Giant-Ass Saucer

April 17, 2020 12:33 PM

"The other day, I was scrolling through Netflix, looking for a distraction from all the pain of my hair and all my terrible car opinions, seeking out some quality space-travel-focused sci-fi, because I love that crap. As I was scrolling, looking at the thumbnails of the various movies and shows and whatever, I realized something: when those thumbnails showed a picture of a spaceship, you could almost instantly know, generally, what that show or movie was about." This Chart Will Tell You What Kind Of Space-Based Sci-Fi You're About To Watch Just By Looking At The Main Ship (Jalopnik) (Direct link to chart)
posted by not_the_water (74 comments total)

Obviously this is by Jason Torchinsky, but you could have guessed that before clicking the link.
posted by Monday, stony Monday at 12:48 PM on April 17, 2020

(a cluster of over 400 Timex-Sinclair 1000 computers dumped into an abandoned hot tub in a bunker underneath Ed Begley Jr’s combined EV R&D lab/sex-lab)

That's our display department!
(the lights had probably gone)
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:52 PM on April 17, 2020 [7 favorites]

(the lights had probably gone)

So had the stairs.
posted by taquito sunrise at 12:54 PM on April 17, 2020 [8 favorites]

But look, you found the chart, didn’t you?
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:56 PM on April 17, 2020 [5 favorites]

I'm struggling to determine where the USS Cygnus falls, because it has the layout of a Class 5 luxury liner, albeit one staffed with faceless zombies and run by a mad captain and a giant red robot with Cuisinarts for hands. (cue "Lust for Life" music)
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 1:10 PM on April 17, 2020 [7 favorites]

the USS Cygnus

I know I've seen The Black Hole at some point but it must've been very young, and I did not realize that B.O.B. was the clear ancestor of another that carried their name.

I found it weird that BSG wasn't mentioned in this at all but maybe spaceships weren't featured on those covers?
posted by curious nu at 1:13 PM on April 17, 2020 [3 favorites]

But look, you found the chart, didn’t you?

Yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
posted by aubilenon at 1:14 PM on April 17, 2020 [22 favorites]

Battlestar Galactica? 🤔
posted by mazola at 1:20 PM on April 17, 2020 [1 favorite]

Is Moya from Farscape its own class or what?
posted by BrotherCaine at 1:20 PM on April 17, 2020

Oh, class 7 never mind.
posted by BrotherCaine at 1:21 PM on April 17, 2020 [1 favorite]

Babylon 5's Starfury & The Last Starfighter's Gunstar are almost a class by themselves.
posted by BrotherCaine at 1:26 PM on April 17, 2020 [2 favorites]

I think there's a continuum between classes 3 and 4. The human ships in BSG and B5 fall somewhere on it. The Minbari, Vorlon, and Cylon ships are mostly in class 7.
posted by shponglespore at 1:29 PM on April 17, 2020 [2 favorites]

There is also a continuum between 1 and 2; the first few minutes of Avatar show a 1.5 ship.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 1:35 PM on April 17, 2020

I feel like the Cylon ships are functionally Class 6, only menacing other ships and not cities on Earth, even if they're not strictly saucer-shaped.
posted by Copronymus at 1:44 PM on April 17, 2020

Irrelevant, where it’s going you don’t need [graphic posters simplifying complex multidimensional continua].
posted by q*ben at 1:52 PM on April 17, 2020 [4 favorites]

Class 0.5: retro Roswell-era saucers (The Day the Earth Stood Still, Forbidden Planet, small Independence Day craft, and so on).
posted by sudogeek at 2:02 PM on April 17, 2020 [5 favorites]

I feel like the Cylon ships are functionally Class 6, only menacing other ships and not cities on Earth

Okay, not on *Earth*, but the only reason they weren't menacing the cities of the colonies was that they launched their nuclear weapons right after they popped out of ftl instead of waiting to menace anything.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 2:09 PM on April 17, 2020 [1 favorite]

I was surprised that the "clearly meant to look like a gun" school of spaceship design, a la Halo's Pillar Of Autumn, didn't get a mention, but sign me up for that "really thinky sci-fi".
posted by mhoye at 2:10 PM on April 17, 2020 [1 favorite]

