[HN Gopher] The Aesthetics of Science Fiction Spaceship Design (...
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The Aesthetics of Science Fiction Spaceship Design (2010)
Author : noblethrasher
Score : 137 points
Date : 2020-06-01 15:50 UTC (7 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (uwspace.uwaterloo.ca)
| drrrek wrote:
| Fantastically stupid. Hard to top the total bullshit artistry at
| work here.
|
| Nothing is accomplished with a paper like this. No one benefits
| from the production of a 150+ pages of babble like this.
|
| The only people that can tell you anything about fictitious space
| ships are the people that made them. This is just some asshole
| applying post-hoc rationalization to trash spewed from a
| Hollywood organelle. None of this is genuine analysis, but fluff
| scattered across a PDF.
| kurlberg wrote:
| As a kid I loved reading "Great Space Battles" and "Spacecraft,
| 2000-2100 A.D.: Terran Trade Authority Handbook", by Stewart
| Cowley, from the late 70s. My impression is that the art (very
| beautiful airbrush(?) space ship pictures) inspired the stories
| than the other way around.
| davidw wrote:
| I had lots of space books as a kid... there's a certain
| aesthetic from the late 1970ies that makes me nostalgic.
|
| I wonder if there's a name for it or a collection of some of
| those book covers and art.
| kurlberg wrote:
| Awesome: Scott Manley has a youtube video about it (see
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8abMJhmvss.) Heh, some of it
| did not age so well:
|
| 2012: work starts on Mars station.
|
| Elon, hurry up! :-)
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Reminds me of Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design[0]:
|
| > 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.
|
| --
|
| [0] - https://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/akins_laws.html
| Animats wrote:
| (2010)
| dang wrote:
| Added. Thanks!
| cryptoquick wrote:
| Wow, this is incredibly comprehensive! A great resource, should I
| ever need it. And even without any obvious present utility, the
| fact that someone did all this is just fascinating in its own
| right.
|
| I can only imagine how this must be mandatory reading material
| for the Star Citizen devs.
| bloopernova wrote:
| This was written in 2010, so it's not including my favourite ship
| designs, those of _The Expanse_. Decks stacked one on top of each
| other, like floors in a skyscraper. Because gravity is provided
| by the drive acceleration.
|
| https://i.imgur.com/f6YGM8N.jpg
| usrusr wrote:
| The physical world building is so much better than everything
| else on TV that I almost hated the plot because I would have
| very much enjoyed ten seasons of just the Roci freelancing
| around in the solar system.
| kutakdogan wrote:
| I would have been content just to watch the Roci
| accelerating, flipping, and decelerating, for ten seasons.
| the_af wrote:
| Same! Though I did love the plot too, but every scene with
| the Roci or other ships maneuvering, fighting or even in a
| tense standoff was simply superb.
|
| 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.
| FirstLvR wrote:
| man of culture i see
| dang wrote:
| See also from 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17899458
| carapace wrote:
| Ages ago my dad pointed out to me that spaceships will be
| spherical. ;-)
| rozab wrote:
| https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Core_ship/Legends
|
| Wish wikia hadn't gone evilmode
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Oh, the giant watermelon they cut up with ground-based lasers
| in Clone Wars! For some reason, it's one of the two scenes I
| most remember from there (the other one was this weird spinny
| droido-tank I can't find a screenshot of now).
| usrusr wrote:
| Union Dropship, it's a quite well published design actually but
| never made it into television.
|
| IIRC this was also quite clearly stated in the Traveller rules,
| and then universally broken in all the lore.
| RalfWausE wrote:
| Only if its found on the moon by some guy called Perry ;-)
| kps wrote:
| General Products No. 4 hull
| atombender wrote:
| This is a lovely paper. However, I was disappointed to not see
| any mentions of Iain M. Banks's Culture universe, which means it
| misses out on what I think is the most novel approach to
| spaceship design in literature.
|
| 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.
| stcredzero wrote:
| Larry Niven's ships from Known Space are kind of a precursor to
| the Culture ships. The General Products hull is arguably a kind
| of "force field" though it's treated more like an
| indestructible hull, and it can't be reconfigured. Also missing
| is the Mind and the scale. Niven's Ringworld is also a Banks
| Orbital predecessor.
| minitoar wrote:
| In the Murderbot series the ships are similar in that the AI is
| apparently inseparable form the ship, although they are more
| like eager-to-please pets or children. IIRC The Minds have
| their own agendas and moral compass.
