You don't have to be an expert in the aircraft industry to know when something looks un-flyable (<< ?? Is that a word ?)
Any kid that threw a paper airplane has a gut feeling about things that can fly in air. A lot of spacecraft we see in scifi look like they would have little maneuverability and be very aerodynamically unstable yet scifi writers, production artists, directors INSIST on flying these things in Earth atmosphere etc


Here are my top 5 bellyflopper

5
"Thunderbolt Star Fury" based on the original Babylon-5 Starfury, JMS did great with the originals, they looked great and he kept them in space but for some reason he insisted on using the new in "Crusade" one to fly missions or leisurely trips on planets

4
"Battlestar Vipers" with tiny little wings I can't see how these things would fly. The new Cylon ships look like the would fall out of the sky also

3
UFO ships in "ID4" Independence Day, considering how vulnerable these things were to some windows bug I'm sure the flight control software was a disaster

2
Star Wars "X-wing", Boba Fett ship etc Most of these ships look like they would drop out of the sky. The Falcon still looks great though

1
A the winner is our "StarTrek Shuttlepods". Built like a brick I've never understood how these things fly, I suppose they have some tractor beam, anti-grav technobabble to overcome that stuff. Apparently it can fly at Mach 8 but it still looks like it would fall like a rock

I figure that most of those craft are using the same propulsion and maneuvering mechanisms in the atmosphere that they use in space - so they really don't need to have correct wings. But then, why do they have wings in the first place?

__________________
24-hour webcam view from atop Kitt Peak, AZ

In space there is no atmosphere, and going from the ground up is harder then dropping from orbit. If you want to fly around the planet, land, take off, land again you could do with wings and wings help create lift to counter atmospheric drag. Even the animal kingdom understood this and birds, dinosaurs evolved to be able to take themselves into the air. StarTrek Shuttlepods do not look like they could fly in any way, take away the phaser drives and tecnobabble and they would fall like a rock. A space elevator is far more plausible than a StarTrek Shuttlepod

Number one should be the Millenium Falcon. It doesn't even have little stubby wings.

__________________
"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky

In a franchise that has transporters, forcefields, artificial gravity, tractor beams, time travel, warp drive, solid-light holograms, and matter replicators, it fits right in.

__________________
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

The German V-2 missile had stubby little wings and I've seen it land on its tail many times on planets with atmosphere. Recently, in the movie King Dinosaur.

__________________
24-hour webcam view from atop Kitt Peak, AZ

Any technology that can generate artificial gravity fields inside a spacecraft can "plausibly" (in-story) be adapted to provide bouyancy in a gravity field. Star Trek/Wars, BSG, etc. are at least somewhat internally consistent in this matter. ID$4 had so much wrong with it that this one detail hardly stands out.

Franchises with solid "forcefields" also sometimes use the excuse that they shape their shields around a non-aerodynamic vessel to provide a smoother ride, but it's a damn stupid and wasteful design.

__________________
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Supercar.



In all honesty, Mike Mercury didn't look very airworthy, either.

But with Supermarionation, who needed force-fields?

Supercar... Supercar...
With beauty and grace,
as swift as can be,
watch it flying through the air.
It travels in space,
or under the sea,
and it can journey anywhere.

Supercar... Supercar...
It travels on land,
or roams the skies,
through a heavens stormy rage,
It's Mercury-manned,
and everyone cries,
"it's the marvel of the age!"

Supercar... Supercar... Supercar!

__________________
If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.
-Dorothy Parker

Can't believe no one's mentioned this yet: the Batwing. I've seen several versions of this vehicle, and not a single one looks like it could ever get off a runway, let alone dodge among Gotham's skyscrapers. They all look cool, though.

Honorable mention goes to the Klingon bird of prey, though it's another really cool-looking ship. Ditto for enormous Star Destroyers cruising idly through some planet's atmosphere like old-fashioned (and light, aerodynamic) Zeppelins.

__________________
"Call me old-fashioned, but I think fire is magic. And it scares me a lot."

--The State

Should I point out that none of these are aircraft, but that they are all spacecraft and dont actually use aerodynamics at all?

Last I checked, a Saturn V didnt have any aerodynamic surfaces, but it still got men to the moon and back.

Actually, one of the reasons I like the shuttlecraft design (for a science fiction show) is that there is no pretending that they work by aerodynamics. Anti-gravity is part of Star Trek canon. In the original series, there were several times they used a device labeled as an "anti-grav" to move things, often with those things shown to be floating in air. See here:

http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Antigrav

The Star Fury is a bigger issue to me, as human technology in the B5 universe didn't seem to have gravity control at that time. I was also a bit surprised at the new B5 DVD showing aircars going all over New York.

Regarding design, if you don't need lift for an atmospheric craft, you might still want to shape it to minimize resistance, or to give it control surfaces. Then again, if you have force fields you can shape on the fly, even that may not be important.

__________________
I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

The Saturn V has stubby little fins on the first stage.

__________________
"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky

Yes, the Saturn V doesn't ignore aerodynamics (the rocket still needs to get through the atmosphere), but there is an important distinction: Those are control surfaces, they provide no lift, unlike the wings on a plane. Directional control can also be done by altering the direction of thrust, for instance, see the DC-X.

__________________
I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

Tom Swifts Jr.'s Diving Seacopter. Which reminds me: Also, the Flying Sub from Voyage to See What's on the Bottom.

Fred

__________________
"For shame, gentlemen, pack your evidence a little better against another time."
-- John Dryden, "The Vindication of The Duke of Guise" 1684

So the stubby little wings on Vipers, shuttlepods, X-wings etc. are control surfaces, not wings.

