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Here are a couple of my favorite ships, from two 1970s Saturday morning live-action adventure shows I watched as a wee, Star Trek and Star Wars crazed tot: Space Academy and Jason of Star Command. Made in 1977-1981, Space Academy was more like Star Trek, with self-contained episodes, while Jason of Star Command was more of a Star Wars ripoff but with shorter, cliffhanger-ending episodes in a single narrative a la Flash Gordon serial format. These were among my favorite shows as a kid, primarily because of its wicked cool spaceships. Space Academy came first. This massive asteroid base was the home of both shows, although it wasn't quite explained how they interacted how Star Command was secretly hidden inside Space Academy's asteroid but obviously used the same bridge but different commanders. The 1970s were the Golden Age of Greeblies, and while the budget for this show was considered enormous for a Saturday morning kiddie show, it was hilariously small by movie standards, and the model makers streched every dime; the star field in the background of these photos is Christmas lights poking through a blackout curtain.  Here's a magazine article with the show's producers sitting behind the Space Academy model:  The primary ship used on the show is the Seeker, a compact exploration ship about the size of an RV, with lasers, tractor beams, and all the stuff you need for an away mission.    To save money, a lot of the spaceflight scenes were reused from episode to episode, but there were some great one-off shots like this scene of a seeker docking with a space hulk from an ancient battle.  The RV-sized proportions were no accident, since the Seeker body was built from another vehicle used for an earlier show by the same producer, Ark II, a show about a multiracial team and a chimpanzee who drive around the devastated wasteland of 25th Century Earth helping survivors and scavengers in order to rebuild civilization. Some of you may think a post-holocaust Saturday morning kiddie show is weird, and it was, but the weird part is that it wasn't the only post-holocaust Saturday morning kiddie show back then (the other was Thundarr the Barbarian.) Being a kid in the 1970s was kind of hosed up.   The interior of the Seeker was filled with blinkenlights and fascinating-looking buttons that made beep-boop noises, and the multiracial Space Academy cadets (Filmation was big on diversity and representation in their shows.)  Meanwhile, on the other side of the asteroid from Space Academy, Star Command was a more militaristic organization that apparently hired out independent contractors to do its heroics, in the form of off-brand Han Solo impersonator Jason. Jason was backed up by a really great cast, including frickin' Scotty from Star Trek right there as the base commander (replaced in the second season when ST:TMP got greenlighted), the marvelous Sid Haig as villain Dragos, and fellow blaxploitation veteran Tamara Dobson as the powerful psychic Samantha.  Sid Haig's sinister helmet also included a lot of greeblies.  While "Jason" also used the Seeker, Jason's personal hot-rod was the souped-up Starfire, with bigger engines, more greeblies, and other go-fasta bits.  However, the ship was still basically just the "Ark II" hull with new bits stuck on it, and the interior was identical to the Seeker.  The Starfury had a small escape craft on its nose, the "Star Pod."  Dragos had his own badass looking base ship with arms that shot zappy beams and a mouth that swallowed captured ships caught in its tractor beam.  Dragos' base ship also launched swarms of drone fighters, and since Saturday morning cartoon shows weren't supposed to have a lot of killing and violence, their drone status made it okay to blow the crap out of them regularly. I like these ships though: big engines, pointy ends, lots of greeblies. Serious business.   The ship design for these shows was eye-catching and appealing, fairly cutting-edge for their day, and still look good (even if other special effects didn't hold up so well.) I liked the look of the ships, and as they used similar techniques to many 1970s SF programs (stick lots of model parts to the ship body) they were also inspiring to me as a model kit builder, and I got into kitbashing non-spaceship model parts into new spaceships: my personal favorite was a model of the Cygnus from "The Black Hole" with battleship primary and secondary turrets and other spare parts from a Nevada-class battleship stuck all over it that I wish I still had or even had a photo of. That ship's design was influenced by Space Cruiser Yamato and designed to portray a cruiser for the roleplaying game Traveller--I could probably do another post about the ships of Traveller but maybe I'll put that into the TG thread on that old tabletop RPG. Jetrock fucked around with this message at 07:00 on Aug 11, 2021 |
