from Hacker News

The Aesthetics of Science Fiction Spaceship Design (2010)

by noblethrasher on 6/1/20, 3:50 PM with 100 comments

  • by atombender on 6/1/20, 7:28 PM

    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.

  • by keiferski on 6/1/20, 6:28 PM

    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

  • by bloopernova on 6/1/20, 7:24 PM

    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

  • by moneytide1 on 6/1/20, 4:14 PM

    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.

  • by kurlberg on 6/1/20, 9:11 PM

    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.

  • by bovermyer on 6/1/20, 6:32 PM

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

  • by je42 on 6/1/20, 6:07 PM

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

  • by 8bitsrule on 6/2/20, 11:50 AM

    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...

  • by caiobegotti on 6/1/20, 5:36 PM

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

  • by cryptoquick on 6/1/20, 9:12 PM

    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.

  • by usrusr on 6/1/20, 8:14 PM

    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)

  • by modzu on 6/1/20, 7:15 PM

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

  • by dang on 6/1/20, 9:33 PM

  • by DonHopkins on 6/1/20, 9:03 PM

    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.

  • by chadcmulligan on 6/2/20, 12:02 AM

    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 :-)

  • by stuart78 on 6/1/20, 9:38 PM

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

  • by CobrastanJorji on 6/1/20, 5:52 PM

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

  • by carapace on 6/1/20, 6:24 PM

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

  • by RocketSyntax on 6/1/20, 8:20 PM

    Decision tree on 41 is great

  • by Animats on 6/1/20, 7:01 PM

    (2010)