Capital scale starships in movies and games tend to follow a naval tradition, being designed to look roughly like their sea-born counterparts on Earth. The trouble with this is that ships in space don’t need to be designed along a horizontal axis because their bottoms don’t need to float on a surface. To acknowledge this, some designers of game models have started building out ships along a vertical axis that look more like (futuristic) office buildings than sea-going vessels. Great examples of this are the mothership in the Homeworld series of games and the cruisers in Killzone 2.
I thought this was a neat direction to take it, after all as a race we’ve been looking at horizontal ships for thousands of years, but then I started thinking about the realities of building a starship this way. In the real world large office buildings have many high capacity, high speed elevators to get people from floor to floor. This is because people are very good at walking around on a flat surface, but not so good at climbing up or down. If we were we’d have ladders everywhere instead of escalators and elevators. Ships in space would be no different.
Real space has no gravity making movement in one direction as easy (or as difficult) as movement in any other. But science fiction has neatly side-stepped the no-gravity issue with one explanation or another in nearly every movie book or game on the subject, so this post assumes that ships have on-board gravity. Given this scenario, horizontally oriented ships would be the most efficient, in terms of personnel mobility as well as maintenance. All those elevator shafts would be full of moving parts that would need constant upkeep to function properly. There is an exception to this though, if we move into the realm of Star Trek and use matter transmitters for intra-ship travel, rather than just extra-ship travel we bypass the mobility problem but still might drive up our maintenance costs. After all, we wouldn’t want Yeoman Johnson to come out the other end with his spleen where his nuts used to be.
If we take an Imperial Star Destroyer from Star Wars as an example, we find that its weapons are mostly mounted on top, and along the left and right edges. The left and right edges are a problem because guns mounted here have huge blind spots and because of the diamond shape the top mounted guns also have a restricted field of fire. The underside has almost no weapons at all, and no bridge to direct their fire.  This shape is great for ‘intensifying forward firepower’ but sucks for any other firing arc and is especially bad for shooting anything directly behind the ship. If we kept the same shape a simple solution would to be to slice the top off, copy it, flip it upside down and attach it to the bottom. If we’re in the realm of gravity generators it should then be a simple matter of installing 2 sets with opposite polarity so that no matter which side of the ship someone was on they were always ‘right side up’. Because of the diamond wedge shape this doesn’t get rid of the massive blind spot at the back, but at least it helps provide useful firing arcs for the rest of the ship.
Another option would be to have the ship fly in vertical position but align the artificial gravity generators so that to walk ‘forward’ would actually be walking down the spine of the ship, while ‘back’ would be up. This is essentially keeping the same configuration as in the previous example and just rotating the ship 90 degrees down in relation to its direction of travel. The crew would get that reassuring planetary gravity alignment they crave and allow the ship design to break out of the horizontal orientation box.
Damn bug in wordpress not saving my page breaks properly. I guess I should upgrade my WP install…
I always thought the Borg had it right. If you have no interest in landing on planet surfaces the cube or the sphere is the most efficient shape. The sphere is always interesting for the people that live in the outer edges, but fuck those guys.
The tradition of having your primary direction of fire aligned with your forward motion is derived from WWI machine gun, dog fighting and has no application is space. It is time to move on
Cheers,
Spencer
I gave some serious thought to the cube and sphere layouts but decided not to include them in this post because visually they aren’t very interesting. I think theres lots of room for more creative designs while also abandoning the ‘this way is down, guns face forward’ concept most sci-fi has been shackled to.
Always thought it would be easiest to operate a low gravity environment with “one way” corridors where mild air circulation would propel you up/down hallways. Think 5th and 6th South or The Jetsons with their pneumatic tubes. A single stream could route you through the entire ship and consume far fewer power resources than a transporter or the calories required to fuel a body.
Spencer has a point, the Borg cube does have terrific appeal for internal passenger transit efficiency as well as external navigation and defense opportunities.
Cool vid.
http://www.thefutureschannel.com/dockets/hands-on_math/space_architecture/
Don’t you think that including imaginary technology like gravity generators in your logical deductions makes the whole exercise kind of pointless? Once you cross that line, you can invent technology to justify any aspect of a proposed spaceship.
If you want to logically design a starship, you have to consider questions like: Will it need to travel in atmosphere? Does it need to land on the surface of planets? In oceans perhaps? What size/shape optimizes the tremendous amount of resources it would take to build something like that? What are the physical implications of a spinning/moving body that is much more massive at one end then another?
The best shape for a large spaceship seems like it would be a sphere. A sphere is the strongest shape for managing pressure differences, you get maximum volume for outer surface area, and you minimize lateral forces when the ship changes direction. However, there is still the problem of finding furniture for all those rounded edge rooms.
Spheres for sure. They’re even great for moving around in any direction. You don’t have to have an engines in back pushing you forward design. But again back to the boring visual appearance. The Death Star was only imposing because of its size, otherwise it was a baseball in space. Nobody is going to get excited about a giant space battle where all the ships are round. Total snooze fest from a visual design perspective.
If we’re considering realistic ships you’ve also got to consider their propulsion systems, because if you’re using any sort of mass-reaction to generate thrust you’re going to eat up most of your space with fuel to have any ‘reasonable’ sort of delta-v.
Including ‘magical technology’ doesn’t make it pointless if its well explained. Matter transmitters and artificial gravity generators aren’t the only possibility, indeed the exercise was about opening the creative landscape as to what kinds of possibilities we see in fantasy sci-fi media.
If someone can come up with a great justification for why their design works a certain way I’ll probably be the first on board. But when I see clumsy systems like the slow ass elevators in a big ship as the primary way of getting from point a to point b I start thinking that there might be a better way to do it. I’m a firm believer that increasing the believability increases the immersion and believability is not the same as realism. Realism is boring.
I guess a more succinct way of putting it is this: in any sci-fi universe the creator defines what a thing can or can’t do. Designers should look to make their creations function with maximum believability within the rules they have set. And maybe come up with some more interesting rules.