hey Veeky Forums
i am new to this board, so excuse me if you dont discuss scifi, but i would like to ask you a question
would the standard large (read HUGE) space ships design eventually end up like a sphere ? my reason for this is, if we invent some sort of gravity device, it would be more convenient for the sphere to spread the waves evenly wouldnt it ? all the planets and stars have this shape for a reason
>pic related
Hey Veeky Forums
Kayden Ward
Christian Harris
Large objects wind up like that because spheres pack the most volume in the least amount of space, and since gravity packs things together, the causality is intuitive.
That said, large ships are much less dense than a rocky planet, but if it was on the scale of, say, a gas giant, it may be desirable to build outward from the center in a spherical fashion to deal with the material stress profiles due to gravity, but ultimately, it's not essential for a very large ship to be spherical unless it's on the scale that you need the toughest materials available just to make it work. Other shapes would need tougher materials because there would be irregular bending stresses, stronger in some areas and weaker in others. A sphere is how best to rectify that irregularity.
So large ships don't need to be spheres, but the very largest structures do because of the limits of the strength of its building materials.
Chase Turner
>that because spheres pack the most volume in the least amount of space
what exactly do you mean by space? surface area?
James Rogers
>if we invent some sort of gravity device, it would be more convenient for the sphere to spread the waves evenly wouldnt it ?
the gravity generators in SW are capable of working on pretty short scales, under the floorboard basically.
consider the turret passages in the millenium falcon and how anyone in the turret experiences a horizontal axis that's actually the vertical axis of the ship
Eli Edwards
OP here
well lets say we dont give scifi as example, because what i try to do is thinking of scifi from the perspective of the reality, possibly predict how our technology would turn out in the future, so i want to hear if the idea of spherical space crafts is wrong or not
Jeremiah Sanchez
yeah thank for the input man, exactly what i thought when i saw the huge ships in WH40k
Matthew Thompson
>what i try to do is thinking of scifi from the perspective of the reality
Then forget that space opera bullshit.
You wouldn't build an ultra-large spaceship any more than you would build the Burj Khalifa in New Jersey and ship it to Dubai, whole and intact.
Future societies will utilize universal assemblers.
Joseph Collins
how about lack of inhabitable planets? in this case we would certainly harvest rich minerals planets and build dope-ass space stations
Caleb Roberts
You exploit orbital dynamics to return that shit to your target world, not a super-gigantic cargo ship. More like an endless train than a boat.
I assume we're talking about within a planetary system, btw...it would be ridiculously wasteful to ship anything interstellar distances (even blue smurf unobtanium)...
Chase Bennett
>You wouldn't build an ultra-large spaceship any more than you would build the Burj Khalifa in New Jersey and ship it to Dubai, whole and intact.
Simple environments in general encourage large forces, complex environments demand small ones. The standard arguments against big ships in space mostly apply to ocean ships, too. Yet warships in real life remain gigantic, because the sea is very simple. Space is simpler.