Fore-and-aft Spaceship Design Considered Silly

[fmitchell]

I just blew about $25 downloading spaceship maps from Ki Ryn and Fat Dragon Games. The maps were interesting, but irked me somehow ... until I realized that they were all constructed like boats or aircraft: there's a front and a back, a port and a starboard, a floor and a ceiling.

Uh, guys, this is SPACE!

We're not on a TV budget here. Where are the designs that assume a spinning cylinder to provide an illusion of gravity? Where are the true "spacer" designs for people quite comfortable with zero-G? Why aren't they built like towers, since a more-or-less continuous thrust from "below" would provide a semblance of gravity? Why has none of these graphic artists looked at plausible starship designs and realizes the living quarters are tiny compared to the engines.

Why aren't spaceships spherical? Conical? Icosahedral? Toroid?

I mean, take this one: http://www.tullisart.com/fdg0006.html First off, it's like some Star Fleet Battles mutant offspring of Federation and Gorn cruisers who had a little too much dilithium one night. Second, each of the saucers is one floor. ONE! They're connected by long hallways with airlocks on both ends. Why? One hit and your ship is in two pieces. If I ever use this map -- and the interior is fairly nice -- I'll assume that the three saucers are actually three levels of an oblate spheroid craft ... or the crew area atop giant engines.

OK, now that I've gotten that off my chest ... has anyone seen "plausible" floor plans of a spaceship or starship, as an RPG supplement or not? Anyone feel like designing one?

[gurusloth]

Well, as you pointed out, the ship design would depend on what level of technology the builders were capable of at the time. If you had artificial gravity inducers and a FTL drive, perhaps you could get away with designing your ships in a more nautical fashion.

For other kinds of ships, you might be able to get away with borrowing maps from other sources and modifying them. For example, a map of the residential levels of a tower-like continuous thrust spacecraft (as seen in the new Heinlein/Robinson book Variable Star) might be easily replicated by simply using the plans from a high-rise apartment building.

[Skunkape]

Whenever I design my own ships, I consider what level of technology I am using in the campaign. I don't run many near space, low tech campaigns, so most of my ships are designed more like aircraft or nautical ships because the technology available means they have artificial gravity.

From the quick look I took at the one ship design you provided, I'd say they're using high tech which allows for artificial gravity. I haven't seen many ships that are designed around low tech.

I remember one ship I designed that had two floors in every room. It was a cylinder, that once the ship was coasting, after acceleration, they would spin up the cylinder and use the outer hull as the floor, when they were in acceleration/deceleration mode though they used the bulkheads that were perpendicular to the length of the ship and split the ship into sections.

The thrust from the acceleration/deceleration generated the gravity at that point. But I didn't run that campaign for too long.

[fmitchell]

If you had artificial gravity inducers and a FTL drive, perhaps you could get away with designing your ships in a more nautical fashion.


But then, why does the artificial gravity have to work along a plane in a vector perpendicular to the direction of motion? (Woo, pseudo-math.) Maybe it emanates from the rear drive. Maybe it comes from the core of a cylindrical or spherical ship ... or the hull, as part of the shields. Maybe, to fit odd spaces or odd minds, it comes from arbitrary directions based on which deck you're on and where you're going, like M.C. Escher's "Relativity".

Even for fantasy gamers, imagine a version of Expedition to the Barrier Peaks where the players have to realize the ship is, in fact, upside down.

[TwoGunBob]

The Warden from Metamorphisis Alpha?

http://www.metamorphosisalpha.com/ma1map.html

I mean, it's crude as heck but seemed to make a loose sort of sense when your talking about THE terraforming vehicle of the future. Well, the future as percieved in the 70's...

[fmitchell]

The Warden from Metamorphisis Alpha?

http://www.metamorphosisalpha.com/ma1map.html


Well, it's still a fore-and-aft design, with ludicrously small and off-center Star-Trekky engines. But it's not a big stretch to use the interior floorplan and hypothesize cyclopean fusion engines underneath, or a set of ramscoops, or preposterium space-warping drives under the lowest level.

My beef isn't with the size of a ship's living space, but its layout. Maybe also I balk at the size of the engines for a craft that traverses interplanetary or interstellar distances; I suppose if you want a bunch of riffraff to own their own ship, you have to presume propulsion is so advanced it's about the size of a jet engine, but it still stretches credulity.

