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Star Wars Republic Tug from the Clone Wars. Two big tractor beam projectors built around a lil' round center very reminiscent of an actual tugboat wheelhouse.  It's a nice utilitarian ship for a very often overlooked aspect of big ships: Big ships with giant engines for going long distances through the empty void of space probably aren't optimized for moving around close-up. Most sci-fi settings tend to just assume that their ships can do anything and move with exact precision, whereas in the real world, we often use these lil boats to wrangle a giant ship into a port. Technically not the first time Star Wars touched on tugboats either. The TIE Fighter game had these things, although they never actually hauled anything around, they just were around for players to beg for missile resupplies.   Kesper North posted:Officers in the front, crew in back. In FASA's Trek RPG, Klingon drives have less radiation shielding, so they mostly used slave races and low-caste Klingons in the engineering section while officers stayed cancer-free up in the command pod. That definitely fits with TOS Klingons, but onscreen Star Trek has been pretty shy about actually depicting the extent of Klingon imperialism, and it wouldn't quite fit with TNG's idea of Klingon honor. Definitely would give a different feel to Worf's stint going off to fight in the Klingon civil war if he had been burning through slaves to keep his ships going.
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Mar 25, 2023 06:18
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Martok mentions being a civilian labourer aboard a ship as he wasn't high enough rank to actually join the warriors, so I figure that's what Klingons have rather than enlisted crew.
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Mar 28, 2023 05:27
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twistedmentat posted:Martok mentions being a civilian labourer aboard a ship as he wasn't high enough rank to actually join the warriors, so I figure that's what Klingons have rather than enlisted crew. Well, we saw the lower deckers on a Bird of Prey in Wej Dug, but on the bigger ships I can easily believe there are both civilian labourers and low-level warrior dudes.
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Mar 28, 2023 05:50
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I'm glad I found this thread. I've read through all 50 pages the past few days and it has been a lot of fun. Thank you goons. More love for the Flight of the Navigator ship:  Look at this fuckin' thing. The immense firepower and sheer destructive capability.  I hope this thread continues on!
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Mar 30, 2023 16:42
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shootforit posted:
I loved this ship so much as a kid, I'd literally have dreams about flying it.
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Mar 30, 2023 16:50
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Wee Bairns posted:I loved this ship so much as a kid, I'd literally have dreams about flying it. Always wanted to see mode 2
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Mar 30, 2023 16:57
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Wee Bairns posted:I loved this ship so much as a kid, I'd literally have dreams about flying it. I was freaked out by the idea that I could be abducted by aliens and not know it until I realised that I'd missed decades due to time dilation
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Mar 30, 2023 17:04
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Apparently the ship prop from Flight of the Navigator got repurposed for a drink stand in a Disney Park: 
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Mar 30, 2023 17:27
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shootforit posted:I'm glad I found this thread. I've read through all 50 pages the past few days and it has been a lot of fun. Thank you goons. Enjoy 41 minutes of talk about the VFX behind this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyixMpuGEL8
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Mar 31, 2023 01:01
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jeeves posted:Enjoy 41 minutes of talk about the VFX behind this. This response is apparently the reason why I spent 10bux seventeen years ago to join these forums. Thank you. I enjoyed that immensely
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Mar 31, 2023 04:44
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Spaceships take on a lot of different shapes and sizes, but the one thing they all have in common is that they're built around some kind of cockpit to keep the pilot nice and safe from the void of space. Well, except for this one.  The original Tales of the Jedi comic was a bit hit and miss, I find the plots hard to follow and mired in too much serious 90s comic angst, but it had one heck of an aesthetic concept. Since it was way in the past of the Star Wars galaxy, everything is a weird retro aesthetic (more retro than star wars normally tends to be). There's armies on the ground fighting melee with axes and spears. Technology often looks like it's crafted from bone. A lot of spaceships have wood paneling, big fins that look kinda like sails, big masts with cables kinda like rigging. So mounted cavalry in space was another big idea. Although unfortunately, while it was a great aesthetic, often the actual drawings were muddy and flat. So here's a fancier rendering.  They're not just dropships either, they're used properly as fighters to take on capital ships, shooting at them and occasionally boarding. In their first appearance, they're out in space bombing an orbital facility. They're just winged mobile battle platforms full of guns. They show up a few other places, but not much happens with them. You can even ride one in the Old Republic MMO (It's not great)     
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Apr 4, 2023 06:38
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This thing is wild and I love it.  The artist has a bunch of other cool space ship and non-space ship art too.
