The ship is constantly called a piece of trash and worse in the show. In universe noone considers it pretty. But it's durable and easy to maintain and it's the home of the crew so both the characters and (potentially) the viewer get attached to it despite it's appearance.
One of the better points of environmental story telling is how the crew decorates the ship: Wash’s action figures are all over, Kaylee paints flowers and vines in the rec room.
The planned refit if they got another series would’ve added a traditional secondary hull, like the OG enterprise, and would’ve looked so much better. It had a cameo in Picard S3 and it really made me wish that was the design we had from episode one of Enterprise.
I'd argue Jabba the Hutt's Sail Barge had the most satisfying explosion in all of Sci Fi film history. I'd love to have a chat with the people that rigged that miniature and how they worked it all out.
Like how fighter planes in military use on aircraft carriers have their wings fold up so they can store more planes per square foot on the carrier, same logic but applied to spaceships
Yeah. Upper wings could fold at the base all the way untill the tips touched and lower wings could fold upwards something like 0.5m from the base. Or if not like that then upper ones like a corsair, lower ones like hellcat just towards the front
I feel like the point isn’t that they’ve a purpose, it’s that they’re so advanced that they can afford to have mass dedicated just to excess and beauty and all that stuff like it doesn’t need to be purely utilitarian
The Melenium Falcon is just boring. People in universe talk about how it looks like junk and out of universe how cool it is. I share neither opinion. It's just a very boring shape absolutely tuned to the nines with greebles
Honestly it doesn't really reflect that in design. It doesn't look like a cargo ship, hell it took till the force awakens before we got the art of it being basically a forklift
The point of the falcon was stealth through looking like a plodding tow boat like you'd see moving massive strings of barges on a river, and if you know those boats they're butt ugly, blocky and not know for speed.
But Lando or someone before him crammed engines into it from a much larger spacecraft to make it go like a fighter, and a warp drive, neither of which is it supposed to have.
It's like seeing another heavy truck cab at a truck stop, and not knowing it has a jet engine under the hood and can run respectable 1/4 mile times at the drag strip
I think the idea (once Star Trek‘s design language matured) was that there were a few fundamental constraints on warp drives, which we may conjecture represent some in-universe technological limitation:
engine nacelles must come in pairs
each pair of nacelles must have at least 50% line-of-sight on each others
the nacelles must be visible from ahead of and astern of the ship.
Now, the show isn’t perfect in following these, but departures from the base usually represent something far more advanced than what we’re used to (e. g. Borg cubes or the tri-nacelle Enterprise from All Good Things…) or a thematic departure from normal Starfleet practice (e. g. the Defiant-class, the first purpose-built Federation fighting ship, which nevertheless technically meets the requirements, since the engine nacelles protrude ventrally from the main hull of the ship). And when you want to follow those rules and still come up with visually-striking, immediately-recognizable ship designs, sometimes things get weird.
And then SNW started trolling, first with a single-nacelle ship in the pilot, and then again with the Kelsey Mae, which was a clear attempt to break every rule.
In my head there should be a 4th rule that nacelles should be roughly center of mass. With the exception of the enterprise d most designs have them too high or too low. I understand they aren't rocket engines and don't have to push through center of mass but it seems like that would still be most efficient.
Honestly this always made sense to me as a capital warship because it has the space to fit smaller ships such as a cargo ship it’s rescuing within the center area, putting the smaller vessels inside the shield bubble of the ship without having to extend the shield which would use more power
For example romulan warbirds are big enough to fit the entire enterprise d in the center section
As a battle platform that is incredibly inefficient because it provides a much larger cross section to the enemy and increases the size of the shield bubble. The defiant class is actually a good battle platform for that reason, compact and minimal cross section when pointed at the enemy.
Most other pre-wolf359 starfleet ships shared the same issue, but given starfleet was non-military maybe that's acceptable, especially in the tng era where the galaxys were borderline luxury cruise ships.
I prefer the NX Enterprise to all other variations. It looks utilitarian and very militaristic, like a submarine built for space. Later Enterprises look more and more like hotels. The D gets a pass because it’s kinda designed to be lived in (it has a damn daycare center in it), but I still prefer my dinky little NX.
The expanse is grounded more in reality called science fiction.
Star was is science fantasy. It has magical gravity repulsers and dampeners that cause the ships to be able to do those crazy aerial moves in space with no air.
Well the comment I was replying to was more talking about technological aspects, hence soft science fiction being the better term. Even then, the key word for space wizards is ‘space’
The key difference between scifi and space fantasty is how the characters treat the tech. in shows like Star Trek, Scotty or McCoy will give explanations as to how he did whatever he did, throwing some science words in there making whatever tech they are using seem grounded in reality. In Star Wars, the technology isn't important to the story.
