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.
Jonathan Russell
>Space is simpler.
Except space is REALLY big, thus requiring high speeds to overcome the distances, and large things have enormous mass even before they start moving and relativistic forces start increasing it.
Easton Bennett
The ocean's bigger than anywhere we fight now except the sky, which has obstacles like clouds. Ships are still big. Go figure.
Jason Rivera
>Future societies will utilize universal assemblers.
Why are you so sure are you that massive spaceships aren't technologically far closer to us than universal assemblers?
Kevin Watson
>if it was on the scale of, say, a gas giant
On that scale wouldn't most of the material end up just being compressed into a solid sphere in the centre due to the gravity, so the "ship" would end up as just a planetoid with a lot of stuff built on top of it?
So you would basically just be shifting a planet of steel with a multi-layered city covering its entire surface, that has the organisational structure of a military vessel (read: totalitarian planet state) around space.
Owen Phillips
It takes weeks at most for an aircraft carrier/tanker/container ship to go halfway around the globe. New Horizons was the fastest vehicle in human history, and still took nine years to reach Pluto, with a mass equivalent to a subcompact car. And this is within the same solar system.
You can postulate exotic new propulsion systems, but the fact remains: the smaller the payload, the better your chances of a safe arrival at an affordable price. This is why mankind quietly moved away from manned spaceflight outside of NEO and committed to probes.
Giant spaceships look neat on the movie screen and are amusing to contemplate, but more ambitious space travel will require a radical rethinking of what it means to travel, and your goals at arrival.
Mason Baker
>the smaller the payload, the better your chances of a safe arrival at an affordable price.
No. You're letting off a heat signature with any kind of propulsion, and if you're small enough to get fried by a little laser, some asshole piloting a star with a stellar engine, and gathering its leftover energy for weapons is going to fry you, cruise past your solar system, and rip your planets apart with its mere proximity without caring whether it takes a thousand years.
Nathaniel Lee
Can you guys tell more about these ''gravity devices''?
Gabriel Flores
>stupid space opera war bullshit
Sorry, I thought we were talking about practical shit, like how to even get off this rock for good out into the greater universe.
A civilization even a hundred or two years more advanced than us should be able to tailor a global virus that will kill off only humans, so SFW.
Christopher Thomas
>stupid space opera war bullshit
Not an argument. Explain how your light, maneuverable craft evades detection and destruction without resort to thermodynamic magic.
>Sorry, I thought we were talking about practical shit, like how to even get off this rock for good out into the greater universe.
Pretty sure the OP is about big space ships, not Elon Musk feels
Luke Ortiz
>Explain how your light, maneuverable craft evades detection and destruction without resort to thermodynamic magic.
Explain how your big-ass moving solar system evades long-range detection and countermeasures (like relativistic weaponry):
en.wikipedia.org
Or just sneaking aboard and planting a long gestation superflu bug amongst the crew so it's spread throughout the entire race to be triggered at a later, more opportune date.
Christian Peterson
>evades long-range detection and countermeasures (like relativistic weaponry)
Evading detection is already out the window for everyone, that's the point. Again, doesn't stop us from having bigass ships IRL. The projectiles take a long ass time to accelerate, and will be spotted. As long as you have more than one ship, you have a side shot at anything headed for any of yours and can knock them off course with something of your own.
As a bonus, the stellar engine is probably a swarm of satellites, each much more maneuverable than the whole, but made mostly of empty space. Unless the projectile is targeted at the star itself, it's not likely to hit anything. As for targeting the star itself, remember that anything hitting it at the speed of light is itself getting hit by a star travelling at the speed of light. You'll want to throw some bigass thing like another star, and it starts smelling mighty operatic.
>sneaking aboard
This is the space opera BS; again, how do you evade detection? Just sit there in space for a few thousand years and hope they fly into you?
>crew
Atavistic
Colton Jackson
>Not an argument.
Translation: "I know you caught me saying retarded shit, but that's never stopped me in the past!"
William Gray
As long as we're talking SF...
Larry Niven was an agent for aliens.
The only reason anyone talks about Flat Earth theory is to stop people from looking into ring earth theory.
The fact is that the sky is an artificial projection. We have gone to space. The images are not fake. Our governments are not aware of the Ringworld. However, it is the true structure of our world.
If we dig deep enough into the ground, we'll encounter the artificial vacuum of space, not a molten core, not China.
A species of ape was deposited here millions of years ago; over time, offshoots developed intelligence, agriculture, metallurgy, militaries, economies. This was expected by the aliens who put us here, who are still in contact with various groups on the ground, having gone into hiding on artificial constructs across the galaxy, like our Ringworld but in many cases larger (i.e. Dyson spheres, O'Neill cylinders, etc. to survive a holocaust being perpetrated by another faction of beings from beyond our habitat (we ourselves, being aliens, are also simply a faction of beings).
For those unfamiliar with Niven's work: en.wikipedia.org
popularmechanics.com
larryniven.wikia.com
Kevin White
>The only reason anyone talks about Flat Earth theory is to stop people from looking into ring earth theory.
>no "Arch of Heaven" that curves off from the horizon, from which the sun appears to dangle
>no shadow squares
>no star patterns that change once a falan
Nice try, LARPer.
Matthew Brooks
Large objects end up that way because of the central force of gravity.
Mason Hughes
Look into O'Neill Cylinders and Stanford Torus
The best way we know of to fake gravity without science-fictiony "box that makes gravity" is centrifugal force
Luke Powell
Packing factor of a sophere is higher than packing factor of other shapes (more stuff in less volume)
Cameron Foster
Is the sphere being treated as a space craft?
How are the decks situated? concentric spheres? stacked?
Luis Mitchell
Take your pic and google for pics of the deck layout.
The decks are stacked with a few concentric ones on the outside. That has got to be interesting moving from one direction of gravity to another.
Of you build your decks as concentric spheres, what do you do about the curvature of the deck floors, they are not going to be the same.