The Event Horizon is just Discovery from 2001 crossed with Pinhead from Hellraiser. I'd call it Class 1.5 or Class 2.5.
posted by Phssthpok at 2:11 PM on April 17, 2020

Okay, not on *Earth*, but the only reason they weren't menacing the cities of the colonies was that they launched their nuclear weapons right after they popped out of ftl instead of waiting to menace anything

Menacing is right up there with monologuing, as classic blunders go. Someday the malicious AIs are going to stumble across a copy of the Evil Overlord list, and then we’re all going to be in real trouble. Briefly.
posted by notoriety public at 2:16 PM on April 17, 2020 [3 favorites]

This chart really needs to be multidimensional, and one of the axes is "vehicle-ness": on a scale from "ominous geometric form" to "literally a train with rockets bolted on", how much does the ship look like a type of existing vehicle. If you're on the "literally a train" end, you're probably looking at an "X, but in space" deal (space western, space Hornblower, etc.).
posted by Pyry at 2:17 PM on April 17, 2020 [6 favorites]

"clearly meant to look like a gun"

I think there is a category of bricky spikey looking things.
It's part way between 3 and 4 but I'd argue that
the Sulacco from Aliens,
Battlestar Galactica,
the USS Saratoga from Space Above and beyond or
the Prometheus from Stargate are all clearly related.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 2:27 PM on April 17, 2020 [1 favorite]

Yeah, there needs to be a 'practical collection of mostly boxes' category for realism-focused military sci-fi. And a 'grimy used future' category for those galactic truckers and see-you space cowboys.

Personally, I'm all about the hugely powerful but with graceful lines aesthetic, like a space orca, which doesn't have a name because no one does it enough.
posted by Eleven at 2:38 PM on April 17, 2020

space Hornblower

Those space horns are notoriously hard to blow (due to there being no air).
posted by Greg_Ace at 2:39 PM on April 17, 2020 [4 favorites]

In space, no one can hear you(r) solo.

(no one watched it either, badumtsh)
posted by curious nu at 2:45 PM on April 17, 2020 [4 favorites]

hugely powerful but with graceful lines aesthetic

Weirdly, having just watched the mashup cortex posted, this kind of design makes me think of Blade Runner.

I played the heck out of Homeworld and I don't know if that ever struck me. Maybe this is Dune-ish? I don't know how you'd classify that aesthetically.

EDIT: Oh man, I wonder if it's a soundtrack thing? "Does this ship go well with prog rock or ambient y/n". I know Homeworld had Yes, Blade Runner had its Vangelis, so.. maybe an auditory component?
posted by curious nu at 2:47 PM on April 17, 2020 [6 favorites]

OK nerds, y'all need to check out Spacedock if you want to really nerd out on spaceship designs.

Moya is a Class 7 organic. The B5 Starfury & The Last Starfighter go with BSG Vipers in Class 1 (with a bit of Class 3 tech) and are notable mainly for space-is-space vs the X-Wing's WWI space-is-atmosphere dogfighting.
posted by zengargoyle at 2:49 PM on April 17, 2020 [2 favorites]

Curious where something like Space Battleship Yamato would land (in the same vein as "literally a train with rockets bolted on"). I guess its kind of between 0 and 1? With some 4 mixed in?
posted by thefoxgod at 2:53 PM on April 17, 2020 [1 favorite]

Class 0.5: retro Roswell-era saucers (The Day the Earth Stood Still, Forbidden Planet, small Independence Day craft, and so on)

Don't forget Earth vs. The Flying Saucers
posted by rfs at 2:54 PM on April 17, 2020 [1 favorite]

Here's my standard...
posted by jim in austin at 2:56 PM on April 17, 2020 [1 favorite]

There are going to be lots of edge cases and exceptions to these very broad categories, of course. Most of Trek is going to be Class 3, because most designs are going to be riffing off of the original TOS Enterprise (still my favorite starship design), but then you've got the Defiant (difficult to peg), an early Enterprise that's really a Class 2, and the Phoenix, which is a hybrid Class 1/3, because it's a Titan II, a real missile (Trek designer John Eaves got to study a decommissioned Titan II to create the Phoenix) with the warhead replaced by a titanium cockpit and a couple of warp nacelles that folded out from the sides. (IRL, Titan IIs were used as the launch vehicle for Project Gemini.)
posted by Halloween Jack at 3:00 PM on April 17, 2020 [1 favorite]

Cool, this is by a very funny RL friend !!
posted by freecellwizard at 3:06 PM on April 17, 2020 [4 favorites]

I wonder where the Event Horizon would fall.