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Jun 8, 2023 03:16
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bij posted:This thing is wild and I love it. Some of the design elements are strongly reminiscent of the ships from Gunbuster (and I like it!)
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Jun 8, 2023 20:55
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looks like the yamato and a unsc frigate had a baby.
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Jun 11, 2023 14:25
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As far as cool spaceship art from independent artists go, here's a few samples and links to galleries from DevArt: Vigilance class cruiser by JadeGreen17  Summary Judgement class heavy cruiser by Evilonavich  Lighthugger by Colourbrand  and then there's AdamKop who primarily does commissioned fan-ships from various sci-fi universes. Below is a battle scene from the defunct Chronicles of Man independent setting. 
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Jun 11, 2023 17:12
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bij posted:This thing is wild and I love it. Can I post my own spaceships? I mean I can't exactly say they're my favorite but if we're posting independent artist stuff it's kind of on topic at least. Elukka fucked around with this message at 20:23 on Jun 11, 2023 |
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Jun 11, 2023 20:21
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Elukka posted:Can I post my own spaceships? I mean I can't exactly say they're my favorite but if we're posting independent artist stuff it's kind of on topic at least. I'd be interested to see your shippies
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Jun 11, 2023 22:36
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Elukka posted:Can I post my own spaceships? I mean I can't exactly say they're my favorite but if we're posting independent artist stuff it's kind of on topic at least. If it spaceships, it fits
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Jun 11, 2023 23:23
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ships       
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Jun 12, 2023 10:00
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Pusher plates make me push plate. Nice.
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Jun 12, 2023 10:18
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Expo70 posted:Pusher plates make me push plate. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2ZbIMUGUPw
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Jun 12, 2023 11:26
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Ever since I learned that any realistic space ship should be pointing its rockets at an object it's approaching, I can't see space ships in the same way. Is there an explanation for how ships with giant rockets always pointed in the same direction are able to slow down in space without turning around? I'm not going to stop watching Star Trek or anything, I just wondered if anyone has tried to explain this.
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Jun 15, 2023 19:57
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Not really. Although if you're doing an orbital transfer you often end up pointing the engines in a completely unintuitive direction half the way and then in the opposite unintuitive direction the other way the other half. For Star Trek their ships don't really rely on regular thrusting most of the time anyway. They don't have giant rockets, after all. In some sci fi it's implied they accelerate rapidly, coast a lot of the way, and decelerate briefly for simple non-crisis travel rather than constant thrust, too. MikeJF fucked around with this message at 20:07 on Jun 15, 2023 |
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Jun 15, 2023 20:02
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tadashi posted:Ever since I learned that any realistic space ship should be pointing its rockets at an object it's approaching, I can't see space ships in the same way. Star trek specifically does jiggery pokery with the laws of physics in areas, even with impulse drive, so they can just turn that off and now the speed goes away. But they do have reaction thrusters that point every direction for close in maneuvers.
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Jun 15, 2023 20:10
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tadashi posted:Ever since I learned that any realistic space ship should be pointing its rockets at an object it's approaching, I can't see space ships in the same way. In Star Trek ships don't rely on rockets, they create a bubble around the ship and then warp spacetime around it, surfing space. They have reactive jets for close up stuff. In The Expanse they put the rockets on, and keep them in until the halfway point. They then flip the ship and put the rockets back on to slow down. That second part is *important*, the creator of the drive was crushed to death by the acceleration of his ship and never flipped it, he's shooting away at a significant fraction of the speed of light.
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Jun 15, 2023 22:01
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BooDooBoo posted:In Star Trek ships don't rely on rockets, they create a bubble around the ship and then warp spacetime around it, surfing space. They have reactive jets for close up stuff. The other neat bit about The Expanse is that there's no artificial gravity, so constantly accelerating in the Up-direction of the internal deck layout is the only way to have things not floating around. That's also what generally limits travel speed in the Expanse. The ships can accelerate much, much faster than usually depicted, but as noted above there are health hazards associated with accelerating more than 1G (0.3G if you're a spaceborn human) for longer than brief bursts.
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Jun 16, 2023 08:28
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There's certainly tech in sci fi that can handwave the acceleration problem, something like an intital dampener/nullifier that can through some sci fi magic can slow down or completely arrest the ships momentum. I can't help but feel if you figure out how to travel faster and light in some way, you'll also figure out how to stop the ship without turning your passangers into pizza sauce. Its like heat on a ship, rarely do they mention anything about it, and it can be assumed there is some kind of heat shunting or recycling that the ship has. Even realistic sci fi doesn't deal with this is noticed, but again, just assume they have super efficent heat sinks or something. Though this, and other science stuff, are left out because the writer(s) just didn't think about it.