__________________
"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky

Yes, assuming the model builders thought that far (I think it had more to do with what they thought looked good). In any event, something like that certainly wouldn't provide much lift.

__________________
I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

How about the Vogon spacecraft, which "hung in the air in exactly the same way that bricks don't".

__________________
"I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day." - Douglas Adams

"Certainly, in the topsy-turvy world of heavy rock, having a good solid piece of wood in your hand is often useful." - Ian Faith

Yeah that's an idea, a good idea but these 'spacecraft' are also flown as 'aircraft', flying down through atmosphere, taking off, landing again. Saturn doesn't feature in scifi because it is no longer hip and cool, but the rocket science is the most sound science for scifi because the Saturn, the Soyuz are all perfect flyers for getting from the ground up. The science principles which govern rocket spacecraft propulsion mean the payload is not lifted into space by an air-breathing engine. With the Rocket you force power down towards the ground and like Newton's law says the payload will fly in the opposite direction, the rocket also gets lighter and faster as it burns off propellant . But when was the last time you saw a good old fashioned rocket in science fiction ? I think in a Stargate episode they fired some anti-aircraft missiles at an alien Goauld ship but that's about all of it when it comes to realistic scifi. I don't know why the changed the spaceship in Babylon-5, they were great when they stayed in space but having a Star Fury fly in Earth atmosphere looks wrong, it is another one of those aircraft that would drop like a rock. The Konstantin/Tesla concept of Space elevator would be a far more plausible idea for science fiction.

Plausible, yes. Make for exciting scenes of combat? No. They usually arent aiming for plausibility, just familiarity.

__________________
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Voyager had a space elevator that made for one, at least fighting inside the car itself. Resulted in one of Tuvok's more amusing lines. "(insert name here) has returned to the surface."

__________________
The last time I felt a warm fuzzy feeling, I was informed by my doctor that it was just gas.

Still not a bad concept, though. Given that humans weren't using some of Trek's more handwavy concepts, they could get it by on vectored thrust or some kind of semi-venturi.
I didn't follow this one closely in the new iteration, but in the old school version, some kind of repulsor system kept'em off the ground in atmospheres.
Supposedly those were some kind of gravitic system. Not aerodynamic at all.
Star Wars used a technology called "repulsorlift" to explain severely non-aerodynamic flight. One book mentioned the launching of an Executor class super star destroyer from a planet's surface on a massive repulsor sled. It only worked up to about 40 kilometers, then you're either unable to rise farther, or you're powering out on engine thrust.
Star Trek leaned heavily on inertial dampening. Dial down the shuttle's mass, and the thrust to mass ratio goes through the roof. The only thing you compete with there is aerodynamic drag, which was mitigated by navigational shield geometry (according to the books moreso than the films/shows).

__________________
The last time I felt a warm fuzzy feeling, I was informed by my doctor that it was just gas.

Actually I don't think that Star Trek "flying box" shuttle pods are that bad. On earth a lot of our vans are simply boxes on wheels because it's cheaper to make them that way and ignore areodynamics. I can imagine the managers at the Acme Budget Shuttle Pod factory saying, "Who cares if the hand wavium drive gets crap mileage in an atmosphere? Just so long as our sticker price is less than the competition!"

Of course that people would actually pilot the shuttle pods is laughable.

Since when did Tesla have anything to do with the space elevator? Just curious.

My favourite 'Vogon Brick' is Thunderbird Two. The fattest plane you ever saw with the smallest wings

__________________
New Orion's Arm Site . The Starlark . Voices: Future Tense- Novella Contest Issue! . OA Flickr set

And it floated in the air on mimimal engine thrust and fired up on full burn in order to decend.

__________________
Note 1. All requests for planetary demolition must now be submitted in quadruplicate on form UX-565/B4 and be counter-signed by the assistant administrative officer for interstellar traffic calming - department QG-7. Subject to approval by the chief planning officer and the infrastructure development coordination sub-committee.

Actually if you look carefully you can see that it's supported by four thin cables. I always wondered what they were connected to.

I suppose it had to fire up its engines to make more fishing line spool out.

Actually if you look carefully you can see that it's supported by four thin cables. I always wondered what they were connected to.

I suppose it had to fire up its engines to make more cable spool out.

Maybe it would be more interesting to look for a sci-fi ship that could actually fly.

__________________
The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one BIG thing

In practice, a craft designed to fight in both Earthlike atmosphere and deep space would most likely be an awkward compromise, good at neither.

More realistic aircraft would look like modern fighter planes, space fighters might resemble the B5 Starfury (the original ones, I mean) or the Gunstar from The Last Starfighter. More likely, space "fighters" would consist of a small fleet of laser-linked semi-autonomous drones.

__________________
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

If you can impart enough energy to propellant to zip between planets within hours or weeks without huge external propellant tanks, and you can impart it fast enough to do it at >1 g-force of thrust, then it stands to reason that whatever you're using as an engine can probably make a brick fly without worrying too much about the rate of fuel consumption. Maybe they just stopped caring about aerodynamics, put it all on their engines, and built their vehicles for strength instead.

Needless to say, the energy density of their reactor/propellant is probably in or past the nuclear range if they can do this stuff.

An additional consequence of these super-drives should be a need for very hot, very large radiator foils.

__________________
http://amssolarempire.blogspot.com

BTW, if T/W >> 1, then all you need are control surfaces, and these can be relatively tiny.

Aircraft designed to operate primarily at supersonic speeds also don't need nearly as large a wing as aircraft designed to operate at subsonic speeds. And the design considerations for the wing are different. As one of my aerodynamics professors put it "the ideal supersonic airfoil, barring any practical considerations like stiffness or the fact that the plane needs to fly before it goes supersonic, is a flat plate"

__________________
http://amssolarempire.blogspot.com