It’s stock type is a YT-1300f light freighter. My understanding has always been that the “Special modifications” were in the area of engine capacity and smuggler hidey-holes, but the basic layout is still that of a light cargo vessel (25-100 tons). If it were a passenger ship, it would be laid out in the YT-1300p configuration, butit’s not.
That was a colony ship. But I didn’t mean the Firefly class was some sort of equivalent of a bulk Cargo ship (that’s the Nostromo.) Serenity is a “Multipurpose, Mid-Bulk Transport” - the cargo hold is clearly the largest feature in her design (payload is listed as ~ 80 tons) and she’s designed for easy access to the hold for loading.
Correction - a sphere makes much more sense when you’re trying to contain heat or pressure. It makes no sense to have a big unpressurized ship that is shaped like a sphere, it makes no sense to have your machinery in pressurized/heated areas, it makes no sense for all your habitable areas to be in a single sphere that could be compromised.
Probably the best arrangement would look something like an unfinished Death Star, arranged differently. You’d have equitorial/polar structural rings where you’d mount weapons, sensors, maneuvering, and docking apparatus. Possibly supporting an exterior layer of radiation/kinetic shielding here. Mounted along the internal supports would be the power plants, life support systems, etc.
Surrounding those, in pods like grape clusters, would be where you’d find the spheres. These would be partially for human habitation, but they’d also help insulate the internal systems against damage. The battle bridge would cover no more than half the habitation modules. In case of danger you would just rotate it to the side facing away from the threat (assuming such a favorable rotation exists). The hab pods would absorb all the damage first, and everybody would just have to sleep in the bridge until repairs could be done.
So in summary, yeah, overall the ship should have a round-ish plan, but nothing needs to be strictly spherical except the 3-5 meter pods where the perishables live.
I must speak up for the interior of the Dark Star, in that it was a total shithole with crap strewn all over the place, and looked like it stank, just like it would be likely to be with [del]four[/del] three guys living in it bored out of their minds for years on end.
The Discovery in 2001 does seem a probable design, and it’s notable that it very closely reswembles the ship in his much earlier story Breaking Strain
Robert Heinlein’s ship in Rocket Ship Galileo still seems reasonable to me – a chemical rocket built for point-to-point transfer on the Earth (much like a comercial jet that hopped through space) retrofitted with an atomic engine (a reactor that heats its reaction mass – in this case zinc – to high-energy vapor). It’s not the most efficient ship, but it is sup;posed to be what a small operation could build with existing materials (assuming the existence of a thriving rocket-ship transport system).
When they turned it imnto a film (with a lot of changes in the plot), the ship became a built-from-scratrch-by-industry ship, but still with the same basic atomic engine. Heinlin wrote long and lovingly about the back and forth involved in building a control room that could both seem practical and reasonable and could also be filmed, in his essay Filming Destination Moon, which has been anthologized more than once.
Some of the Alliance ships in Firefly were basically flying cities/skyscrapers, which I thought was a neat idea. The biggest disadvantage, though, is if you are at the top of one tower and have to go to the top of another…all the way down, over, then all the way back up. Inefficient. But cool looking.
[spoiler]The Daban Urnud from Neal Stephenson’s Anathem uses multiple spheres inside a larger structure that is an icosahedron (looks like a 20-side die). The propulsion is explained generally in the book but without a lot of detail.
Humans don’t effectively use the space in rounded structures though. If we were gelatinous amoeba-men, sure, but people do better with right angles. Everything we make is built to fit in right angled living-space. Put a refrigerator in a geodesic dome house or a couch or hang a flat screen TV. If you build a sphere, you’ll need custom-rounded everything. Else, you’ll build right angled walls within, but then you lose all the extra space the sphere granted you.
I think the way ships like the Millennium Falcon were supposed to work was that you’d fit a big rectangular cargo container (like the ones we use nowadays) up front in between those two big triangular protrusions, then detach that and pick up a new one at your delivery point. The ship itself was basically just a semi tractor.
but if you understand the fundamental laws of nature and are able to transcend them and fly faster than light none of the designs or plot scenarios make any sense, 2001 takes place within the limits of current human understanding, thus everyone you meet in space is petty, avaricious, or boring and the scientists on the moon are portrayed as a bunch of union carpenters shooting the shit on break…
If you want to go with written works there are a lot of hard SF out there that has realistic depictions. I was trying to come up with something from tv or movies. The gravity thing is often just easier and cheaper to do than try to show weightlessness. It’s rare to see a show or movie that obeys the universal speed limit.
Do we ever see the big engineering room of the Millennium Falcon?
Actually, the only sets I recall are the cockpit, the turret gun, the entrance ramp, a couple of the corridors (one with the hidey holes), and the corner of the hold with the chess table.
The Mass Effect series of games has some interesting info about their ships. Most notably, a “stealth device” is essentially a heat sink, and does nothing to make the ship invisible like Star Trek’s cloaking devices. The idea is that ships are usually so far away from one another that visual detection is useless anyway. The ship has to radiate a lot of heat, though; otherwise it would quickly build up and broil the crew. A ship has panels on its hull designed for dissipating heat efficiently, but make the ship as conspicuous on thermal scans as a road flare on a moonless night. A stealth device on a ship channels waste heat to an internal heat sink instead of to the hull panels, making the ship inconspicuous for a time. Leave the device on too long, and it overheats, breaks, and turns the ship into an oven.
Possibly the only realistic method of interstellar travel is beamed propulsion; you send a stream of particles from a fixed transmitter towards the ship, and the impact transfers momentum without any need for on-board fuel.
One of the few examples of this kind of ship in fiction appears in Karl Schroeder’s Permanence, although I’d be interested to hear of others.
If your building a spaceship, you can design all your engineering and vent shafts, ducting etc to use the curved space and have rectangular walls on the interior.
Actually, the saucer on the Enterprise D was designed to be separated from the rest of the ship. There were two bridges, the main one in the saucer, and a “battle bridge” in the secondary hull. Since the “D” carried families, they could be left in the saucer section at a safe distance from a battle while the rest of the ship was commanded from the battle bridge and would engage the enemy. Once the battle was over, if the Enterprise was victorious, the two sections would rejoin. If the secondary part of the ship was destroyed, the saucer was capable of self-propulsion and would seek safety at a Federation starbase or an allied Federation world.
