Space ships in sci-fi - which is the most 'realistic'?

Cafe Society
61

A few thoughts:

Re: Protective suits for engineering crew on Starfleet ships: They have them in the Kirk-era movies. I don’t recall seeing them any other time.

Wasted volume in a spherical ship: Sure, most human equipment is designed for square-angled rooms, but a ship would need to carry plenty of non-solid essentials like water, air, and fuel, all of which could be stored in tanks along the hull, and which could be whatever shape is needed to suit the interior of the ship.

Armor vs. shields: In the Honor Harrington books, the emphasis is on shields due to the type of weapons being used (and the availability of powerful defensive fields formed by gravity manipulation technology). Bigger ships still carry plenty of armor because they’re big enough to carry enough armor to still be useful after the shields take most of the sting off. The justification seems to be that once a ship gets that big, stripping the armor off doesn’t make enough of a difference performance-wise since the limiting factor is inertial dampening rather than available thrust.

One of the anthology collections included an in-universe article about starship design that stated that warships in the Honorverse often carry their hydrogen fuel tanks (lots of hydrogen being needed for their fusion reactors) outside the crewed portion of the ships, with the fuel itself being set up as a sacrificial layer of protection. The tanks are basically designed to blow outwards (like the magazines in a modern tank), effectively giving the ship a layer of ablative armor.

That said, I hadn’t read of a single ship in the Honorverse being saved by its fuel tanks, but I guess it’s a “Every little bit helps” design philosophy.

For Babylon 5, only some of the human ships use rotation for gravity (the Explorer ships, B5’s version of the Starship Enterprise, basically, and the Omega Destroyers, their equivilant of a Battlestar). Most of their ships have the crew strap themselves down all the time (Hyperion cruisers, Nova dreadnoughts), and some of their newest ships have the newfangled artificial gravity (the Warlock and Victory destroyers, with the latter finally ditching the humans’ blocky geometry design style).

While the human Starfury fighters have the pilot lying down (or, from the viewer’s perspective, “standing up”), the Minbari Nial fighters with their artificial gravity instead have the pilot lying down to give the ship the smallest profile possible.

62

Too bad space travel didn’t come about in Victorain times-we would have interiors that looked like the submarine “Nautilus” from “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”-red velvet cshions, gold trim, pipe organs. Steampunk spaceships would be neat!

63

[quote=“coremelt, post:59, topic:612644”]

so why is the ISS all made of cylinders then instead of being a rectangular box?
http://timgeorgedesign.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/iss_exploded_acronyms.jpg

[QUOTE]
WAG here, but - because they have to be lifted out of the atmosphere on rockets, and thus have to worry about aerodynamics and such.

Also, because something is a sphere doesn’t mean wasted space - You build a dome house and put in squared off walls you can use the space behind the walls for ductworks, plumbing, storage, etc. (not to mention convenient places for the cat to get into and yowl for hours when she can’t get out).

64

The ship, hell most of the plot (outside of the mystical material that makes up the bomb) in *Sunshine *is pretty realistic.

The movie is really good - science fiction, but more based in science than fantasy - about a crew on a mission to “restart the dying sun.” One mission has already failed, and the movie is the story of the second mission. I won’t layout the whole story, but the point is the ship is rendered to be as realistic as possible. Since they’re hurtling toward the sun, the ship is built as one huge solar shield, behind which the crew quarters and the guts of the ship is located – complete with an oxygen garden and computers stored in some sort of really cold liquid (I can’t remember exactly what it is).

And all that science theory comes into play over the course of the story, from concerns about overheating CPUs, depleted oxygen levels and crew members on EVAs burning to crisps when accidentally being exposed to what’s on the other side of the shield – sorry about the minor spoiler there.

Great movie.

