The aesthetics of science fiction spaceship design
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The film recounts the attempt by avant-garde director Alejandro Jodorowsky to turn Dune into an epic, 12 hour film in the mid 70s.
He assembled an incredible cast of conceptual artists and designers including Moebius (jean giraud), Chris Foss, HR Giger , and others and designed a giant illustrated tome laying out the shot-by-shot epic, largely penciled by Moebius and filled in with art from the other contributors.
Producers scoffed at the scope of the vision but ultimately the team of people that Jodorowsky got together went on to design the art & aesthetic for seminal credited films including Alien, AI, Gaurdian's of the Galaxy, Tron, etc.
And even more broadly this group is credited with the inspiration behind the aesthetic of Star Wars(1), Blade Runner(2), and more recently Fifth Element.(3) as their giant tome of incredible, outstanding sci-fi conceptual art was passed through Hollywood in the giant, fabled Tome.
As a nod to the importance of Moebius' designs in particular, the imperial probe droid in Empire Strikes Back is a direct copy transfer of one of his creations (4)
I was already a hopeless fan-boy of Moebius & Jodorowsky thanks to "The Incal" - which in and of itself is one of the most inspiring pieces of storytelling and graphic art I've come across, but Jodorowsky's Dune cemented to me that the early works by these teams are the true inspiration for much of the visual sci-fi aesthetic that has predominated 50+ years of pop culture.
(1) https://kitbashed.com/blog/chris-foss-and-the-triangular-tot... & http://www.tasteofcinema.com/2015/7-famous-sci-fi-movies-inf...
(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tomorrow_(comics)
(3) https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=376571
As I learned more about science and actual spacecraft, I got increasingly frustrated with science fiction and anything related to spacecraft. But there is a spectrum of realism.
For example, with Babylon 5, the fighters had inertia, and would often face in the direction of the enemy while travelling in another direction. In contrast, Star Wars spacecraft fly around as if they were aircraft in an atmosphere, which isn't surprising given that older war movies were an inspiration for its battle scenes.
Later, I was reading about molecular nanotechnology, and then considered the idea that un-augmented meatbags like us travelling among the stars is absurd. From an energy expenditure perspective and practically perspective. Basically, if we have the technology to travel to the stars, we won't be humans anymore.
And these days, I just look for shows that feature "good writing" in the sense of dialog and overall plot.
To add to this, older war movies and actual war footage were directly used to make the storyboards and movement: https://www.starwars.com/news/from-world-war-to-star-wars-do...
Allegedly, it's quite a hard problem.
If you just had autonomous systems "fighting" without any emotion, or being pathetic in any kind of way, it might be as interesting as watching Mars rovers --cool in some respect but very boring in others.
Maybe the spacecraft designers made the spacecraft have aerodynamic-like handling in space so pilots that honed their skills within the atmosphere could use those same skills in space battles.
Ehhhh...
If you place a lot of intrinsic value on being human, as most humans do, then the idea of sending non-humans to space is going to completely miss the point.
It could be we develop some new physics soon and hopefully the engineering know how to take advantage of it. In this scenario we've developed space travel with a still primitive understanding of human biology. A far more likely option in my eyes (although still very unlikely as this is all speculation and opinion) is that we eventually develop a way to move into the transhuman era and robot ourselves. At this point space travel can use the traditional method of traveling < speed of light although this isn't interesting. Also, if you can upload your mind onto a server, I wonder how much value you'd place on exploration. Of course the singularity concept is just SciFi right now and probably just as likely as us developing wormholes, but it seems like it should be more likely given another century or two.
I think I'd put "uploading" in the same category as 'faster than light travel' - lots and lots of breakthroughs in fundamental sciences need to happen before we get either one of those things. (FTL travel feels less squishy to me, but that's just because the problem can be defined in a less squishy sort of way. I see no evidence that it's actually easier) -
As far as colony ships go, I think it would be hard to feed people for a couple of centuries, keep the systems running, and keep the passengers from going insane. It would have to be very big for even a few people in my mind for the agricultural requirements.
I'm also a big fan of the Culture series by Iain Banks, it's a lot of high-high-high-tech technobabble, but he gets some physical basics right, it doesn't matter if your ships is enormously more technologically advanced than someone else's, if they can project enough energy onto you, you will be vaporized. He also gets the timescales and distances correctly, because none of it runs on a human decision-making timescale, it's all sentient weapons and AI's, so a close quarters battle is over in seconds.
Reminds of Hollywood sword fights, where it's clang-clang-clang back and forth and leaping about. A real sword fight is two moves.
As I remember the story, the actual battle was a loud bang and a violent jerk.
Indeed, the following youtube [1] shows how much the original Star Wars borrowed from old WW2 movies, in particular, from "The Dam Busters" [2], 1955.
The best part of Babylon 5 (besides the best writing in all of SciFi) was how asymmetric the races could be (makes perfect sense). Earth is pretty powerful among the younger races, but we're nothing compared to the mid-level Centauri Republic & Minbari Federation. We still have to spin mass around our ships for gravity while they've figured out a way around it. So you see the Minbari ships being beautifully designed on the outside and inside (proper living spaces), while Earth ships are almost like old Navy battleships but in space where everything is cramped and people have to where seatbelts in combat as it is so likely for the gravity to be unstable. The ancient races don't even really need to open jumpgates to go into hyperspace, they just phase and have 100% sentient organic ships.
