The Aesthetics of Science Fiction Spaceship Design (2010)(uwspace.uwaterloo.ca) |
The Aesthetics of Science Fiction Spaceship Design (2010)(uwspace.uwaterloo.ca) |
First, The Culture's spaceships are enormous. The largest type we encounter, the General Systems Vehicle, is 200 km long and can house up to 6 billion people; while these serve as habitats for a civilian population, these are still spaceships, capable of moving at great speed.
Secondly, the ships have no physical hull. Instead, their structure is maintained by field manipulation. Banks doesn't go deeper into how this works, but it's clear The Culture has technology to manipulate physical reality similar to classic science fiction "force fields" that allows ships to maintain an atmosphere and protect against physical damage. Notably, in several books, the ships modify both their interior and exterior structure while traveling in order to optimize themselves for some purpose.
Thirdly, an important part of The Culture is that the ships are, in a sense, alive. The Minds, which are the AIs that control them are largely inseparable from the ships they inhabit. Clearly we've had AI-controlled ships before (HAL, Alien's Mother, and so on), but these have always been subservient to humans. With The Culture, a human boarding a ship is a guest of the Mind, and ships don't have captains or comamnders. The only other author I know about who has done anything similar is Anne Leckie.
Most emphasis is on the little details like the pipes on the hull and how they contribute to the general idea, for example small windows make the ship appear bigger, bigger thrusters will evoke a fast ship. The opposite as with books where the attributes tend to be given first and it is up to you to imagine the details.
A kind of ship that I found interesting was from "étoiles mourantes", a weird (the "Dune" kind of weird) french novel. In the novel you have animal-cities, huge extraterrestrial beings living in deep space, hosting other life forms inside them, including humans. They allow for hyperspace-like travel.
I liked the idea of living creatures as spaceships, but the book doesn't give much detail about how they look, therefore being out of scope of the paper. Organic looking spaceships are mentioned though, as a sure-fire way of making them look alien.
"I am not an animal brain, I am not even some attempt to produce an AI through software running on a computer. I am a Culture Mind. We are close to gods, and on the far side. We are quicker; we live faster and more completely than you do, with so many more senses, such a greater store of memories and at such a fine level of detail. We die more slowly, and we die more completely, too."
In The Player of Games, A GSV explains to the human protagonist, that it can use its force field projection abilities to protect the human from all physical threats -- while orbiting a planet in a different solar system.
The GSV's are more like demi-gods than AI starships.
https://www.deviantart.com/ex-pacifist/art/Culture-GSV-and-e...
It's going to be a challenge to anyone who decides to adapt Banks into a movie or TV show.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=the+fountain+movie+space+ship&t=os...
The damage caused during ship combat was also pretty interesting. People die not in massive explosions (though there's that, too) but simply as fragments and projectiles perforate the ship's hull and their bodies. Instead of the usual "sparks flying from consoles" like in Star Trek, a hit in the Expanse means you have a kinetic projectile punching through the wall and taking someone's head off.
> 30. (von Tiesenhausen's Law of Engineering Design) If you want to have a maximum effect on the design of a new engineering system, learn to draw. Engineers always wind up designing the vehicle to look like the initial artist's concept.
--
2012: work starts on Mars station.
Elon, hurry up! :-)
I wonder if there's a name for it or a collection of some of those book covers and art.
Chris Foss: https://www.chrisfossart.com
These illustrations helped fire imaginations that got us off this noble rock the first time. Here are several hundred of them (or like them) for anyone who might not have been exposed yet.
https://www.flickr.com/groups/midcenturyspaceillustration/po...
I can only imagine how this must be mandatory reading material for the Star Citizen devs.
Cultural research as part of a software project is no different from a physicist writing sensor readout code as their thesis as part of a larger experiment group (which, from what I have glimpsed, seems to be more norm than exception with physicists these days)
Warp drive needs nacelles in Star Trek
best results were tear drop shaped in the lensman for the inertialess drive
powered low G bits of things stuck together will do - ISS
Wish wikia hadn't gone evilmode
IIRC this was also quite clearly stated in the Traveller rules, and then universally broken in all the lore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_opera
Star Trek is science fiction. It is clean, high-minded and with a plot driven by futuristic technologies and what they might mean for us. Science fiction is at least somewhat predictive. Star Wars is space opera, a soap opera set in space. The plot is driven by family squabbles and surprise revelations (ie Luke's sister/father etc). The standards of morality are subverted by the reality of the family drama. If one removes the special effects and fight scenes, Star Wars is almost daytime TV. All it needs is a good coma fantasy.