INTO THE VERY MAW OF HELL!!!!
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:08 PM on April 17, 2020 [14 favorites]

I've been thinking how you can classify Outer-Space-based science fiction based on whether Space matters.

There's a lot of SF books and films where you would have no idea that people were spending their time traveling through an incredibly hostile radiation-filled vacuum, and others where that's a huge part of the story.

So while 2001 doesn't have the "fragile monkeys in a tin can" feeling of Apollo 13 or Seveneves, as soon as the astronauts go outside the ship it gets very concerned with weightlessness, airlessness, and absolute zero cold. On the other hand, until the "Princess Leia flying" scene in The Last Jedi, the Star Wars movies never paid any attention to Space as a setting at all.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 3:17 PM on April 17, 2020 [14 favorites]

Harvey, that's a very good point. Star Trek mostly didn't, for quite some time; occasionally they'd put on a space suit for one reason or another, but never really had the crew doing EVAs for any reason, until The Motion Picture. Star Trek VI had the Klingon cruiser temporarily lose gravity, and Star Trek: First Contact had some of the crew go out on the hull with magnetic boots to stop some of the Borg. VOY and ENT had a few space scenes. DS9 would occasionally show someone working on the station exterior in a suit (I think usually just in the opening credits), and once Garak nearly put himself out an airlock during a claustrophobic attack, but that's about it. And, of course, the Kelvin timeline movies (aka JJTrek) and DSC have had a bit more of that.
posted by Halloween Jack at 3:29 PM on April 17, 2020 [1 favorite]

I read this and only wondered where TARDIS would fall into the scheme. I honestly have no idea what class it would be.
posted by jmauro at 4:01 PM on April 17, 2020 [4 favorites]

TARDIS as part organic would be class 7, but trying to disguise itself as class 1 for retro chic cred.

I'm actually not crazy about Moya in class 7, mostly because the story doesn't match the prediction IMHO. It's an intelligent show, but not really "thinky." And nothing piloted by Pilot can be truly ominous!

Talon, though . . .
posted by mark k at 4:38 PM on April 17, 2020 [5 favorites]

"literally a train with rockets bolted on"

Another American Astronaut fan?
posted by tobascodagama at 5:08 PM on April 17, 2020 [6 favorites]

If I were writing sci-fi for print as opposed to film I think most ships would just be a collection of structures bolted onto the back end of an asteroid or moon driven up to significant fractions of light speed. I mean, how else would interstellar crossings be survivable? Interstellar space has no crossing guards.
posted by BrotherCaine at 5:11 PM on April 17, 2020

I think Class 3 covers most of the space-opera scifi universe stories.

Moya: Class 3; it's got an organic flow to it, but distinct sections not too different from the Enterprise.

Babylon 5: Also Class 3; while the Shadows could be considered Class 7 along with some others, they're not the main ships - they're supposed to be freaky-weird things rather than "the central story focuses on these." The Shadow ships might even be Class 6: they're mostly used as a huge sky-filling shadow (with tentacles/spidery legs) that hover over whatever they're about to destroy.

Battlestar Galactica: Class 3. Cylon raiders still follow the basic design: Central hub, visible guns, long sweeping sections that presumably have some kind of purpose besides looking cool.

