The Aesthetics of Science Fiction Spaceship Design (2010) | Hacker News Reader

The Aesthetics of Science Fiction Spaceship Design (2010)

uwspace.uwaterloo.ca

194 pointsnoblethrasher100 comments

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.

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.

They are eager to please pets unless they've hacked their governor module ;)

Is the Murderbot series worth reading?

I really enjoyed it! It is quite short. It's pretty funny.

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.

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.

Affronter ship designs: https://philbale.blogspot.com/2012/03/excession.html

That is exactly how I pictured the Affront!

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!

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."

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.

As outlined in "Flatlander" the General Products hulls are made of matter (stitched together in an extremely exotic manner).

the General Products hulls are made of matter (stitched together in an extremely exotic manner)

IIRC, there's some kind of external power supply maintaining that stitching. But of course, it's been a long time.

The High Angel from the Commonwealth Saga and spoiler spoiler spoiler for Ninefox Gambit series moths.

I think some culture ships if not all have actual hulls certainly the war ships do

It looks like the paper focuses exclusively on visual media, mostly film and TV, rather than things left to your imagination, like in books.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Loved the shots of PDW rounds silently penetrating the interior of the Roci and then leaving just as silently via the other wall as they'd removed the atmosphere to avoid pressure blowouts in the event of a puncture.

In the latest season (so spoilers for those who haven't seen it)

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.

Surprised they don't have anti spalling and internal protection

They do, but also take lucky hits from opponents.

The Rocinante is a nimble corvette, not a heavily armoured battleship. :)

I understand that about the Rocinante, but what about larger Martian warships? The Donnager, the huge warship that carried the Roci (when it was called the Tachi) has its hull punched through by a weapon and someone gets his head blown off. Though it may have been a railgun in that case, not that I'm sure what that is in The Expanse.. an energy weapon?

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.

You're correct about the close combat part.

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.)

Thanks for the explanation. I'm still not sure about what a "railgun" is, if not an energy weapon.

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!

its a slug thrower accelerates stuff to high velocity

There is a trilogy of book scalled "The Nameless War" by Edmund Barrett ( https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B074C8KG27?ref_=dbs_r_seri... ) which I highly recommend if you like "Expanse" style technology and combat.

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)

Which, just to clarify, "The Nameless War" you are referring to is NOT the 1952 anti-Semitic screed by Archibald Maule Ramsay (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archibald_Maule_Ramsay)

I would have been content just to watch the Roci accelerating, flipping, and decelerating, for ten seasons.

With some Adam Savage / Scott Manley explanations of the orbits used. And whole episodes dedicated to Amos repairing the ship.

man of culture i see

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.

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.

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"?

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.

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.

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.)

Star Trek was telling stories of the Cold War in space.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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".

The honor Harrington by Weber series is also based on Hornblower and has some very nice, realistic depictions of physics and battle in space (minus the ftl, of course). I highly recommend it.

Dark Star started the dirty spaceship look, Dan O'Bannon worked on Star Wars too before writing the screenplay for Alien.

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.

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."

I have always wondered what Han was dreaming while frozen in carbonite for 6 months.

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

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.

Then 20000 Leagues Under The Sea is not science fiction? (the setting was contemporary art the time of writing)

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.

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.

What about time travel, or alternate history? Is that fantasy?

edit: If you count time travel as fantasy, please do so for any SF which features FTL :-)

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.

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.

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.

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! :-)

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

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.

The art for the book OP mentioned was, IIRC, by a particular British artist. One sec... he was very prolific in the late 70s / 80s.

Chris Foss: https://www.chrisfossart.com

Nice! Yeah, some of those are what I'm thinking of. Not cartoony, nor particularly 'dated' looking like some stuff from, say, the 50ies.

https://www.instagram.com/seventiesscifiart/

Possibly contained within "cassette futurism".

Too bad the starships of the Honorverse weren't included in this. They have... interesting designs.

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

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?

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

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

The larger parts on either end are primarily just heavy armor.

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.)

Fantastic work ! Too bad Stargates spaceship-designs were not reviewed

I was surprised not to see any of Bonestell designs seen in the books by Willy Ley (with some ideas of von Braun). True, many were designed for landing on planets with atmospheres - a rather practical bent.

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 really like the simple yet useful flowchart to estimate the origins of a given spaceship (figure 4.10 in the PDF).

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.

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)

Posting because I don't see the word Enterprise anywhere in this thread!

See also from 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17899458

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.

So Ms Kinnear convinced her supervisor that a masters thesis on science fiction spaceship design was a good idea, thats the most impressive part imho :-)

I'll admit I didn't read the whole thing, but the flow chart on page 41 is fantastic. Worth skipping to.

This was an interesting read. Are example results of the procedural generation posted somewhere?

There are some screenshots on pp. 72-75 of surface details on a trench and a cube.

You might like this link from yesterday. https://github.com/a1studmuffin/SpaceshipGenerator

Those extreme examples have clearly adopted Shadow technology.

Whole thread: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=38...

Ages ago my dad pointed out to me that spaceships will be spherical. ;-)

Only if its found on the moon by some guy called Perry ;-)

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.

General Products No. 4 hull

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Core_ship/Legends

Wish wikia hadn't gone evilmode

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).

Depends on the drive system?

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

Decision tree on 41 is great

(2010)

Added. Thanks!

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