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Jun 19, 2023 19:16
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tadashi posted:Ever since I learned that any realistic space ship should be pointing its rockets at an object it's approaching, I can't see space ships in the same way.
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Jun 19, 2023 21:13
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twistedmentat posted:Its like heat on a ship, rarely do they mention anything about it, and it can be assumed there is some kind of heat shunting or recycling that the ship has. Even realistic sci fi doesn't deal with this is noticed, but again, just assume they have super efficent heat sinks or something. In the novel for 2001, Discovery had giant radiator fins, but they didn't put them in the movie because Kubrick didn't like how they looked.
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Jun 20, 2023 17:32
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The big solar panel things on Babylon 5 are actually cooling fins for the fusion reactor.
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Jun 20, 2023 17:46
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My more hard sf ships often don't have huge radiators because they often favor drive types that don't need enormous radiators, and I did some thinking and realized that for power hungry intermittently used things like laser cannons I don't really need either reactors or radiators, at least not immediately. A main drive with a magnetic nozzle can be readily tapped for enormous amounts of power, which can then be stored for later use. And given most of the mass of the ship is propellant at any given moment, as long as that propellant is something that has a decent temperature range, you can sink an enormous amout of heat into it. This has also been considered for aircraft in reality. For the warships, radiating is something you do after the fight to cool your heat sink back down, over hours or days. They still need radiators, but they don't need to dominate the design.  This one would circulate a coolant gas through the propulsion nuke storage tubes to transfer heat to them. Not like nukes care if you heat them up a bit. 
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Jun 20, 2023 19:12
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Elukka posted:My more hard sf ships often don't have huge radiators because they often favor drive types that don't need enormous radiators Spot the contradiction
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Jun 22, 2023 02:08
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Kesper North posted:Spot the contradiction
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Jun 22, 2023 11:20
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i'm not a fan of hard sci-fi on the basis that hard sci-fi fans tends to be really insufferable and judgemental on what is "REAL" Sci-fi and what isn't. I especially don't like how things will go "We don't need a good story or characters, just Hard Sci-fi", and will also make the ships ugly as sin, too. http://efni.org/Images/Nike_N.gif I do like Earthforce ships from Babylon 5, though.
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Jun 23, 2023 07:31
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Elukka posted:It's usually drives that have to convert thermal power to electricity that need enormous radiators. Or generally ones that do a lot of things with electricity. It's why the lasers and particle beams would make a lot of heat. Something like an Orion drive wouldn't need radiators because it's not really absorbing much heat from the reaction at all. The pusher plate heats up a tad and that radiates enough. Oh fair enough, I was afraid you were gonna go all pet black hole on me
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Jun 23, 2023 08:05
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Kesper North posted:Oh fair enough, I was afraid you were gonna go all pet black hole on me Don't knock black hole ships. (Although they would have heat issues, the reflector would be heating up massively)
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Jun 23, 2023 08:13
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MikeJF posted:Don't knock black hole ships. I'm familiar with the literature. There's a lot of handwaving involved in getting a black hole in the first place. Much less so for something with a reactor we might halfway recognize in it.
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Jun 23, 2023 10:02
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I like detailed spaceships, where a lot of things about the process and potential implications have been thought through, but I'm very skeptical about things billing themselves as "hard sci-fi", not just because some nerds get up their own asses about it, but because generally any story with interstellar travel is going to be cutting some corners or making some assumptions about sciences that don't exist yet. With the science we know now, it may be that humanity never escapes our solar system. We can make educated or aspirational guesses, but very quickly you get into making poo poo up territory, which is fine, but you have to acknowledge it. I feel like the blimps in Drifting Draons are like that too. They may run on some amount of magic, and the overall premise is fantasy, but they are internally consistent, and there's definitely a lot of thought into the mechanics of the airships and how they work, there's even sequences where the engineers pull real-world tricks to overclock the steam engine. 
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Jun 23, 2023 17:11
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I don't know if it was ever explained elsewhere, but the "Whale Aliens" from Star Trek IV appears to be unique in the trek universe It's just a dark cylinder, but also somehow it's realative position in space *matters* for communication 
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Jun 24, 2023 01:48
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Unique in that someone read Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama and decided to call it an early day on designing that prop for that notoriously frugal franchise.
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Jun 25, 2023 18:22
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