If I could, I'd throw all my legal schoolin' over the side and just draw CG spacecraft all the live-long day!

Alas, I can't. But I'm wondering, human spaceships are almost ALWAYS shaped like a submarine with stuff stuck on it. That's fine, I can live with that particular convention.

But for "alien" spaceships, what are some of the more inventive looking designs you've seen of thought up yourself?

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Ooooo goodie!(said like a little school girl)

I've fond of spaceship designs that look biological sort of. This is quite rational to. Biological systems have had millions of years of natural selection work on them to produce structures that have maximum surface area for a small volume and vice versa. Curved shapes are better. More stuff can fit inside a ball that is build using less material than a cube.

A ship that looks like a cluster of grapes.
One that looks like a stack of M&Ms one on top of the other.
Various cones that taper at varying spots down the length.
A large torus with small spheres here and there on it.
A large sphere with a much smaller one attached by a few small contact tubes.
One that looks like a mushroom that has a sphere on the other end of the stalk from the large cap.
And other stuff that is much to hard to describe. I'd need to draw them.

I think my favorite non-cylendar design would be the Imperial-Class Star Destroyer.

The wedge shape means that every single weapon on its superstructure, except directly aft, can be aimed forward.

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This is a human ship, but as it is loosely based on Stephen Baxter's alien Gaijin Flowerships; (a RAIR ramscoop design).
so strictly speaking it is an alien ship.

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Have you seen this website:

http://www.merzo.net/

It has scale drawings of hundreds of sci fi space ships. I've always liked the vaguely biological designs that japanese studios do. For example, the zentron or marduke ships from Macross

Being a big time anime fan, and being heavily influenced by that style in my own storytelling, I know exactly what you mean.

Although I'm trying to get away from too much of the "bio" type designs. I mean, they're cool but so many people do them and it might confuse others into thinking they WERE really biological ships.

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Science--can't live without it, but it makes everything so much more boring.

For innovative design I don't think you could ever beat the flaming pie plates from Plan 9 From Outer Space. 8)

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The folks who made the documentary Flying Saucers Over Hollywood: The Plan 9 Companion that is part of the deluxe Plan 9 DVD looked into this and found out the saucers were actually "flying saucer" plastic model kits. This of course contradicts a quote from Ed Wood about the saucers being Cadillac hubcaps.

Nevertheless the deployment of these models is groundbreaking, what with the non-GR/SR/QM force fields concentrated in a single thin white line leading up from each saucer!

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The Borg cube is hardly pretty, but probably makes the most sense in that it maximizes cube while not being concerned with beauty or styling (hey, if I'm never going within ten thousand miles of an atmosphere, why do I need to have an aerodynamic ship?)

Now all I need is that reactionless hyperspace drive......

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Surely their sphere ships make more sense? Not withstanding funky star trek technology, a sphere is a stronger shape than a cube is it not?

Why not egg-shaped (there is a reason why eggs have such a shape...)?

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papageno


"Why waste time learning, when ignorance is instantaneous?" - Hobbes (Calvin and Hobbes)

"It's all about context!" - Vince Noir (The Mighty Boosh)

"I've never heard of such a brutal and shocking injustice that I cared so little about!" - Zapp Brannigan (Futurama)

"...because the logic of the lines traced from reality is as poor of aesthetic value as it is strict in consistency. " - Paolo Bozzi (Naive Physics - free translation)

Stronger in what sense? What types of force is it subjected to?

Compared to a cube, a sphere will enclose greater volume with equal surface area, or equal volume with less surface area. But since such vessels are essentially solid (or a "dense foam," if you will) instead of a hollow shell, such concerns are of little consequence.


Because it's easier to expel from the mother's body, perhaps? (Then again, it seemed to work for the Orkians.)

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A very large cube (larger than say 1000km on a side) could be compared to a sphere with eight pyramidal mountains evenly spaced on its surface; the mountains would tend to collapse under their own weight.

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Well Mork & Mindy had an egg-shaped space craft!

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Eggs are probably supposed to be spherical or very nearly but need to be elongated a little to make it easier for hens to lay them.

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Eggs, as far as I know, are shaped the way they are because if they where spherical, they'd roll away. The way they're shaped, they just roll in little circles.

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SeanF

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The contents of this post are ©2009 by SeanF and may not be copied or retransmitted in any form without the express written consent of SeanF

Although I think the show LEXX is one of the dumbest shows I've ever watched, I think the ship looks really cool. It's 10km long! It makes the Enterprise E look like a toy.

Spherical ships in Science Fiction (just off the top of my head):

The Kzinti warships (pre hyperdrive) (Larry Niven-Known Space series)


Most of Clarke's ships (two spheres joined by a lond tube to seperate the drive from the crew)

Titan A.E. (the big one they're looking for)

The ons from an Alan Norse (I think) book I read once (can't remember the title--synopsis: young man finds what turns out to be an alien map showing the planet betweeen Mars and Jupiter before it turned into the Asteroid belt [sorry-last time I read it was over 20 years ago, and the science was right for the time it was written]. I seem to remember corporate warfare/piracy involved somehow...)