[shilar]

The reasoning behind these ship designs has nothing to do with real physics. These designs are familar, easy for most people to wrap thier head around. Until people start regularly building ships in the shapes you talk about the most common designs you will see in games will be based on familiar designs like nautical craft or aircraft. As far as aircraft style designs go, this shape actually makes sense for all but capital class ships because of the potential need for using spaceports. As for the whole gravity plane thing. Unless the gravity generators can only pull toward a single fixed point on the ship(with a spherical ship thus being the most suitable design). Then a flat plane with only one established down would play the least havoc on human anatomy. Ask anyone who knows about the space program, it doesn't take long in zero G to mess a human up. And the disorientation of switching gravity directions. Can you say violently ill.

[fmitchell]

My original rant came from the perspective of trying to run a "hard science" campaign. Current science admits no plausible way of generating gravity, or moving FTL.

On the other hand, most space games are less about realistic technological capabilities and more about the ultimate freedom of going anywhere in the universe in the Millennium Falcon/Serenity/Enterprise/White Star/Liberator/whatever.

These designs are familar, easy for most people to wrap thier head around. Until people start regularly building ships in the shapes you talk about the most common designs you will see in games will be based on familiar designs like nautical craft or aircraft. As far as aircraft style designs go, this shape actually makes sense for all but capital class ships because of the potential need for using spaceports.

Planet-base spaceports assume ships can go in and out of the gravity well easily. Especially at lower TLs, a more reasonable solution is to have shuttles from the ground to an orbital station or ship, and then ships optimized for deep space.

Then a flat plane with only one established down would play the least havoc on human anatomy. Ask anyone who knows about the space program, it doesn't take long in zero G to mess a human up. And the disorientation of switching gravity directions. Can you say violently ill.

There are some games/worlds, notably GURPS Transhuman Space, that assume the residents of orbitals and extraterrestrial colonies might be genetically engineered to live in micro-G or zero-G without adverse health effects. (Usually, Earth-like gravity messes them up, although I'd assume spacefaring parahumans would also be used to constant acceleration to travel between planets.)

I'm beginning to think that, if I ever run a SF game, I'll gloss over space travel entirely, and just assume the players got to the planet via Guild Highliner, generation ship, or TARDIS.

[InfoStorm]

If you can get a hold of some old Star Frontiers material, they ships were desighed along your tower ideas. That game system HAD gravity simulated by constant thrust.

[Farcaster]

I'm beginning to think that, if I ever run a SF game, I'll gloss over space travel entirely, and just assume the players got to the planet via Guild Highliner, generation ship, or TARDIS.

At the very least, you and your players will need to have some idea of how they got to where they are, which will help set the tone. If they came on a generation ship, then they may have adapted a very different culture than the one they came from. They will also have no direct knowledge or connection to the planet of their original launch, and may even lack motivation for leaving the ship at all.

On the other hand, if you use the mechanism of cryofreezing or time dilution to explain how they traveled such a long distance without FTL and without aging very much, then the characters may be people who didn't have much to loose back on Earth (or wherever they came from). They will have left everything that they knew behind and as a result they may be more determined to make the mission and the sacrifice a success.

So, the technology behind it doesn't have to be greatly detailed, but how the characters got to where they are will have some baring on their character motivations and backgrounds.

[fmitchell]

At the very least, you and your players will need to have some idea of how they got to where they are, which will help set the tone.

No, I get that. Your examples are very good, BTW.

I just meant I'd worry less about the travel aspects (apart from time and mechanism), and more about what happens on the planet/moon/orbital. That cuts out the complexity (and, admittedly, the fun) of designing spaceships and space combat.

Although I could see myself running a game inside a generation ship, sort of like Metamorphosis Alpha replacing "mutants" and psi with a "transhuman" society. Might keep the accident and the aliens, though ...

[Kelbin]

I like the designs, but since I am going to be using the Star Wars setting they can work for me.

[jayphailey]

OK, now that I've gotten that off my chest ... has anyone seen "plausible" floor plans of a spaceship or starship, as an RPG supplement or not? Anyone feel like designing one?

There are a LOT fo questions to be asked there.

What technology? What function? All of that affects how a ship is designed.

In a super hero game, we had a condition where Iron man like super-rockets were released to the wild.

One of the results of this was a "Llama" a cone shaped ship based on various SSTO designs. They had the super rockets, but they didn't get any of the other super technology designs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X

Anyway - After a couple of attempts to run games with limited and more sensible technology development lines, I gave up and ran Star Wars. It works as a role playing game and I don[t have to argue engineering and costs of development issues with my friends.

Jay ~Meow!~

[rabkala]

If you can get a hold of some old Star Frontiers material, they ships were desighed along your tower ideas. That game system HAD gravity simulated by constant thrust.
There are still people who play Star Frontiers, although far and few between. There is some of the old stuff at the SF site. http://www.starfrontiers.com/modules/

[fmitchell]

What technology? What function? All of that affects how a ship is designed.