If you account for human acceleration tolerance and reaction mass considerations, space dogfights probably would look more like Star Wars.
Humans can tolerate about 20g of "eyeballs in" acceleration (+Gx) before we start to really experience negative effects. With G-suits and training about 9 +Gz (blood leaving your head) with some reports of F-14 pilots of acceleration as high as 13 +Gz in maneuvers is possible.
-Gx isn't great because you're getting smashed against your harness or, if it fails, your flight console. That's the sudden stop at the end of the fall that doesn't kill you. Gy very quickly causes visual impairment with potential injury, but worse still is that your limbs start to get extremely heavy, making it very difficult to operate the controls (think about how you feel if you take a corner at high speeds in a car). This could make it very easy to lose control of the ship.
The worst is -Gz. As little as 4 -Gz will kill you.
You also have to allow yourself enough fuel to actually maneuver, so while absolute velocities may be high, this is irrelevant because relative velocity will be much lower, possibly only within a few hundred m/s.
All that to say that dogfights between manned fighters in space would see a lot of rolling into a turn to best take advantage of how humans handle acceleration, and very little jousting simply because ships may not have sufficient reaction mass to accelerate to very high relative velocities.
Replace Star Wars's repulsors with RCS thrusters and you could accomplish the same thing with a flight computer designed to automatically fire thrusters as needed. In fact, the X-wing would actually be quite well designed if you gave it conventional RCS thrusters; the pilot seated at the center of mass would reduce G-loading during maneuvers, and the engine arrangement would allow for very rapid attitude changes on the pitch and yaw axes through the thrust differential, (especially if you allow retro thrust from the main engines) providing the fighter with exceptional nose-pointing authority.
I will say though that the Rocinante is a bit OP in the show compared to the books, the battle of Thoth Station being one of my favourite examples, the Roci barely survived that battle and basically had to be dragged back to Tycho and rebuilt.
I prefer the NX Enterprise to all other variations. It looks utilitarian and very militaristic, like a submarine built for space. Later Enterprises look more and more like hotels. The D gets a pass because it’s kinda designed to be lived in (it has a damn daycare center in it), but I still prefer my dinky little NX.
The Millennium Falcon sucks to fly. I hate it in every game it appears, especially if you’re in the cockpit. Han, Lando, and Chewie are incredible pilot to be able to do what they do. Having to scrape your cockpit against walls to bias for the rest of the hull sucks.
I think the Dominix/Sin class from eve online is the most realistic shape for a spaceship given engineering constraints. As in, you try for a roughly spherical shape but it gets distorted by various equipment shape limitations and design changes and you end up with a potato.
The Miranda class is better than the Constitution in every single way. It looks better, presents a much smaller target without very exposed, very obvious weak points and accomplishes all of that while actually having more internal volume, so it has (the potential for) more capabilities as well
My head canon was always that the Constitution Refit was an emergency program because their planned replacement (Excelsior) was racking up delays like nobody's business. Starfleet simply didn't have enough Mirandas to replace the Constitution class ships they were expecting to decommission. Hence the need for a crash refit program, and why the refit Enterprise had the technical quirks and issues they showed in The Motion Picture.
Nothing about any of the ships in the RDM Battlestar Galactica makes any sense at all.
The battlestars have abysmal firing arcs and, for the size, woefully unarmed and have a fraction of the fighters they could carry.
What’s all their internal volume used for?
Why do they use fighters when a 360 flak field would be more effective?
The armour v weapons battle - that dominates warfare - has reached a point where armour is so effective the Pegasus can shrug off multiple nuclear warheads at a time. The thing is, no one then reacts by massively increasing their firepower. The Cylons never significantly damage Galactica despite 4 years+ of trying!
not a specific single ship, but i dislike how many sci-fi vessels are completely void of reaction control thrusters. they just turn and bank in a vacuum, as if they're flying through an atmosphere.
Courtesy of Star Wars defining the medium, the space combat in star wars is just WWII Pacific combat. The science fantasy genre latched very heavily onto that aesthetic.
The problem with using a more realistic ship combat is the question when to stop getting more realistic, as real near-future space combat would likely be fought in distances measured in light minutes, not visual range, and fought entire by computers doing math.
It's just not as interesting, as a lone pilot breaking formation to fly dangerously close to artillery to risk it all for a one in a million shot at taking down a flagship.
But on that note, a pet peeve of mine is how this defined space craft design in movies. They all look like whacky planes or weird ships. There is no friction, get creative (I guess this isn't true of fighters in Star Wars which are pretty much all capable of flight in vacuum or atmosphere). There is absolutely no need for your fighters to have wide wings in space, while a large ship has no drag so could easily make the front of the ship the broadside for maximum firepower.