T.I.E. fighters (most of them)

I think Psshtpok's ship had at least two sherical sections (not sure about the drive section--I think it was a double torus) (Larry Niven-Protector/Known Space series)

Puppeteer General Products #1 and #4 hulls (Larry Niven-Known Space series)

does a Dyson Sphere qualify here too?

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441!!!! :)

The Skylark of Space and the Lady Macbeth...

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The Death Star!

(Well, since it is so big, maybe there is not much choice...)

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papageno


"Why waste time learning, when ignorance is instantaneous?" - Hobbes (Calvin and Hobbes)

"It's all about context!" - Vince Noir (The Mighty Boosh)

"I've never heard of such a brutal and shocking injustice that I cared so little about!" - Zapp Brannigan (Futurama)

"...because the logic of the lines traced from reality is as poor of aesthetic value as it is strict in consistency. " - Paolo Bozzi (Naive Physics - free translation)

I have always been fond of Douglas Adams's description of the Vogons ship in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

If it doesn't have to go in an atmosphere, why does it need to be aerodynamic, or aesthetic?

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"I'm so cool you could keep a side of meat in me for a month! I'm so hip I have trouble seeing over my pelvis!" -- Zaphod Beeblebrox

[hangs head in shame]

...and I was wracking my brain for examples, got the T.I.E. fighter, and missed the most obvious one from the movie ops:

edit fixed quote coding

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"Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it." — Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

441!!!! :)

[quote="darkhunter"]
The ons from an Alan Norse (I think) book I read once (can't remember the title--synopsis: young man finds what turns out to be an alien map showing the planet betweeen Mars and Jupiter before it turned into the Asteroid belt [sorry-last time I read it was over 20 years ago, and the science was right for the time it was written]. I seem to remember corporate warfare/piracy involved somehow...)
[quote]

Darkhunter, I believe the title is "Raiders From The Rings". A great, fun book, I wish that I could find a copy.

Robert Heinlein's Torch Ships were sphereical.

David.

Here's another website:

www.starships.com

One of the ships on this site is the famous "Umbrella" Mars ship, which is definitely not aerodynamic:

www.starships.com/SF_Image75.HTML

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it's what we do know that ain't so.

Actually, I believe it was "Scavengers in Space" by the same author.

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It's not what we don't know that harms us;
it's what we do know that ain't so.

Well, in space anything goes at "low" speeds.

At relativistic speeds, having a slimmer profile might actually be a good idea...

Spherical ships would actually be very innefficient to creatures with a body shape similar to ours. Or any shape, really.

Yes, spheres have maximum volume in minimum surface area. But the sphere is also one of the WORST shapes in nature for stacking. If you've got a given volume, and you have to fill it with smaller units, more than half of the volume will be wasted if you fill it with spheres (about 51% waste). Rectangular filler, however, will have 0% waste all the way out to the edges. And if the outside is rectangular as well, no space at all needs be wasted.

Plus, any life form reasonably similar to us is going to have evolved on a planet, which means gravity. Which means it is going to be used to flat surfaces to move on. Flat walking surfaces pretty much automatically mean that it will get broken up into rectangular sections inside, meaning wasted space that has to be packed with filler around the edges of a sphere.

Idealy, you'd want a series of cubes or rectangles. Seperate the engines from the living space in case of emergency, and give the whole thing a modular approach. Since there's no air resistance in space, the best design would likely end up looking like it was made of leggos.

Smooth, curvy lines look good on film, but they'd be a nightmare for real, practical use. Heck, a real one likely wouldn't even attempt to be symmetrical even. Long as weight was more or less balanced out so a source of thrust wouldn't set the ship into a spin, any shape would work.

Really, only time you'd be likely to see nice round edges would be for centrifical force generated artifical gravity. And I'd rather assume some sort of artificial gravity along the lines of Star Trek by that point.

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But he that sows lies in the end shall not lack of a harvest, and soon he may rest from toil indeed while others reap and sow in his stead. -J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion

Don't forget that a fast non-warp capable spaceship would need good shielding at the front end to protect it from interstellar dust and gas; a gramme of interstellar dust would hit with the force of several tonnes of TNT, even a low fractions of c.

Unless you have some kind of deflector field the ship will need several tens of metres of shielding at the front (I prefer ice myself)
http://www.orionsarm.com/ships/Dyaush_Colony_Ship.jpg
any part of the ship not behind the ice shield will be eroded away, so the best design is long and thin.

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I recall the ice shield being described in one of Clarke's books, "The Songs of Distant Earth." I think the ship was cylindrical, too, come to think of it.

*cough*LM*cough*

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"Earth diameter is 7,900 miles, and Moon diameter is 2,160 miles. It takes on average 90 minutes to complete one Earth orbit, so one Moon orbit should take roughly 25 minutes." - Sam "NasaScam" Colby

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