In my mind, "organic/bio-inspired aesthetic but obviously a shaped machine" is not the same as "biological design," which I'd tend to think applies to the Lectroid space ship from Buckaroo Banzai.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 5:37 PM on April 17, 2020 [2 favorites]

Dark city. A giant saucer full of menace hovering over the city. "hovering" in the "lurking in the shadows" sense. So... class 6... yep. That checks out.
posted by surlyben at 5:53 PM on April 17, 2020 [3 favorites]

A Firefly is obviously a Class 3 but there is almost zero geeky technical talk. Mind you the Alliance Capital Ships are also clearly Class 4 so the ships aren't consistent within the universe either which would point to Fireflys not being Class 3.

Of course they also have this exchange at one point so maybe they aren't even science fiction:

Wash: "Psychic, though? That sounds like something out of science fiction."
Zoe: "We live in a space ship, dear."
Wash: "So?"
posted by Mitheral at 5:57 PM on April 17, 2020 [2 favorites]

The Lexx is definitely Class 4 both in structure and in story line though technically Class 7.
posted by Mitheral at 6:06 PM on April 17, 2020 [2 favorites]

I read this and only wondered where TARDIS would fall into the scheme.

The TARDIS can disguise itself as anything from class I to class VII. It was designed to automatically camouflage itself to blend into whatever genre it's landed in this week. Curiously, the best option is always mid-20th century British police box.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 6:08 PM on April 17, 2020 [2 favorites]

Knights of Sidonia.
Knights Of Sidonia | Official Trailer - Only on Netflix 4 July | Netflix.

Giant human colony rock flying through space under acceleration with extreme consequences under maneuvering messing up the 1g acceleration and people falling to their deaths.

Nothing really matters anyways. Space ships almost always suffer from heat. They can only radiate from the surface which is a power of two, but the volume inside is a power of three. Any sufficiently large ship will melt or glow like a light-bulb because the energy inside has to go to the outside.

Moya can reproduce and has a mind of her own as do other Leviathan. That humans? can domesticate and breed and control this species of space animal does not make it a constructed thing. Leviathans are another SPACE WHALE that has been domesticated and breed by pesky little humans? into servitude. If humans? could make a leviathan, they would, they can't. Class 7 organic.
posted by zengargoyle at 6:10 PM on April 17, 2020 [2 favorites]

Space ships almost always suffer from heat. They can only radiate from the surface which is a power of two, but the volume inside is a power of three.

Clearly the solution is to use the warp drive to make the ship bigger on the outside.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 6:39 PM on April 17, 2020 [1 favorite]

So where does the Rocinante fall into this? And, a bigger can of worms, the ships of the Culture?
posted by Ber at 6:48 PM on April 17, 2020

Curiously, the best option is always mid-20th century British police box.

Seeding a sufficiently pervasive admiration-and-reenactment process over a long enough period of time can liberate a set of semiotic markers from the anchors of their normal cultural and temporal context and provide a quasi-atemporeal innocuousness that functions as camouflage in all future interaction scenarios. The process is simple; in short, the best possible camouflage is simply the appearance of somebody else's fandom.

A blue British police box could appear in the middle of the Sahara or Times' Square, halfway up Everest or halfway down the Marianas Trench. It wouldn't get a second glance anywhere. People say, "I guess that's a Doctor Who thing", ignore it and get on with their day.
posted by mhoye at 7:03 PM on April 17, 2020 [15 favorites]

The process is simple; in short, the best possible camouflage is simply the appearance of somebody else's fandom.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a viral marketing campaign.
posted by dephlogisticated at 7:24 PM on April 17, 2020 [12 favorites]

I'm looking for the Giant Floating Head category. Asking for Zardoz.
posted by Liquidwolf at 7:59 PM on April 17, 2020 [10 favorites]

So where does the Rocinante fall into this?

It and the other ships of the Expanse (at least through the tv seasons so far) are variants of 2, the rotating ring. They just don't have rotating rings, except for Nauvoo/Behemoth/Medina, because they have super-awesome rockets instead.

And, a bigger can of worms, the ships of the Culture?