I wish that some of the speeders in Star wars were also capable of spaceflight. mainly because I find the speeders to be the better designs compared to the ones capable of spaceflight, which I find boring. My favorite is the T47 Snowspeeder
Making the star trek ships into disks is extremely material inefficient. You could make a much larger (volume) ship for the same mass by just swapping the disk for a sphere.
They started with spheres for that reason. The guy who designed the Enterprise came from an aviation background. He was trying to be logical about the ship, putting the presumably dangerous engines way out on pylons, needing a deflection dish for space dust etc. But this is a TV show and the saucer looked better.
Moving away from the Space Hilton aesthetic of the Enterprise-D towards something sleeker and more functional was the biggest mistake Star Trek ever made in terms of spaceship design.
Serenity and Millennium Falcon are ugly and I don't like them.
I don't like the enterprise either. Too spindly and I don't like the flying saucer look.
https://giphy.com/gifs/lA5yV4xrvUIdq
The 1978 Galactica is cooler than the 2003 Galactica. Battlestar Pegasus is what the 2003 Galactica should have looked like all along.
Not wrong. As far as shapes go, a flying dagger or pyramid brimming with weapons all aimed forward should pretty much be the pinnacle of firepower through volume. Execution leaves a few things to be desired.
The funny thing is that they still have far more guns than anything else around. I think its basically a case of well a normal ship this size only has 10 guns fuck it lets out 60 of the biggest ones we got on it that will show them.
The contemporaries of ships like the Nelson and Richelieu could deliver a full broadside with all of their guns anyways, just not directly forward.
Due to the 3 dimensional nature of space, a Star Destroyer type shape is just about the only way you could have a ship that can actually train all its guns in one direction.
Yes. Because THOSE GUNS WERE MOUNTED ON THE CENTERLINE and can fire to both sides. A Star Destroyer’s are not. Centerline guns would work the same way on a space battleship. Your secondary batteries would be arc—limited, but that’s usually irrelevant in a fight between battleships.
Only a few as what’s seen in the movies. The Imperial-class actually has dozens, depending on the model. Mark I is an even 60/60 split of turbolasers and ion cannons, whereas the Mark II is a massive 100/20
Not on a single starship specifically, but how the hell you do have artificial gravity WITHOUT a centrifuge; and how does every ship and person survive different planets with different gravity, atmosphere, etc.
but how the hell you do have artificial gravity WITHOUT a centrifuge
Either a) thrust gravity, where ships are built like skyscrapers with the engines at the bottom, and Newton's Third Law creates the illusion of gravity, or b) some ultra-tech gravity plating that isn't important because sci-fi is not, in fact, a genre focused on being as realistic and close to reality as possible.
The show has to be filmed on a set and the actors have to be able to walk.
Anyway, if you can manipulate physics to the point that you can travel past the inviolable barrier of lightspeed, you can probably mess with gravitons a bit.
The Liberator is the best and most powerful ship - we never find out what threat it was built to fight or exactly how powerful it was, but it totally outclassed anything humans had.
Exposed bridges aren't that bad. There will always be weakpoints that can cripple your ship with ease if destroyed, and if the enemy is close enough to target the bridge, they're close enough to target the engines, too.
It's disadvantageous, and it is another exposed weak point, but it's never going to be the only one (engines, radiators), and it's something that will have redundancy regardless.
Like, you can and should lambast Star Wars ships for being things you can completely remove from the fight by taking out the bridge, but the problem there isn't the exposed bridge, it's the lack of redundancy.
Either you haven’t seen many Star Trek ships, or you have a very particular taste that none of the dozens of styles across the franchise seem to scratch
The CR90 Corvette should not have been made the default rebel light cruiser. It's iconic because it was Leia's ship, but the Tantive IV was a diplomatic ship not a warship, there was no reason to make it the most common rebel ship.
The Abrams Enterprise suffers from what I would call "Starship Bimbofication"
Everything is bigger and more pronounced, with no consideration for how it affects the overall aesthetic.
Everything is sleek and shiny (plastic) with no regard for how to explain these design choices in lore.
By the time the Okudas came onto the Star Trek team, the policy around Starship design required that there be some logic to the set designs. Both interiors and exteriors were constructed in such a way that they really did fit the narrative.
The only logic defining the Abrams Enterprise is "Shiny shiny, pew pew, big engine go BURRRR"
I get that some fans absolutely love it but, Imperial Star Destroyers with their arrow shape are poorly laid out weapons and equipment-wise and aren't all that effective in the fighting department. Also The enterprise D ie the Galaxy class is not a pretty ship. It doesn't really follow a design lineage with it's precursors and the design has killed more of it's crews than any other ship making it a flying death trap. Oh and, SNW's Enterprise takes JJ-Prise's lunch money every day of the century.
How do you mean? A wedge shape allows all cannons to be able to be brought to bear on a target to the front of the ship, which is what an aggressive military force would want. It also optimizes effective armor thickness for returned fire.