65

Mass Effect is a good example. The way the ships are depicted in game is very unrealistic, with many typical tropes like sound in space, ships behaving like airplanes, combat range being way too short, etc. But if you read the codex that’s included, there’s a surprising amount of good science fiction in it. I especially liked when Shepard made a joke about a clueless traveler on a trip asking why the ship was turning around while they were only half way there.

66

That means you’d have to manufacture all of those systems to have a pi curvature which would be a nightmare for both manufacturing and shipping.

67

The aliens in the short story “The Fourth Profession” by Larry Niven relied on launching lasers to get their ship up to speed, and deployed a solar sail for braking as they approached their destination. (They couldn’t rely on braking lasers at the destination because they were information merchants who sold–among many other things–the tech to build the lasers. Any place that already had them would be a poor market.)

68

Indeed, and they also had methods for leaving a star system where the locals wouldn’t build launching lasers, too. Somewhat less efficient, but they worked.

69

How realistic is the Borg Cube? Its just a cube! But in space, you don’t have to worry about drag or wind resistance. Its inelegant, but useful. Plus, there’s no bridge to speak of

70

And you can assimilate stuff by sticking more little cubes on.

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71

I’m not sure why that would be so difficult. We can make precision-fit round objects today without too much trouble. Presumably, with a tech base that can make extra-solar travel feasible, it would be even easier.

72

I’m reading a Poul Andersen novel.
Spheroid spacecraft traveling FTL. They rarely are close enough to see each other, fire missiles. Lasers weaken quickly over the vast distances. Communication is impossible across light years, or useless at parsecs.

73

Curved means custom. It’s a right-angled world, so if you want curved pipes or ducts, you’ll need additional manufacturing and more room to do so. Also, imagine loading a cargo container with a bunch of curved and bent stuff versus straight. There’s extra expense at literally every step of the way when building round or spherical – all to ultimately build a sphere that you’ll have to put right-angled interior walls in anyhow just so the space can be used sensibly. Basically, you’d have to build a cube spacecraft inside of the sphere anyhow, so why not just build the cube?

Here’s an excellent article about the many headaches of building a geodesic dome house: Dome Builder’s Blues. That’s just a house on terra firma. You’d have the same or similar problems in space only multiplied many times over.

74

:confused: No it doesn’t. We’ve had the ability to machine standardized curved parts since… well, since the invention of standardized parts.

75

Build me a round house. I want the plumbing and HVAC to be curved so as to follow the curvature of my new round house. The backs of all the cabinets and appliances should be curved as well. Good luck finding the aisle of curved everything at Home Depot. Don’t forget the curved siding and curved doors.

76

Smoke me a kipper, I’ll be back to mention Red Dwarf.
Ramjets have to count for something. Plus, excellent and academically sound depictions of evolutionary feline theory. The got vindaloos wrong.

77

We’re not talking about houses, we’re talking about space ships. I don’t think we’ll be kitting out our interstellar space ships with crap we pick up at Home Depot. Regardless of what shape we build our spaceships in, the parts we construct it out of will be purpose-built for constructing spaceships. It’s no more expensive to fabricate curved objects than straight objects. If we make it square, we will have to make square doors for it. If we make it curved, we will have to make curved doors for it. Either way, we’re making our own doors. The availability of mass-market goods isn’t an issue one way or the other, here.

78

This thread makes me laugh. We’re talking about nuclear powered interplanetary ships and interstellar ramjets and we’re worried about standardized doors and plumbing.

79

We’ll do better than that, we’ll build hundreds of round houses, and put them all in the same new housing development as yours so that you and hundreds of your new neighbors can have equally unique homes. We’ll save a bundle in the long-run via economy of sale. :smiley:

Either we’re building one space ship, in which case an awful lot of it will be custom crafted even if it is right-angled, or we’re building a fleet, in which case all of the curved pieces will be mass-produced.

Also, not all shipping containers are made out of square angles. The ones for airplanes, for example, are shaped to fit the interior of a round aircraft.

80

The Nostromo From Alien deserves a nod imho.