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Aug 11, 2021 06:58
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My other favorite ships: the ships of the early science fiction tabletop roleplaying game, Traveller! For those not familiar with Traveller, it was the first really popular science fiction roleplaying game, first released in 1977 and still around in multiple editions and rules sets, produced by several different companies. While Traveller was originally a "generic" game with no specific setting, as many early RPGs did, a campaign setting quickly emerged, called the Third Imperium. The ships below were part of the original Traveller rules set, and some later designs from the Third Imperium setting, generated via later supplements to the game. [url]https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3970497[/url] Traveller starships are based on two physics-violating principles: jump drive and gravitic plates. Interstellar travel is done with a jump drive, which turns a big tank of hydrogen into a rip in spacetime where you hang out for a week in a hyper-spatial bubble called "jumpspace" and pop out 1-6 parsecs away; this week is also useful for post-adventure healing, study, skill improvement, or "orient express on a starship" passenger adventures. Grav plates are used to provide thrust in real space of up to about 6 G acceleration, and artificial gravity within a starship. As a result, ship hulls tend to run tangent to the direction of travel, but gravitic inertial compensators don't toss you around too much. The basic ship in Traveller is the scout/courier, 100 displacement tons, which is the minimum possible size for a starship. They are used by the Imperial Interstellar Scout Service, a kind of combination exploration, survey, and postal service in the Third Imperium. The ship can thrust at 2G and jump 2 parsecs, nothing compared to a military ship but better than most civilian craft. It's big enough for four staterooms (4 people, or 8 people who had better get along really well and will still get on each other's nerves) and an air/raft (basically a grav jeep, slow and open-topped but handy and cheap.) The Scout Service sometimes provides surplus scout/couriers to retired Scouts, including some maintenance at Scout bases, in return for remaining on "detached duty" which means they may get assigned military or security tasks by the Scouts if needed, but are generally free to roam about. It's basically a perfect roleplaying-murderhobo ship: free, cheap to maintain, enough to hold a small crew but can be operated by one person, plus built-in excuses to get the characters into trouble or advance a plot line by having the Scouts assign them a hazardous task/adventure. Others buy surplus Scouts with no strings attached, for use as adventuring ships (they're too small to carry enough cargo to be profitable, unless the cargo is very small and very expensive, which means it's somewhat likely to be very illegal) and others increase cargo space by reducing jump capacity, converting them into "seeker" mining ships. The wedge shape immediately registered as a Star Destroyer, and wedge designs were popular for Traveller, but this is basically the A-Team van of starships: enough to get you around, but not something you want to fly into space battles.  The Free Trader, at 200 tons, is still a small ship, but focused on maximizing cargo and passenger space. Its grav and jump drives are minimal, pushing just 1-G and 1 parsec, but about 40% of the hull is a big cargo bay. The ship has a regular crew of four, but ten staterooms, so generally six paying passengers can be carried, plus a bank of cryo-sleep tubes, known as "low passage," cheap but with a small chance of dying in transit (there's a common tradition of betting on how many Low Passage passengers survive the trip.) Enterprising free traders run along densely-s paced clusters of stars called mains, since they don't have the range to jump farther, and are used to carry cargo from world to world. Profits from the cargo are used to pay off the 40 year mortgage. Older used ships are cheaper to buy but come with more maintenance problems; there's a rumor that Firefly was inspired by a Traveller game involving a Free Trader. So many stereotypes about scrappy crews of murderhoboes-in-space just barely scraping enough profit from cargoes and odd jobs (and crimes) to pay the ship's mortgage and keep it maintained applies to a Free Trader campaign, enough to fill the Free Trader's cargo hold. It can also hold two turrets of missiles, lasers, or sandcasters (used to reduce the effects of lasers through ablation), but the Free Trader is no pirate ship, since it's too slow to catch anything that tries to run except maybe another Free Trader with worse engine damage. Basically it answers the question, "What if the Millennium Falcon was slow and gutless?"  