Spaceships

No Gundam, only modular semi-autonomous teleoperated drones

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I think combat in micro G would be pretty cool, not to mention complicated. What sort of equipment do you think a professional "space operative" would need to survive in darkness of space?

In a battleship of His Divine Majesty's holy navy of course.

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Anyone have some pictures of really "comfy" ships? Places you'd be happy to relax in or call home.

Probably in the toilet in your quarters. Each cabin has one and there isn't a communal shitter. I figure really cheap ships would have just one communal head/shower, so this must be a mid to high end ship.

I travel with my planet-sized self-replicating Von Neumann Machine.

A little of both.

For some reason I have massive hardon for Mass Effect-style interior. Metal with soft glowing lights.

Also post more ship plans.

I don't like the floor plan of the posted ship. would make loading and unloading a bitch, time is money for a freighter.

I like bold and brash names of Royal Navy warships: Indefatigable, Defiant, Dauntless, Resilient, Invincible, Victory....

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ship_names_of_the_Royal_Navy

>I don't like the floor plan of the posted ship
You're not the only one, it's pants on head retarded. But sadly that is par for the course for most spaceship layouts, since they are done by artists or people trying to make it look cool.

How could it be improved then?

one of the only things starbound got right was how easy it was to make your ship comfy as fuck

In a mid-size destroyer that gives enough agility to maneuver but enough firepower to hold our own.
And its name will be the Gentle Breeze.

Post moar deck plans

Cargo space should be able to be rapidly unloaded with material handling equipment using modular containers. That is how modern day sea going ships are loaded and unloaded. Break-bulk shipping practices ended with containerization.

worldshipping.org/about-the-industry/history-of-containerization/before-container-shipping

Also freighters with round shapes are inherently inefficient as their is wasted space. Unless they are hauled a gas or liquid of there is some handwavium reason.

See and for a good start.
Also look at all that wasted space for the hallway to the passenger compartment, and where is the reaction mass storage. Can't really be a good freight hauler if you have no range.
Smaller things that annoy but might be acceptable depending on story reasons (or just be handwaved)
>Big ass window on the bridge.
A space ship isn't a fighter plane.
>Bridge right at the front of the ship.
Bridge and 13 should have their positions swapped
>Jump drive in the nose of the ship right AND in front of the bridge.
Your most important means of transportation should be more heavily protected, and if you have a drive failure, it just wiped out the command staff.

In a decently sized science/exploration vessel, with a massive sensor suite and lots of probes/drones. I want to know whats out there and find new things.

As for names I am a fan of the names given to Culture ships, so some thing like "to look outward in wonder"

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I don't know. My tastes are... Well I've never been very good at summarizing them.

If you were two ask me "what my favorite spaceship is, well for the longest time I probably would've given you 2 answers:

The Y-wing starfighter, and the Nebula-class not the Nebulon-B, the Nebula class from Star Trek and today, those haven't changed too much I have since grown fond of the Nebulon-B, CR90, Excelsior, and the B'rel class. Look them up...

Probably If I could find a way to combine these two styles of spaceships, I'd be pretty damn happy.

What is this the fucking love boat? Look at all that space wasted on berthing and the galley. Put those fuckers in bunks. and use folding square tables. They can watch movies in the galley.

My favorite is the tramp freighter. Figure about a thousand tons or so, crew of about 5-10, can be flown solo. Cargo, living space, med bay. Basically a mobile home base for adventurers.

Examples: Serenity, the Millennium Falcon, Mora, etc.

It's perfect for gaming because it's big enough to house the whole group, small and mobile enough not to require large numbers of NPCs and capable of easily flitting from the setting of one episode to another. And when it arrives, it can land right in the thick of the action.

The very best IMO have a small hangar bay so you can carry a shuttle or fighter or two. So you can have the Ace pilot archetype and yet still have him featured in scenes on-board with the rest of the crew.

From a campaign a few years ago.

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Just the thread I needed. I'll be stealing ideas.

But in return, I offer these two filk songs.

youtube.com/watch?v=wJzPhRJRgFA
youtube.com/watch?v=FH8lvwXx_Y8

SPACE BATTLE SPACE BATTLE

Very, very, very fast with lots of long ranged weaponry.

I think a ship with a crew of about a dozen would be ideal for me.

Something small enough to land on planet if necessary, but also has a shuttle. Enough facilities to do maintenance and repair, but anything really serious would require a trip to a planet or space station.

As for ship name... it should make me smile every time I think of it. Even if I am the only one who does. A joke or something.

Why do these designs all conform to a similar, tubular pattern? Is a long cylinder really the most pragmatic design for a realistic spacecraft, or is it just a stylistic convention?

>Is a long cylinder really the most pragmatic design for a realistic spacecraft
a cylinder is easier to get into orbit.
(seeing as each component was likely launched from the surface into orbit either via shuttle, or as part of a larger launch system, i.e. rocket)
To put it in better terms, these ships are a dozen or so rockets stuck together to make this craft, so what shape are rockets?

no mention of the 'Raygun Gothic' genre?
For shame.