Another clue from Lucas: "A long time ago in a galaxy far far away." That is code for "This isn't science fiction. It isn't about a possible future. It isn't about what our children's lives might be like. Magic is possible. Just enjoy the show."
Star Trek does this is spades. We see the dangers of automates war machines that lack a moral context for their operations, the consequences of ecological manipulation gone wrong, we are shown how absolute power corrupts absolutely, and the social and personal cost of subsuming violent passions within a rigorous rationality. That’s just the start, it’s hard to think of a single idea or trope of SF that Star Trek hasn’t explored many times over in its several generations-long run.
Meanwhile Star Wars is Kung fu wizards in an interplanetary Wild West. I don’t think there’s a single exploration of the impact of technology on society or the individual in the whole thing, although I know little of the extensive Clone Wars material. That’s not a criticism, They’re just different things.
This is of course subjective and it's not a binary thing, but a whole continuum from "hard" scifi to "soft" space opera and outright fantasy.
Also, to me this is orthogonal to quality. Space operas are cool.
For me it's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindenstra%C3%9Fe in space, or 'Raumschiff Entenscheiss' (Spaceship Duck Shit because Enterprise rhymes with Entenscheiss)
Doesn't matter which tv-series or theatrical movie, always the same, quack quack, tech the tech the with the tech to tech the tech tech bla bla bla.
edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAUIHBAxbXY courtesy of https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinnlos_im_Weltraum
The rebels have hangars in jungle and snow bases that would have been perfectly reasonable in a WWII movie.
Star Trek developed a different aesthetic, starting with a flying saucer and then trying to justify it in various ways.
Starfleet seems to use a naval ranking, and officers use words like "hail", "heave to", "away team", and "bearing". The navigation terminology in Star Trek sees to be related to the galactic plane, which again evokes the surface of the sea.
The drive section of the Enterprise looks like the keel of a boat to me, and her nacelles look like the hulls of a catamaran.
Roddenberry loved the Hornblower books and I'm sure he was influenced by naval aesthetics.
It will be interesting to see what the methane-fueled rockets look like when they come back. I’m guessing a lot less sooty. If SpaceX’s Starship keeps some exposed stainless i hope it gets a little of that exhaust pipe purple patina going. That would be awesome.
In young mind I expected this beautiful, gleaming massiv white shuttle. Instead, the real shuttle was dirty, dingy, all the tiles and body panels looked like they were randomly replaced, which makes sense as it had years and years of use.
Regarding "used space", I'd say that the trend was already present in Silent Running (1972) which happens to link both the clinically clean 2001 and dirty Star Wars in terms of FX crew.
I enjoyed the lore surrounding the design though, how the gravity wave tech is used to create shields that are unfortunately less strong on the sides of the ship. This of course leads to great Horatio Hornblower style naval broadside battles. And I really dig the driven-by-war improvements in technology, specifically missiles.
A similar space-navy-sci-fi series is the Lost Fleet series by Jack Campbell (pen name of John G Hemry, retired US Navy). First book is called Dauntless, and I highly, seriously highly recommend everyone read the whole series: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/112292.Dauntless
They look like merge between a capsule and a dumbbell. Could you describe which direction does they generally move. I see that the weapons array seem to be on a longer side. What function do the wider parts on ends are for, propulsion?
This has the effect of making "crossing the T" as in olden sailing days (giving a broadside to the nose) is still effective in 3D space combat.
They move along their length. Typically the end with the larger bulb is the front I believe, but many ships have equally sized bulbs.
Propulsion is provided by gravity generators built in a ring encircling either end of the craft.
In normal space the ship forms two planes of intense gravitational gradient above and below the ship in a wedge shape, which has the effect of moving the ship forward. For reasons that I suspect have some grounding in actual physics (?) The wedges need to be open at either end to actually move the ship forward.