This is where you lost me.
The writing is occassionally weak, and thus it pales in comparison to more younger fantasy productions like Battlestar Galactica reboot, or Game of Thrones. But at it's time it was groundbreaking.
The moments of epic were really good since they were preplanned and they could be foreshadowed much in advance. Hence moments like (spoiler alert...)
... Earth falling into totalitarian state, bombing of one of the alien homeworld, the Shadows overwhelming Centauri prime, etc, were nearly unheard of narrative high points due to the buildup to them over the series.
There were lot of not-so-high quality filler episodes and so on, which make the series more of a cult classic rather than ... an obvious classic.
And yes, I categorized space opera as fantasy :)
At minimum, every episode at least advances a core character. And usually has one Easter egg related to the overall plot.
As you said, compared to TNG, early DS9, or X-Files, this was groundbreaking stuff on broadcast TV.
Yes B5 had some painful filler episodes and the acting was both amazing (G'Kar, Londo, Delenn) and at times bad, but overall the show is the one show that has stayed with me since Kindergarten. Just like TNG episodes (the drumhead and measure of a man) served as mini courses in morals, ethics, and philosophy for kids, Babylon 5 was the same, but more memorable to me as the arc was 5 seasons, two spinoffs, and like 5 TV movies. I learned all about politics, facism, standing up for what's right, leadership, really cool spaceships, the impact of discrimination, and diplomacy (kind of :)). A great show to watch at an impressionable age.
For armor, all you'd need is a large shield in front (similar to the movie Sunshine). You can turn to face inbound enemies quickly enough so that you'd only need to defend one angle. Enemies will try to maneuver missiles around it, which could be shot down with lasers behind the shield, making that an ineffective tactic. Then you'd have your own missile banks with which to attack the enemy's shield.
- Guided, smart missiles for punching your opponent.
- Lasers/point-defense guns for shooting enemy smart missiles.
- Lasers for putting pressure on enemy radiators.
- Some way of protecting your own radiators; be it clever ship design, large frontal shield, or mist generators.
If, somehow, you'd end up in a short-range battle (short-range meaning your enemy can't move to evade much further than 1-10x ship size without pulping the crew in time it takes your round to fly to them), you might want to add a machine gun, or possibly a howitzer shooting nuclear-tipped shells on time fuse.
A battle would be expected to last until one party manages to get a missile through (likely nuclear-tipped), or one party surrenders/disengages due to their radiators no longer being able to cope with the heat load.
has no logic nor reason to it, nor much of any internal consistency. It's loaded with deus ex machina. You've just got to pith your mind to enjoy it.
For just one spectacular example: the rebels build a base out of a cave, and put a gigantic armored door on the front to protect it. It evidently never occurred to them to explore the cave to see if there was a back entrance? Which of course there was, as that was necessary for the plot.
... given that the spacecraft in Star Wars are all used to land on planet surfaces as well as fight in space. :)
You can pilot your spacecraft in "easy" mode, where it goes in the direction you point it. However, that severely limits its speed. You can also set it to be in full 6-DOF mode (like the Descent video game series), but that takes a lot more practice to do well, and frankly, the interface isn't suited to that. Mostly because with Descent, you are inside a cavern, so that you maintain a good sense of where you are and what direction you are going. That doesn't work as well in outer space, with less "landmarks".
Rockets / drones / mines could be useful depending on assumptions such as how easy they are to detect. Having a laser or projectile hit your ship could make a huge noise etc.
Both sides may or may not have appropriate weapons, so some battles could involve ramming or aiming the engine at the other ship etc. Even just dumping junk out an airlock on a close flyby might.
Dissipating heat or solar pannels may involve something that looks a lot like wings.
The thing missed in the video is that there would be no close flybys, unless both sides royally fucked up. The warring fleets would see each other across half of the solar system at least, much more if under acceleration. From there until the end of the fight, one would expect the space between them to be like one huge rave party, pretty much saturated with laser light.
> Dissipating heat or solar pannels may involve something that looks a lot like wings.
Yup, with current technology, that would be the most recognizable part of any ship, as all interesting functional parameters of the ship itself scale with radiator surface area.
You’re assuming these ships have weapons. That may not be the case at the start of a civil war where both sides just have civilian craft. Or what happens when two prospectors booth find a very valuable resource. Even today in an age of nuclear weapons and drones etc, people still occasionally beat each other to death with sticks.
[1] http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewarintro.p...
[2] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high...
[3] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/08/space-ca...
It popped up in The Martian, but some of the early 'hard sci-fi' I read - Stephen Donaldson's The Gap series - described similar designs. Rendezvous with Rama would be an earlier, more famous example. I've been surprised that it doesn't show up way more often.
Edit: And I do love Watts' design, because it handles the acceleration to coast transition so well.
Procedural generation of natural terrain with vegetation is very well developed. Cities and buildings, not so much.
But I think, no mention of the Warhammer 40k universe though.
Is there any further proof needed that we live in an enormously wealthy society that we can afford to pay people to engage in such frivolous research.
It's also proof that AI will not result in net unemployment, because it will just open up the possibility of more of these sorts of frippery jobs.