>furiously
Sorry to hear that, user.

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Wow. Look at all those technology and design goal related answers.

>realistic
Hard SF has its own unique charm, yes.

At least, I assume it does. Not really a fan.

I think you might've replied to the wrong post there.

Either that or you might want to more clearly explain exactly how your post relates to user's.

I'm really grousing about Damned hard SF types shitting up a thread with a lot of space opera in it.

>Damned hard SF types shitting up a thread with a lot of space opera in it.
You must have hard time getting around with skin that thin. That is a pretty mild post to be calling it shitting up an entire thread.

A little realism or basic design sense isn't anything to be afraid of. Space opera doesn't mean everything is built of 100% pure hadwavium.

All ships whether they be space or sea based shall be named after metal songs!

The best part is when you have a player who is onto your shit but can't call you on it because it's fucking PERFECT.

Once got called on my shit for naming a ship "The Blind Guardian"

My Dark Heresy had a group that was faced down with almost certain death after some really stupid shenanigans detonated an ork superweapon that ended up teleporting them and a few other ships literally a fourth of the way across the galaxy (rolled on a random list of crazy dangerous shit it could do)

They managed to salvage enough shit to get one ship working. Just a single one with all surviving crew on board. Thing is, all the navigators are dead and they absolutely will starve to death centuries before the Imperium finds them in this nebula. So eventually the psyker steps up and goes "fuck it, we're going to die anyway. I'll do it."

>Such willpower rolls did I force her to make.
>Such corruption dice did I throw at her
>And so much insanity
>Also, she's blind now

And she fucking rolled low on EVERY SINGLE THING. Single digits on each willpower roll. Less than 15 each for both sanity and corruption despite the fact that I gave her like 8d10 to roll for them. Crazy ass shit.

Point is, she got them out of the nebula and they got picked up without dying. And this is the same player who called me out when her request to the Inquisition to be allotted a starship resulted in her being given provisional command of the Blind Guardian (they were ascension level and about ready for a cruiser of their own anyway).

The ship shows up in port, finally repaired to her former glory.
>The figure head is the psyker, wrought in glorious detail
>Her captain rechristened her and the crew pretty much demanded they be made available for inquisitorial work
>Never again have my players questioned the metal names for ships.
>Omnissiah bless the Blind Guardian and her sister, the Iron Savior, as they do His will!

Yeah, just look at The Expanse (the books especially, but the show is pretty good for it too) for an example of a clearly space opera setting that is fairly hard, at least by the usual standards of the genre.

Soft vs hard scifi design philosophies:

Soft:
>scribble a spaceship with a unique shape, preferably with as many round shapes and smooth curves as possible
>add artificial gravity generated by magic floor plates or something, because Star Trek: TOS had a small budget and therefore it looks cool
>crew accommodations should be as comfy as possible, ranging from an RV in space to a luxury mansion with a stardrive
>hell, might just as well give every room its own toilet and shower
>put bridge on the front because there's no way you can drive your space RV without looking out of the front window
>fill the corners with cargo space/weapon systems/passenger seats as an afterthought
>what's propellant again?

Hard:
>spacecraft are designed around a purpose, be it hauling cargo or being a warship
>build the spacecraft to be as efficient in its job as possible
>put propellant tanks, crew accomodations, reactors and engines somewhere where they won't get in way of the job, and if there's a fission reactor on board, put it as far away from the crew as possible
>command center, or at least a small storm shelter to protect the crew from bad space weather, should be well protected
>stick massive radiators everywhere so that the crew won't melt down every time there's a correction burn

Put it this way:

"Realistic" spaceships are only "realistic" because they look like the spacecraft we build now, which are just tubes for fuel and aiming it with some space for payload.

Real spaceships, especially deep-space and interplanetary spaceships, wouldn't look like that. But retards keep sucking the long metal dick.

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don't listen to this retard. Hard designs tend to be long cylinders because it's easier and, crucially, more mass-efficient to build a structure to absorb the engine thrust along the long thrust axis. Sticky-out bits require more bracing to not snap off, and more bracing is less mass allowance for your mission payload.

There's other factors, like it making the radiation shield between crewed compartments and a reactor much smaller since it doesn't need to extend to shade more of the ship.

>The Expanse

>Hard

Keep reading. It doesn't stay that way.

Oh, that's kind of disappointing. I've only read the first and am most of the way through the second, so I guess I spoke too soon. Based on those two though, what I kind of meant was that even though it had the magic super-efficient fusion torches and alien space magic stuff, it still applies them in a reasonably grounded way.

The first and second ones are pretty hard, but by the end of the third things are getting fairly silly.

The best part about the first two books is how a relatively hard sci-fi setting reacts to a soft sci-fi macguffin (the Protomolecule). Things like people losing their shit over how it made Ceres ignore the fucking laws of physics.

The vast majority of sci-fi spaceships look like trash, because the artists think the road to a good design lies in cramming as much distracting, lumpy detail into a design as possible.