| the_af wrote:
| They are eager to please pets unless they've hacked their
| governor module ;)
| bencollier49 wrote:
| I did the same as you, and leafed through looking for Culture
| ships. I guess they're less prominent in popular culture and
| there are fewer images of them to use.
| atombender wrote:
| Banks usually describes the ships as oblong bubbles, and I've
| seen very few illustrations online that do service to Banks'
| descriptions. I like this one:
|
| 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.
| stcredzero wrote:
| Affronter ship designs:
| https://philbale.blogspot.com/2012/03/excession.html
| beeforpork wrote:
| The minds are definitely alive: in 'Excession', one such
| General Systems Vehicles, the 'Sleeper Service', is the main
| character. And a very interesting character indeed. Great book!
| arethuza wrote:
| As a Mind says in Look to Windward:
|
| _" 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."_
| moneytide1 wrote:
| I liked hearing George Lucas say that he wanted all the craft to
| look beaten up and used instead of shiny and new (long time ago
| far, far away) so as to focus on the human experience instead of
| the tech itself.
| rjsw wrote:
| Dark Star started the dirty spaceship look, Dan O'Bannon worked
| on Star Wars too before writing the screenplay for Alien.
| usrusr wrote:
| The entire Alien movie is basically an extended (and, ahem,
| perhaps slightly darker?) remake of the Pinback vs the beach
| ball creature scene. My favorite piece of movie trivia. I
| wonder if anyone stumbled into the theatrical release of
| Alien knowing about that connection?
|
| 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.
| dsr_ wrote:
| Lucas was telling a story, so he made the symbols look like
| things that his audience already knew: one and two-person
| fighter planes, small tramp freighters, giant naval warships.
| The good guys and the bad guys get distinct visual styles for
| their fighters so you can tell them apart. The bad guys have
| all the big warships, and they have bridges as command centers
| up high over the main body, batteries of guns that look like
| WWII battleship's guns, anti-fighter guns that recoil like an
| antiaircraft cannon, and send out swarms of fighters like
| aircraft carriers.
|
| 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.
| PeterCorless wrote:
| Star Trek was telling stories of the Cold War in space.
| usrusr wrote:
| And many other stories in space entirely unrelated to the
| cold war. There really aren't that many TOS episodes that
| have Klingons in them.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Klingons... and in TNG, at some points the role was taken
| over by the Romulans. TNG's "The Drumhead" is essentially
| about McCarthy's hearings.
|
| I still like it.
| sradman wrote:
| I wonder if the hangars in the jungle came from the script or
| from the memories of someone who experienced the view from
| Temple IV at Tikal. I had the surreal experience of standing
| atop Temple IV and suddenly recognizing this was the camera
| location of Star Wars rebel base landing scene while being
| enveloped by the smells and sounds above the rain forest
| canopy, especially the cacophony from the howler monkeys.
|
| https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Tikal
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Yup. The evil empire had big carriers and giant battleships.
| The good guys had their fighters hidden in caves. It is a
| WWII metaphor. Abrams continues this subversion in the
| opening of Episode VII: The bad guys come at night in their
| helicopters to search a desert community for rebel
| terrorists. Credit where credit is due for sneaking that
| theme into an otherwise apolitical film. (And king bad guy
| carries a flaming cross.)
| prideout wrote:
| Whenever there is a flotilla of ships in Star Trek, they seem
| to always arrange themselves into a two-dimensional plane and
| orient themselves according to their artificial gravity. This
| evokes ships at sea.
|
| 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.
| zrail wrote:
| The one very notable exception to the two-dimensional
| flotilla is the depiction of the battle of wolf-359. As I
| recall the battle played out as a ball of Starfleet ships
| surrounding the Borg.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Wouldn't say it's an exception; the scenes from the
| battle and the aftermath still look pretty planar to me.
| Similarly, the battle with Borg over Earth, while not
| completely flat, had ships orbiting the Borg cube more-
| less along a plane.
|
| 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".
| jcims wrote:
| That's one of my favorite aspects of seeing Falcon 9 boosters
| coming back to port. Dirty as hell, maybe canted a wee bit.
| Looks like they went through something.
|
| 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.
| bluedino wrote:
| As a kid, I was disappointed in how dirty the space shuttle
| was on visit to Cape Canaveral.
|
| 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.
| usrusr wrote:
| I doubt that they could or would dare to reuse one
| onscrubbed, but it could still be fun to put one one the ramp
| painted in that used look. Perhaps one side gleaming white,
| the other "this is not my first rodeo"?
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Science Fiction v. Space Opera (from Soap Opera)
|
| 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."