The 200 ton Safari Ship has a built-in 20 ton launch with its own small cargo bay, and two storage tanks with separate environmental controls, allowing live capture of exotic animals, even if they have to be kept at radically different temperatures or atmospheres, or even filled with liquid. Because they have a large, comfortable luxury stateroom and lounge with a big wall-filling window on the bow under the bridge, they are popular as noble's yachts, partially because the Traveller standard yacht looks like garbage and the Safari Ship looks like a cool flying wing. Plus, it has, no poo poo, a back porch that can be lowered from the main hull so the hunting party can have outdoor barbecues beneath the ship when it's planetbound on a hunting trip.  Here's a rear view of the Safari Ship, with the launch preparing for (heh heh) docking into the ship's (huh huh) aft docking port  The 200 ton Far Trader trades slightly longer range (2 parsecs) than the Free Trader in return for a smaller cargo hold, but it can go places the Free Trader can't. Also has extra Millennium Falcon looking cockpit.  The 400 ton Laboratory Ship is relatively rare but well known, a ring shaped design with a built-in ship's boat at the hub of the ring. While artificial gravity is common in Traveller, gravitic drives apparently interfere with some types of sensors, so the Lab Ship is designed to spin in order to simulate gravity via spin. When not doing experiments that require it, the Lab Ship uses its regular grav plates, but of course retains its spin-ring configuration, which is unusual for Traveller ships.  The extremely pointy 400 ton Patrol Cruiser (later retconned the Patrol Corvette when cruiser-class ships in Traveller were more clearly defined as ships in the 30-90,000 ton range) was voted "ship most likely to hail your ship demanding you prepare to be boarded for inspection" in its high school yearbook. Fast, well-armed, and extremely pointy, this ship was generally too expensive for Travellers and too hard to operate profitably (shooty guns and fast drives don't pay the bills unless a planetary government is paying them to regulate some space) but were often coveted for their insouciant pointiness and utility for dispatching/becoming pirate craft.  The largest ship in the basic/original Traveller rules is the Mercenary Cruiser, again not an actual cruiser, but an 800 ton flying barracks and transport ship for a platoon of mercenaries. Campaigns of small mercenary units were very common in Traveller, as the Imperium was a very light and barely noticeable government, unless one started messing around with nuclear weapons or psychic powers (long story.) Worlds without their own military forces or low tech but sufficient cash often hired mercenary teams as strike forces, security troops, or just a military force with plausible deniability. The MC is reasonably fast and long-legged, with enough firepower to keep small ships at bay and provide some orbital fire support artillery for its troops. The soldiers travel from orbit to ground in a pair of modular cutters, which also have enough room for a vehicle or two. The cutters can swap out special-purpose modules for troops, bulk cargo, fuel, or special vehicle cradles for ATVs or fighters. While the ship isn't very streamlined, it can land on a planet's surface, very slowly, using its "legs" as both thrusters and landing surfaces. It is also a relatively rare "tail sitter" design, with decks oriented in the direction of travel.  Traveller's alien races (the Third Imperium was mostly human, but with a lot of relatively minor alien species) had their own ship designs, with their own design peculiarities. The Vargr, a species of intelligent, uplifed Terran wolves (very long story) liked ships with spiky bits all over, and loud, contrasting colors.  The Aslan, a "warrior race" species something like a blend of Kzinti and Klingons, are vaguely lion-like, which along with the Vargr may lead some to assume Traveller players are furries. Only a few are, I think. There are also other species, like the Hivers, who are basically intelligent starfish. Anyhow, the Aslan prefer these swoopy, lumpy looking ships.  The basic Traveller game focused on small ships like these; what Traveller grognards call "small-ship universe" ships. But one of the early Traveller supplements, High Guard, allowed players to design ships that were much larger. I'll add some more about the big Traveller ships, and maybe the small craft too, in a future post.
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Aug 14, 2021 07:18
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:Great effort post! 
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Aug 15, 2021 01:09
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