My definition of "realistic" was to discount any technology not possible by current physical theories. We can generate pseudo-gravity by walking around the inside of a rotating cylinder, but unless there's some new experimentally-confirmed physical theory I'm not aware of, the only source of true gravity is a big freaking mass. FTL violates Einsteinian Relativity, and "force fields" are an SF writers' invention of desperation.

So, no artificial gravity, no FTL drive, and no force field generators, to name three. Given those constraints, I was thinking of the full gamut of functions: interplanetary freighters, scout ships, military ships of various sizes, even interstellar ships (generation or suspended animation). Of course, if one assumes reaction drives are still slow, so that Earth to Mars takes months instead of days, interplanetary travel becomes immensely harder, and only exploration vessels, colony ships, orbital stations, and ground-to-orbit planes would remain practical.

[Farcaster]

FTL violates Einsteinian Relativity, and "force fields" are an SF writers' invention of desperation.

What about travel through wormholes, which in principle do not violate the theory of general relativity? In Hyperion, Dan Simmons proposed just such a solution by the creation of a network of artificial wormholes. His milieu had both traditional slower than light travel, and wormhole travel. In fact, in order to setup these "portals," slower-than-light ships had to be sent in advance to construct a portal aperture at the destination site.

By the way, traveling through one of these portals was called "farcasting," and the network of portals was referred to as the Worldweb. I had just finished this book when I first heard about the "World-Wide-Web" and so it is the origin of my alias.

[rabkala]

Interesting, I will have to pick up Hyperion. I have never read that.

Why do we care about Einsteins special relativity? While Einsteinian relativity is popularly held as correct, it is still not proven. There have been many scientists proven wrong before now. Do you conjecture that humanity will never get past this point in understanding?

The Alcubierre drive which would allow warp travel has not been disproven. Many objections were raised, but numerous counterarguments were also raised.

The theory that light speed is fixed, has been challenged by numerous scientists. Even the smallest fraction of change in the normal speed of light distance, opens the way for 'unreal' possibilities and a hole in relativity.

[fmitchell]

I guess I was aiming for more of a "hard SF", "playing with the net up" feel, a la Gregory Benford. (Or for that matter, Firefly, if you disregard artificial gravity and questionable celestial mechanics.) I wanted to explore the idea of people _in space_, not people on boats or aircraft that somehow travel through space as most science fiction seems to do.

The clearest indication of "you're not in Star Trek/Star Wars/Doctor Who anymore" is ships without a single "down" direction. After that, I wanted to ditch the whole "one city on the entire planet" cliche in a lot of media science fiction. (Planets are big. We're on one.) Making space travel actually hard in some way, and in particular making travel from one star system to another a major life choice, would emphasize that space is *different*.

As far as Einsteinian Relativity goes ... it hasn't been conclusively proven, given the scale on which it operates, but it hasn't been definitively overturned, either. There have been inconclusive experiments on faster-than-light effects, but many involve quantum entanglements and hence too random for macroscopic objects. So, if you're going to avoid rubber science, you have to uphold Einsteinian Relativity or (as with the wormhole idea) come up with some fairly esoteric loophole.

What about travel through wormholes, which in principle do not violate the theory of general relativity? In Hyperion, Dan Simmons proposed just such a solution by the creation of a network of artificial wormholes. His milieu had both traditional slower than light travel, and wormhole travel. In fact, in order to setup these "portals," slower-than-light ships had to be sent in advance to construct a portal aperture at the destination site.

Wormhole travel isn't too bad, but it still assumes a ship that can get out to the wormhole, which might be far from a habitable planet. (Possibly by design; see Cowboy Bebop, where a prototype hyperspace gate in geostationary orbit exploded, rendering Earth nearly uninhabitable.) Unless you want to go with human-scale Stargates, which is just a "magic portal" dressed up with rubber science, and *not* the feel I'm going for at all.

One idea I've been toying with is wormholes that do *not* violate Relativity. From a traveller's perspective, he only spent an hour or so in the wormhole ... but when he emerges, as far as the universe is concerned he's travelled his N light-years in N years and a bit. You can go to another planet, spend a month, and come back ... to find you've been gone a century.

Actually, another one I like is Ursula K. LeGuin's idea that matter can't travel faster than light -- intact, anyway -- but information can. "Think Like a Dinosaur", by an author whose name has slipped my mind, posits an information-based "teleport" from one star to another, with the slight complication that a passenger ends up both here and there ... and the one here has to be rendered into atoms in order to "balance the equation".