Mostly 7, Simple shapes. GCUs (ahem) just look like bricks with some chamfered edges. Some ROUs/VFPs look like simple cones with a few necessary bulges for effectors. The real hulls of GSVs are their field systems, so they mostly just look like ellipsoids. Underneath the field systems they mostly look like patio pavers with a diorama on top.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 8:01 PM on April 17, 2020 [14 favorites]

WRT steerable asteroid colony ships, Trek had one in the TOS episode with the magnificently-overwrought title "For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky" (I'm still wondering how that didn't end up as the title of a prog rock album), not to mention the Marathon videogame trilogy featured an asteroid colony ship (the Marathon) which was formerly the Martian moon Deimos.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:16 PM on April 17, 2020 [2 favorites]

Clearly the solution is to use the warp drive to make the ship bigger on the outside

I think this was from the Lensman series. Yes, the shields must expand to dump the energy absorbed. So shielded ships' shields get larger and larger until the fail and POP and have no shields.

Also...

A TARDIS is limited in size by the narrowest Einstein-Rosenberg bridge that can exist and connect from our universe into a pocket universe of undetermined size. The Doctor's TARDIS is just broken and can't change it's extrusion into our universe. Other TARDIS' are perfectly capable of taking on any sort of extrusion into our universe limited by the minimum size needed to keep the E-R bridge to the inside open and the available excess of dark-matter used to create and sustain the E-R bridge that can be used to extrude into our universe. It has been shown that a TARDIS is basically a human? sized tube with a door, and can extrude into something at least the size of a small house. My theory is that by means of being capable of traveling the 4^th dimension of time... it just goes back to when the universe was tiny and moves a few nanometers and then forwards to a new position in time and space. Or one might say: Time And Relative Dimensions In Space.
posted by zengargoyle at 8:17 PM on April 17, 2020 [3 favorites]

So where does the Rocinante fall into this?

It's a Class 1 with a bit of 3. Simple design, gravity by constant acceleration. Only some ships/colonies in the Expanse are Class 2 with the rotational gravity but those are mostly colonies/station and not ships because they're not mobile.

Zardoz is a 0/3 because you need some anti-grav sort of stuff to keep it flying. It's also atmospheric so not technically a space ship in the first place. It's an aeroplane without space flight capability AFAIK.
posted by zengargoyle at 8:32 PM on April 17, 2020 [1 favorite]

I'm looking for the Giant Floating Head category. Asking for Zardoz.

I think Lord Hater and Dr. Gel might be interested too. Seems like that's the "ship piloted by people who want to be taken seriously against the grain of a fairly silly universe" model.
posted by wanderingmind at 8:50 PM on April 17, 2020 [1 favorite]

Where do continent size sentient space ships mostly made out of fields with some basically irrelevant yet amusing humans living inside them on artificial landscapes large enough to contain seas with whale-sized animals in them and who communicate with other similar ships via a form of FTL text messaging mostly to snark about yet other ships, fall in this categorization?
posted by signal at 9:05 PM on April 17, 2020 [1 favorite]

The generation ship Axiom in WALL-E is a Class 5 then?
posted by King Sky Prawn at 10:08 PM on April 17, 2020 [1 favorite]

like a space orca, which doesn't have a name because no one does it enough.

Funny, I posted this article in our team's Slack (We're working on Homeworld 3, excitingly!), I was arguing HWs designs were between classes 3 and 4, which feels about right.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 12:25 AM on April 18, 2020 [2 favorites]

I propose a slight refinement of class 3 and 4; remember the classification is based upon the signature ship, not every ship class in the series.

Class 3, the ship is an excuse for Adventures In Space. There may be guns, but the the hull will be fairly clean and with features having guessable functions, and the most prominent feature will be the engine(s). The ships will be relatively small. There will be a mess hall and crew quarters, and conversations will happen here. Exploration, planet of the week (probably with aliens with their own culture), and lots of character development. Blueprints will have a lot of detail, including individual crew quarter layouts and quite possibly the toilets. Ships shooting at each other will happen, but only occasionally.