The two planes have such intense gravity that literally nothing (including missles, lasers, visible light, etc.) can get through. The sides of the ship can be protected with weaker "side wall" gravitational planes, but not at the strength of the primary planes or it will interfer with propulsion.
All of this has the effect of making space battles similar to ocean battles with broadsides of missiles (which can get through the side walls) and lots of emphasis on maneuvering to bring your ship's broadside in line with the other ships unprotected "throat" or "kilt".
Which brings it right back to the bulbs on either end which are the heaviest armored parts of the ship because they are not protected by powerful gravitational planes.
Civilian ships taper at the ends instead of flaring since they don't need the armor or powerful sensors that military craft put there.
(As an aside, the honorverse hyperspace has currents of gravity. When in hyperspace the gravity generators on a ship create Warshawski Sails - massive km wide planes of gravity which catch the currents to move the ship much faster than possible in normal space.)
The Warshawski sails are a fascinating bit of tech. You can read about them here:
IIRC, there's some kind of external power supply maintaining that stitching. But of course, it's been a long time.
I still like it.
The Dominion Wars in DS9 had been both the best and the worst, sometimes in the same battles. I remember the confrontation when the Federation fleet tried to punch through a Dominion blockade to DS9. Yes, they were saved by the Klingons arriving off-plane (and with the local star behind them, reminiscent of a WWI/WWII fighter tactic), but other than that, the battle was terribly planar and terribly crowded.
Star Trek has IMO nailed most narrative, but I wish they'd remake combat scenes with a little better, and more 3D, choreography. Leave the FX the same, though; IMO the TNG/DS9/VOY/ENT style of weapons was the best in the whole series, and the best in "soft sci-fi".
It's a taxonomy which is cladistically nonsensical, which you can prove to yourself by browsing the Hugo and Nebula awards.
edit: If you count time travel as fantasy, please do so for any SF which features FTL :-)
Written by a naval historian and features no super-weapons or other deus ex machina. Just solid strategy and tactics of Naval Combat in Space. There are two accompanying "Janes Ships of the Fleet" style books which detail the ships in the story.
It is 4/4.5 on the Mohs scale of sci-fi hardness https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MohsScaleOfScien... (Jump drives, very limited FTL, and Plasma Cannons which are basically naval artillery in space)
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One of the PDCs on the Rocinante is used while the ship is landed on a planet with atmosphere. Those "little" guns that go brrrrrrt in space are large cannons in atmosphere that go BOOM BOOM BOOM. Just one PDC used while on a planet is like an artillery barrage being called down on one person.
The Rocinante is a nimble corvette, not a heavily armoured battleship. :)
The warship that carries Gunny and her Marines gets attacked by kinetic projectiles on Ganymede and someone is similarly killed by projectiles punching through it.
My impression is that they may have anti-spalling measures, but close combat in The Expanse means spraying the enemy ship with your PDCs until something breaks down and the defenses get overrun. I get that impression from the (very cool) fight with the stealth ship protecting the station with the Protogen scientists. They rake the enemy ship with bullets until it simply stops working and drifts away, its crew dead.
The Donnager was hit many times by railguns, so far we haven't seen any energy weapons except for the communication laser on what is now known as Medina Station.
For the larger ships, I think it's one of those trade-offs of weight vs drive power. There's probably no thickness of rock or steel that would stop a railgun round that could also exist on a ship light enough to move in combat. I'm not well-versed in weapon and armour theory, but I think it's not possible to make armour that can withstand any gun or weapon.
(And that stealth ship fight was so badass, desperately hiding from the advanced ship twice your size until you can land a killing blow.)
The Expanse's ship combat is very cool. A worthy successor to the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica (minus the mumbo jumbo that marred the end of that series!).
I like the characters too. I haven't read the books, and I understand this character was changed a lot, but I really like what they did with Klaes Ashford in the series. Way to subvert expectations! The TV show more than once appears to set up a cliché (this is the bad guy, he has delusions of power and is going to undermine this other character) only to subvert it. More of that, please!