[Inquisitor Tremayne]

I guess I was aiming for more of a "hard SF", "playing with the net up" feel, a la Gregory Benford. (Or for that matter, Firefly, if you disregard artificial gravity and questionable celestial mechanics.) I wanted to explore the idea of people _in space_, not people on boats or aircraft that somehow travel through space as most science fiction seems to do.

The clearest indication of "you're not in Star Trek/Star Wars/Doctor Who anymore" is ships without a single "down" direction. After that, I wanted to ditch the whole "one city on the entire planet" cliche in a lot of media science fiction. (Planets are big. We're on one.) Making space travel actually hard in some way, and in particular making travel from one star system to another a major life choice, would emphasize that space is *different*.

If thats the case then wouldn't you really just be playing a Sci-fi RPG set on another planet? Since Space Travel is difficult and a major life choice I would assume there would be a brief adventure on the vessel in space, dealing with no gravity and mechanical issues and then you land and start a new life on the new planet.

I mean if its a risky proposition why would a hero continually risk it when there are plenty of adventure opportunities on the new planet?

[fmitchell]

If thats the case then wouldn't you really just be playing a Sci-fi RPG set on another planet? Since Space Travel is difficult and a major life choice I would assume there would be a brief adventure on the vessel in space, dealing with no gravity and mechanical issues and then you land and start a new life on the new planet.

To be accurate, interstellar travel would be a life choice. Space travel within a system would be more reasonable. So, you might have one very well settled Earthlike planet, a few harsh but terraformed planets, and a bunch of orbitals, lunar colonies, and the like. The campaign might alternate between adventures on one or more planets and interplanetary voyages; depending on technology, voyages might range from slightly uncomfortable interludes to claustrophobic months-long voyages punctuated by hazards.

While I haven't read Transhuman Space yet, that might be a model for the sort of campaign I'm thinking of. Only not within our Solar System, so the GM would have a blank slate to design cultures, flora and fauna.

On the other hand, there's nothing wrong with "planetary romance" campaigns, where advanced Earthmen end up on a backward and dangerous planet, trying to get back home.

[nijineko]

I just blew about $25 downloading spaceship maps from Ki Ryn and Fat Dragon Games. The maps were interesting, but irked me somehow ... until I realized that they were all constructed like boats or aircraft: there's a front and a back, a port and a starboard, a floor and a ceiling.

Uh, guys, this is SPACE!

We're not on a TV budget here. Where are the designs that assume a spinning cylinder to provide an illusion of gravity? Where are the true "spacer" designs for people quite comfortable with zero-G? Why aren't they built like towers, since a more-or-less continuous thrust from "below" would provide a semblance of gravity? Why has none of these graphic artists looked at plausible starship designs and realizes the living quarters are tiny compared to the engines.

Why aren't spaceships spherical? Conical? Icosahedral? Toroid?

I mean, take this one: http://www.tullisart.com/fdg0006.html First off, it's like some Star Fleet Battles mutant offspring of Federation and Gorn cruisers who had a little too much dilithium one night. Second, each of the saucers is one floor. ONE! They're connected by long hallways with airlocks on both ends. Why? One hit and your ship is in two pieces. If I ever use this map -- and the interior is fairly nice -- I'll assume that the three saucers are actually three levels of an oblate spheroid craft ... or the crew area atop giant engines.

OK, now that I've gotten that off my chest ... has anyone seen "plausible" floor plans of a spaceship or starship, as an RPG supplement or not? Anyone feel like designing one?



uh, yes actually. i've designed some. my notes are in a rather incomprehensible format using star frontiers, knight hawks and neo's custom mods, and i'm not sure where they are. i actually designed six ships that could link together into a rather large super-ship. (no, it wasn't anthropomorphic). the main cannon was a fun piece of work however. working out the area and the shapes that area would take was rather fun. (who would have thought that descent 2 level designing would come in so handy for starship design!?)

[Jay]

Most every bit of science we just KNEW was true seems to get overturned by the next generation of thought. So postulating FTL, gravity fields, or wormholes is not beyond my concept of "hard" science fiction. As to linear oriented spacesphips, they have a comfort feel to them and fit easily into a sci-fi RPG with, after all, is just a game not a thesis paper. I'm also a fan of the KISS approach to game rules :-)
Jay

[nijineko]

heh. well, then go with neo's custom rules, but ignore the star frontiers rules. ^^

i'm not the best person to go to for that sort of thing, after all, i actually like car wars car design and movement rules.

[fmitchell]

Most every bit of science we just KNEW was true seems to get overturned by the next generation of thought.