So that's Star Trek (Enterprise), Farscape (Moya), Firefly, Lost in Space reboot (Jupiter)

Class 4, the main feature is the guns. Big ass guns, big ass ships. The entire ship may be built around a huge cannon. The rest of the hull will probably be blocky, with random gribblies without obvious purpose (apart from the engines) but the overall look will be battle cruiser with stuff glued on. So this will prominently or entirely feature stuff-blowing-up-in-space, and a space opera. High chance of one-man ships dogfighting, physics optional. Blueprints will tell you where the engineering decks are and how powerful the guns are, but living spaces will be mostly glossed over. There will be a *lot* of different ships, likely with navy-style roles (carrier, cruiser, battleship, fighters, bombers etc)

So that's Star Wars (Imperial star destroyers), Battlestar Galactica, Warhammer 40k (imperial battleship/cruiser), Homeworld, Space Battleship Yamato, EVE, Aliens (Sulaco).

Some ships in a series may be in a different class of course for plot. Borg cubes are a class 4 menace/excuse for action in Star Trek. Farscape is a Class 3 ship in a Class 4 galaxy (the peacekeepers).

Babylon 5 is tricky, as it looks like a Class 3 space station, and has a lot of character stories; but space war becomes the dominent storyline, plus starfuries, but they actually obey physics.

There probably also needs to be a category for lone blocky civilian ship, as that is probably going to be horror. (Alien, Dead Space, Event Horizon)
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 5:32 AM on April 18, 2020 [2 favorites]

Curious where something like Space Battleship Yamato would land (in the same vein as "literally a train with rockets bolted on"). I guess its kind of between 0 and 1? With some 4 mixed in?

Pretty much the entire Leijiverse presents some problems for this chart. For instance, the title vehicle of Galaxy Express 999 is literally "literally a train with rockets bolted on".

The generation ship Axiom in WALL-E is a Class 5 then?

When I read the description for Class 5, the Axiom was the first ship that sprang to mind, so yeah, I'd think so.
posted by May Kasahara at 6:05 AM on April 18, 2020

AFAICT, there's no class for the Red Dwarf/Rama/Starlost/Lexx giant-space-ship-is-the-whole-world setting. It's not one of the smaller ones, and the big boy ships, class 6 and 7 are more pieces of scenery, off in the distance, not settings. You see them inside only briefly and only to emphasize how wierd or menacing they are. The adventure in the ship class are the setting for the entire story, not the alien element only revealed at the climax.
posted by bonehead at 6:55 AM on April 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

I'd put the Space Station stories, DS9 and B5 as well as Ringworld or Titan (Varley) in this same category too, btw. The vessel is a permanent environment for the story, and has enough variability and variation in the physical environment that different kinds of stories can be told in it without feeling samey all the time.
posted by bonehead at 6:57 AM on April 18, 2020

Space Battleship Yamato, TARDIS - I wonder how much of this model depends on Hollywood productions.
I'm thinking of Czech, Soviet, and Russian sf movies, for starters.
posted by doctornemo at 7:37 AM on April 18, 2020

on my ship the rocinante, wheeling through the galaxy
headed for the heart of cygnus, headlong into mystery!

(peart pens no description of the appearance of the ship)
posted by 20 year lurk at 8:26 AM on April 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

No room in this classification for the really big ones.
Gene Wolfe's Whorl from the Long Sun books is a hollowed out planetoid.
Robert Reed's Ship is a Jupiter sized ship with rocket vents the size of the Earth.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 8:31 AM on April 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

Missing raised WWII Japanese battleship repurposed into space battleship... just saying.
posted by hilberseimer at 8:34 AM on April 18, 2020 [4 favorites]

Regarding the Rocinante; There’s a little bit of CLASS 0 to it.

Ships with an Epstein Drive (which allows for hyper efficient constant excelleration) are built like skyscrapers, with decks stacked on top of each other, and the engines are in the basement. They generate gravity by constantly accelerating towards their target. Halfway there, they “flip-n-burn” then decelerate for the second half of the trip, scrubbing the momentum they’re built up. This is why ships on approach come in engines first, and look like theyr’e flying backwards. Also why their speed is described in terms of “How many G’s they’re flying at; the faster they go, the more the effect of gravity.

