sense to have a long truss of some sort between the engines and the crew compartment, since whatever your engines run on is probably radioactive.
For a warship, it would make sense to make the whole thing spherical, with partitions inside for crew, fuel, equipment, etc. A warship’s skin should be armor, which makes the weight of it that much more critical.
Well, if you don’t have artificial gravity then you might want a rotating ring and not a sphere. Or when you add the drive, you get the classic ring around a cylinder design. As for armor, that depends - armor quite possibly simply wouldn’t be useful enough to be practical given the energies involved in ship-to-ship combat. You’d just be adding useless mass to the ship.
Of course that could change with the right sci-fi technology. I recall the Prince Roger/Empire of Man series, which had an FTL drive that ignored mass, and a normal space drive that was affected by mass. They had “carriers” which were basically hybrids of real world carriers and battleships; armored heavily enough to be nuke-resistant, heavily armed, and carrying smaller, much less well armored (but much more mobile in-system) ships from system to system.
The Borg Cube, because it’s a cube. It’s a boring design, but in space, every dedicated spacecraft should be cubes. Aerodynamics is for when there’s air.
Or a ring (or two or more separate pods on tethers) for simulated gravity. Or if your main concern is avoiding hitting some bit of debris or hiding behind a shield, a long thin cylinder.
its possible to spin a sphere around one axis and put the living / sleeping quarters at 1 G in a ring around the “equator” and then you’d have floors with decreasing gravity and a zero g dock in the center. It would make a lot of sense to have everything going in dock at the zero g not rotating center. You can unload and load bulk provisions with no gravity, then they “fall” down to the high gravity areas down ramps and you eject waste from an outlet on the outer skin equator, the rotational angular momentum would fling it away from the ship.
any ring would need to have a central docking mechanism anyway.
I love some of the other ships mentioned (BSG esp.), but I think personally, based on the OP’s criteria (i.e non-technically) the Firefly Serenity is tops, with the Star Wars Millenium Falcon as second. Both seem lived-in, in a way that e.g the Enterprise just isn’t. I esp. love the foldaway toilet on Serenity, the kitchen/dining room-as-living area, and the fact that you can see how it would work as a cargo ship (something I don’t really “see” for the Falcon, BTW, and I say this as someone who owns the minifig-scale Lego Falcon :)).
Imagine a rotating ring inside a nonrotating sphere.
You have your supplies, especially water in the outer sphere. The inner hub is where your people live.
Your drive is integrated into the outer sphere.
The bridge is buried deep in the inner core.
It is weightless there, but that is acceptable for short periods of time.
The bridge is spherical. All stations are able to be switched from various functions to others. So there might be an accustomed weapons station or science station, but with the proper command sequence each station could be repurposed. These stations would be specially shielded from incoming energy assaults. That would obviate the incredibly incredible helmsman at controls getting severe damage to his hands syndrome That is the worst thing about Star Trek that I can think of.
So, where is the Captain in this? Sitting in the center of the sphere. With all of the various displays floating in her view she can choose to select some of then (environmental, sick bay status, this week’s music selection, …) to be background, but still there is the information from tactical, weapons, defense that she will need to see. So I posit a three dimensional array projected in her field of view. From those data streams, she can then plan the mission much more effectively. Yes, she will ask her other officers their opinions, but at least they won’t be spending time trying to describe visual and complex ideas in a bunch of pseudoscientific crap. Exposition can happen, but it will be driven by the plot, not some McGuffin nonsense.
The floating from station to station at shift change might be fun to watch. The bridge would obviously need to have stantions in place to aid the movements of the various crew members. A scene where we watch the change from alpha crew to beta crew would be interesting. “You have the bridge, number three”. heh heh heh
I don’t think the Falcon is a cargo ship, its a passenger ship. And while Han uses it to haul “cargo” its only because the cargo he is hauling is only a couple of kilos:D
Ditto for the Serenity, in one of the early episodes where they find that ship that has been raided by the Reavers you can see how big and open a real cargo hauler is.