Look, in visual arts, everything can be broken down into simple, solid forms, right? Cubes, cylinders, toruses, spheres, pyramids... basically anything can be reduced to a collection of platonic solids if you look at it right.

And when you're designing some soft sci-fi spaceship, you can make it any damned shape you want, because who's to tell you it's unrealistic? It's your fictional universe, not theirs. If you say that's the way things are, that's the way things are.

And if you look back over history, all the most memorable and iconic spaceships have been those made of very clear and obvious shapes. Tie Fighters are just spheres suspended between two hexagons. X-Wings are tapered cuboids with four planes extending outwards in an X-shape from their larger ends. The USS Enterprise is a disc and two cylinders, connected by narrow arms to a larger, central cylinder. A Star Destroyer is a giant arrowhead with a bunch of cubes stacked on top. The Hiigaran Mothership is a giant cuboid, with a gentle curve stretching from end to end.

But instead, so many artists ignore this, in favour of making every ship a giant brick, and then piling on as much extra detail as possible, which only serves to obscure the underlying shape. All it does is produce boring and generic designs, to the point that often ships from different franchises end up looking completely interchangeable.

I mean, look at pic related. Those are all Star Wars designs, and I can guarantee that no-one will ever get them mixed up with any other franchise.

Yeah, that was great. I really like the whole atmosphere through the second one of Venus being this elephant in the room while everyone tries to keep up business as usual. I guess it turns more portal-hoppy later on? Would you say the quality of the series drops, or just the hardness?

To go fast, you need a good power source and a good amount of energy. Shit tends to be radioactive. Radioactivity is bad. A shield of heavy, dense material at the end protects everything else from such radioactivity; and that shield tends to be circular and small due to COST, so the tube allows the most amount of profit thereof.

Also, the further away it is from the parts with people inside of it, means that the intensity of the radiation is diminished. For a gas core nuclear rocket, 100m-200m is the norm, for Antimatter, it can go from 1km to 700km or somesuch

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I'm not joking about the 700km thing.

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based Kronos.

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Man, hard scifi is so soft. Fusion? Interplanetary? Wormholes? We don't even have that shit, mannn. Maybe one day, but we don't got it now or any working stuff that could really lead to it!

Fuck that mainstream shit. Time for MUNDANE scifi! Aw yea! Fission only! Solar system only! Just us, the planets, and our conflict! Woop woop!

I didn't know there were others in that picture set.

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Besides, ain't much beyond Saturn. And if Titan has no life, then maybe it's at best some sort of plastics and hydrocarbon production center. And Ganymede and Callisto are good enough to terraform mars anyway; so woop.

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But hard scifi is still better than nothing. It's all niche. Scifi? People still think you're a nerd. It's sad that The Expanse wasn't the GoT of Scifi/specfi (like GoT was for fantasy). Maybe 2017 trek might be, but I doubt it.

Also, most of scifi art on the realistic side is still hard; 'mundane' scifi tends to literally be concepts on the drawing board from the 70s to the 10s.

>the expanse

Oh, the fedora show didn't work? What a shock.

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Well, they all seem to be less flashy, "workhorse"-type starships, which happen to be my favourite as well.

You mean the detective guy, or that you found the show cringeworthy?

I really wanna know. I'm not someone on syfy or whatever, but you know, just want some opinions on it.

I personally think there's too much technobabble and exposition. A easy pitfall for ANY work to fall into. But game of thrones? Nope. It's just 'dragons. Giants. Fairies. Wildfire. We know they exist, why do we have to explain it to you?' - an example overall of SHOW, and not TELL. The expanse was too much tell, even with all the show. BSG probably worked as well because never did anyone say 'this is what makes jump drive work', or 'this is why we can go super fast', they just DO it, because its already in their lives and they have no reason to tell other crewmembers who also have lived with it for their how lives why the jump drive works. The audience doesn't need to know, there's no reason for anyone else to be brought up to speed, so they don't. The expanse has the protomolecule, the fancy smancy fusion drive, telling people about ceres and the corolis effect and all that shit - it's more than anyone cares to chew and it makes little sense to talk about it inverse.

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>all this delicious hard interplanetary sci fi
>not a single Orion post yet

weird, it's usually a lot quicker than this.

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Because Orion is relatively only good for lifting objects INTO space and not use for IN space, plus making hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of nukes to chuck out the ass is a suicidal way to end up with new york nuked as one warehouse holding the nukes will find itself on the black market?

Orion is overhyped, overplayed, and overloved. Even Atomic Rockets wanks hard for it.

Both. From the very first episode i could tell that it thought very little of it's audience. The exposition was very heavy handed and at a very basic level. They even tried to ape game of throne's biggest pull, the sex scenes. They had one right at the beginning of the first episode to signify "hey, we're a cool sci-fi show" and try to hook people who don't actually like sci-fi, because they're a bigger market.

that's just how it is. Fancy graphics cost a lot of money which means you need to tap a larger market than our niche.

That's why i love books.