Yes, the books are different, but on the show the Roci deploys legs and lands standing up. Presumably it’s the maneuvering thrusters they land with, not the Drive (which would fry the landing area like Godzilla).
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 9:02 AM on April 18, 2020 [2 favorites]

Yeah, the Roci's a pretty classic-SF torch drive ship. Like Tintin's Moon rocket with some guns bolted on.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 9:43 AM on April 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

Ford Prefect's electronic thumb? Do the towel and the guide count as part of the spacecraft?
posted by surlyben at 9:47 AM on April 18, 2020

I think not; those are more like blasters and lightsabers in other series.
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 10:54 AM on April 18, 2020

And now someone needs to tackle the ship designs by Chris Foss for Jodorowsky's Dune.
posted by Saxon Kane at 1:48 PM on April 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

> Nothing really matters anyways. Space ships almost always suffer from heat. They can only radiate from the surface which is a power of two, but the volume inside is a power of three. Any sufficiently large ship will melt or glow like a light-bulb because the energy inside has to go to the outside.

Discussion of David Brin's book Sundiver:
https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=22649.0

Project Icarus it was called, the fourth space program of that name and the first for which it was appropriate. Long before Jacob's parents were born—before the Overturn and the Covenant, before the Power Satellite League, before even the full flower of the old Bureaucracy—old grandfather NASA decided that it would be interesting to drop expendable probes into the Sun to see what happened.

They discovered that the probes did a quaint thing when they got close. They burned up.

In America's "Indian Summer" nothing was thought impossible. Americans were building cities in space—a more durable probe couldn't be much of a challenge!

Shells were made, with materials that could take unheard of stress and whose surfaces reflected almost anything. Magnetic fields guided the diffuse but tremendously hot plasmas of corona and chromosphere around and away from those hulls. Powerful communications lasers pierced the solar atmosphere with two-way streams of commands and data.

Still, the robot ships burned. However good the mirrors and insulation, however evenly the superconductors distributed heat, the laws of thermodynamics still held. heat will pass from a higher temperature to a zone where the temperature is lower, sooner or later.

The solar physicists might have gone on resignedly burning up probes in exchange for fleeting bursts of information had Tina Merchant not offered another way. "Why don't you refrigerate?" she asked. "You have all the power you want. You can run refrigerators to push heat from one part of the probe to another."

Her colleagues answered that, with superconductors, equalizing heat throughout was no problem.

"Who said anything about equalizing?" the Belle of Cambridge replied. "You should take all excess heat from the part of the ship were the instruments are and pump it into another part where the instruments aren't."

"And that part will burn up!" one colleague said. "Yes, but we can make a chain of these 'heat dumps,'" said another engineer, slightly more bright. "And then we can drop them off, one by one ..."

"No, no you don't quite understand." The triple Nobel Laureate strode to the chalkboard and drew a circle, then another circle within.

'Here!" She pointed to the inner circle. "You pump your heat into here until it is, for a short time, hotter than the ambient plasma outside of the ship. Then, before it can do harm there, you dump it out into the chromosphere."

"And how," asked a renowned physicist, "do you expect to do that?"

Tina Merchant had smiled as if she could almost see the Astronautics Prize held out to her. "Why I'm surprised at all of you!" she said. "You have onboard a communications laser with a brightness temperature of millions of degrees! Use it!"

Enter the age of the Solar Bathysphere. Floating in part by buoyancy and also by balancing atop the thrust of their refrigerator lasers, probes lingered for days, weeks, monitoring the subtle variations at the Sun, that wrought weather on the Earth.

posted by sebastienbailard at 2:41 PM on April 18, 2020 [4 favorites]

Acoup.blog: Where does my main battery go? Makes some interesting comparisons to real warships which are mostly propulsion systems and weapons systems with the human quarters tucked in wherever there's space. Whereas fictional space warships are designed as cool shapes with a few guns stuck on.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 10:12 AM on April 19, 2020 [5 favorites]

Once again, I'm impressed by the broad pallet of the (2000s) Battle Star Galactica. They don't stray from the tropes, but they hit everything except class 1, and maybe class 6 if you insist on saucers being round.

I'd add a "late 20th century fighter plane, but in SPACE" category.
posted by eotvos at 12:05 PM on April 20, 2020 [3 favorites]