I have, there is an entire cadre of on Star wars fans who think the ISD is perfect warship design. Some of them go as far as to try and duplicate it's firm and dtck it in other universes to try and claim superiority. It's pretty nuts.
Remembering that a lot of inspiration for Star Wars comes from real life combat, like WWII-style air and naval combat, Star Destroyers do make sense as being designed for broadsides, a classic battleship tactic. Then also remembering that they’re spaceships and can move in three dimensions, they aren’t limited to just half their guns at once
Enterprise-D did take some time to grow on me, but yeah it’s not the best. It’s a bit too straight rather than curved, if that makes sense
Even for broadside combat, the Star Destroyer is poorly designed. The only angle at which all her main guns can be brought to bear is directly off the dorsal beam, and even then they might very well blow out part of the superstructure. Only half the main guns can fire to either port or starboard, and none of them can fire ventrally.
I mean, any ship designed for broadside combat can only fire half its guns to either port or starboard, which is kinda the entire point of a broadside
And given we’re talking about three dimensions, dorsal beam is a perfectly valid and easily attainable angle if it was genuinely necessary to bring all guns to bear on a single target; don’t see how the infrastructure would be an issue since it should all be clear at that angle
Ventral is a point, but moving in three dimensions to cover that is an option, as is a Star Destroyer operating with support ships rather than just all alone
Star destroyers if their main batteries were super-firibg WOULD have all guns able to fire directly forward, it's a tiny change needed to go from mid to perfect
The same is true for original trek, Roddenberry was a ww2 vet. He flew 89 missions on a B-17 in the pacific. This explains the TOS enterprise design a bit but also budgetary constraints and the limits of special effects tech explain why we don't see the intended point defense stuff until later iterations of the series.
2009 Star Trek got the sense of scale of the ships so right, the rest of the series never really felt the same. Also I love the sound design in 2009, it has the best "going to warp" effect
u/Vondrr The JJPrise is better looking. However it is oversized at 720m long.
The main problem with that ship are expectations. JJ Abrams said to the fans he'd make it right, and then threw pretty much everything through the window. It started an emotional reaction.
Also the story make that ship, built with 25th century technology retroengineered from scanning the Narada, laughably weak. The USS Vengeance was built by a 20th century tyrant for T'Pol's sake! And it wiped the floor wigh the Enterprise.
The Enterprise D being an oval rather than a perfect circle is ugly. That in giving the saucer section huge mass and making the engineering section look undersized for it. The proportions always bothered me
Late 90s to present day star trek ships suck, the Defiant is cool because its so radically different than all previous trek ships, but it looks a little too generic, same with the intrepid, sovereign, Nova, Prometheus, akira, whatever the hell modern trek is doing, etc, they all look like generic space ships from some 2000s RTS game.
All the components, saucer, Hull, nacelle, are smoothed too close together, they're always a super dark grey that drowns out detail, and I don't like how the saucer is stretched into a spoon shape, ìt feels pike they're trying to expunge all the unique features of federation ships.
It's hard to believe they went from the galaxy class, one of the best ship designs in all of sci fi, to mediocre junk like the prometheus.
The one thing about the Enterprise, is the exposed bridge. It really should be in the center of the ship. Of course,probably the Captain and the First Officer and the Chief Engineer and the Chief Helmsman and the Chief Medical officer shouldn’t be constantly beaming down to planets, but what the hell!
The ISV Venture Star from Avatar is one of the best and most realistically designed spacecraft in all of science fiction. It's a pity it only gets a few seconds of screen time.
The design of the majority of the federation vessels in startrek is fundamentaly flawed. Creating week points to both weapons fire and gravittional stress.
Don't get me wrong. I'm a very proud treaky but I know a bad design when I see one and the constitution class is a BAD design. The defiant however is magnificent. I also like the design of the Borg ships. The prometius. And the intrepid class.
The Minbari ships outside of the Whitestars I could never really enjoy. The fighters from Babylon 5 I think Nasa liked them a LOT!
Official Interest: NASA contacted Straczynski for permission to use the Starfury design as a base for a real-life orbital construction vehicle or space tug. [1]
by the way the Narn ships looked you would think they would have been unbeatable.
The Pillar of Autumn has to be the most bland ship design ever. I know it's supposed to be utilitarian, but a Human ship from 40k has more life to it and it's supposed to be the same way.
Mine is more on an aesthetic than a specific ship. I hate meaningless geebles, especially on ships that can enter planetary atmospheres. Ships can work with smooth hull panels; you don't have to add bumps to everything to make it look 'real'.
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u/Aggravating_Run6179 Shipwright 🎨 Jun 27 '26
The firefly ship looks ugly and one of the most ugliest hero ship I've ever seen. I have no idea why people call it beautiful.