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Ahem. Sorry Trekkies, but NO! Star Trek is different how
| exactly? Domestic problems, old enemies longing for revenge,
| _Tech the tech with the tech in order to tech the tech in the
| tech tech..._
|
| 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
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Ok, the very very simple version: Science fiction is set in
| the future. Star Trek is deliberately set in the future.
| Star Wars is deliberately set in the past ("A long time
| ago") and therefore is something other than science
| fiction.
| samatman wrote:
| I don't think you'll get very far classifying space opera
| as opposed to science fiction, rather than a variety of
| it.
|
| It's a taxonomy which is cladistically nonsensical, which
| you can prove to yourself by browsing the Hugo and Nebula
| awards.
| usrusr wrote:
| Then 20000 Leagues Under The Sea is not science fiction?
| (the setting was contemporary art the time of writing)
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Future technology. When they set foot on the nautilus
| they set foot into a possible future. 20,000 poses the
| question of what might happen should that sort of
| technology be developed. It was very predictive of the
| power that such technology would place on a single man.
| Nemo is latin for "no man", telling us that no man should
| have such power.
| [deleted]
| simonh wrote:
| For me Science Fiction is about exploring the consequences of
| technology on society, culture and the individual. It takes
| some scientific technological concepts and explores their
| implications.
|
| 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.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| I have always wondered what Han was dreaming while frozen in
| carbonite for 6 months.
| the_af wrote:
| To me Star Trek is another kind of space opera, a different
| flavor from Star Wars to be sure, but not "hard" scifi
| either.
|
| 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.
| keiferski wrote:
| _The Fountain_ was really interesting in this regard, as it had
| the main character floating in a giant orb surrounding the Tree
| of Life. Completely different from the typical spaceship
| aesthetic. IIRC the space background was all microphotography,
| not CGI.
|
| https://duckduckgo.com/?q=the+fountain+movie+space+ship&t=os...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdmPrsKV0Kg
| stuart78 wrote:
| I'll admit I didn't read the whole thing, but the flow chart on
| page 41 is fantastic. Worth skipping to.
| usrusr wrote:
| To readers who wonder how this could possibly be a thesis in
| computer science: I haven't checked, but it would perfectly make
| sense in the context of a larger project about generative design.
| You need to understand the cultural conventions before you can
| fulfill them in code. Understanding the application domain is a
| part of every software project.
|
| 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)
| je42 wrote:
| Fantastic work ! Too bad Stargates spaceship-designs were not
| reviewed
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| This was an interesting read. Are example results of the
| procedural generation posted somewhere?
| thecupisblue wrote:
| You might like this link from yesterday.
| https://github.com/a1studmuffin/SpaceshipGenerator
| Sharlin wrote:
| Those extreme examples have clearly adopted Shadow
| technology.
| PeterCorless wrote:
| Whole thread:
| https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=38...
| rdlw wrote:
| There are some screenshots on pp. 72-75 of surface details on a
| trench and a cube.
| bovermyer wrote:
| Too bad the starships of the Honorverse weren't included in this.
| They have... interesting designs.
| bloopernova wrote:
| Yes, they look a little... phallic?
|
| 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
| hawski wrote:
| Interesting. Link for the lazy:
| https://www.google.com/search?q=Honorverse&client=firefox-b-...
|
| 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?
| NortySpock wrote:
| The ship moves to the left in this image, longways. The
| ghostly fields surrounding the ship both provide reactionless
| drive and protect the ship from most incoming laser and
| missile fire. Forcefields of course work by writers fiat, but
| in the stories it works out that a "down the throat" or "up
| the tailpipe" missile shot is a killshot.
|
| 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.
|
| https://images.app.goo.gl/PMn9wgpV682Xa3fM7
| bovermyer wrote:
| These ships move longways, with the bulbous ends in front and
| back. However, they maneuver differently in battle, as their
| armaments are primarily on their sides, akin to 18th century
| frigates and galleons.
|
| The Warshawski sails are a fascinating bit of tech. You can
| read about them here:
|
| https://honorverse.fandom.com/wiki/Warshawski_sail
| modzu wrote:
| Posting because I don't see the word Enterprise anywhere in this
| thread!
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Figure A.96: Futurama's Planet Express has a simple, retro
| design. Note that the ship, like many of the 1999 show's
| characters, has a distinctive overbite.
| RocketSyntax wrote:
| Decision tree on 41 is great
| caiobegotti wrote:
| I really like the simple yet useful flowchart to estimate the
| origins of a given spaceship (figure 4.10 in the PDF).
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