But that cuts both ways. We don't have flying cars or robot butlers in the 21st century, but there are far more than six computers in existence doing things nobody thought of in the 40s. Past generations predicted moving walkways in every city and automatic traffic control of cars, but nobody thought we'd telecommute; Buck Rogers had a radio the size of a large suitcase with a giant microphone, but today we have cell phones that fit in your pocket and give you maps and weather.

One of my reasons for keeping FTL and artificial gravity out of a space campaign was to shake players out of the familiar, but another is that I think if future generations ever do migrate into space they'll find the ships of Star Wars and Star Trek as naive and quaint as we find going to the Moon via giant cannon or Cavorite capsule.

[jayphailey]

This is world building just like kingdoms or magic.

What is the energy source?

Sure in 15 years something may well happens that renders your extrapolation in accurate to real life.

So?

The reason why I ask what the power source is, is because that determines about everything else about your designs.

Ships with a high energy supply, using anti-matter, or a magical "Zero-point" energy generator could have contant thrust.

They'll be organized with a common up and down. The engines will fire constantly so the acceleration stands in for gravity.

A ship with less energy will have to make burns at specific times, generally follow ballisitc courses, and probably will have a rotating section to mimic gravity if possible.

Trips will be on the order of years. Ships will have to be self supporting.

Some people have speculated about putting space cities into ellipitical orbits, so small ships making the passage from, say, earth to Mars could rendesvous with the space city - the crew and passengers spend six months as passengers/workers on the space city and then undock when they get near Mars.

The real big problem with realistic space travel is that takes a heck of a long time and no place is that much fun to go to.

Asteroid mining and building space cities seems to be a logical progression, (Assuming the huge problems of making self sustaining bio-spheres and in-space large fabrication could be solved)

But then you get into questions of radiation and radiation shielding.

Although there have been a few interesting experiments....

http://www.ess.washington.edu/Space/M2P2/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini-magnetospheric_plasma_propulsion

These lead right back to the question - What is the power supply

Although both these articles talk abot using this as a solar sail, one article I read a long time ago speculated about the effectiveness of this technique as a radiation shield.

Jay ~Meow~

[Jay]

Hi-
I was always a fan of Dick Tracy's wristwatch communicater and the gravity vessel they used to go to the moon :-)
I do view the science to be RPG "magic" to use as you want. So if no FTL or artificial gravity makes your campaign fun, go for it.
I would think it would still leave ships with a default up and down based on the prodominate acceleration vector. When the drive is turned off, then use all available surfaces for secondary functions.
Jay

[jayphailey]

I think RPG and Fiction Science-Fantasy techno-magic needs to be jhjust as internally consistent and clearly thought out as fantasy magic or other parts of the world building.

Jay ~Meow!~

[nijineko]

But that cuts both ways. We don't have flying cars ... in the 21st century....

actually we do. flying car, but it's pricey and difficult to get license for it. (http://www.moller.com/)

[rabkala]

I want a flying car! Too cool.

[nijineko]

and only for $500,000 ~ $995,000....

[rabkala]

Well, the technology is there. That's important. Next comes making it better and cheaper.

[nijineko]

indeed. there's lots of tech out there, but making it affordable, that's the trick.

[Engineer Doramos]

I can totally understand the flavor of a realistic sci fi space travel setting. I'm currently trying to create one. Ironically, it has FTL, grav control, and force fields, but I worked that into new advances in quantum theory 50 years from now (the game takes place 150 years from now). My science *fiction* theory is basically that energy and matter are aspects of space itself and thus related to gravity, so if you can manipulate matter the right way, you can push it through the fabric of space. I draw a lot from Madeline L'Engle in my perspective of spacetime though. However, it is a game, and it is fiction. As a game it has to be playable, and as it is fiction it is not real. You are left with choices of style really in the end. To say one's style is wrong due to details would be incorrect. The only valid criticism would be whether the style is successful in the end or not.

The comment on spacecraft design was very interesting. I'm still in the stage of trying to figure out common designs of terran ships from various countries. It just may be a segmented sphereoid or disc might be best, considering how thrust works in space, and that my ftl drive is centrally located.

[Thoth-Amon]

I ran across this the other day, thought some of you might find this useful.

http://www.people.iup.edu/pnwm/comparison.gif Click on the picture to enlarge.

When it comes to cylindrical(sp?) anti-grav. ship design, i havent been able to find much either. In the end, i just had to design my own.

[boulet]

Not just useful, it's neat too !

[Thoth-Amon]

Not just useful, it's neat too !
Glad to hear it. I thought it pretty cool too. It also helps when visualizing size in spacecraft design.

[Engineer Doramos]

Haha, George Lucas has everyone beat for biggest ship. I'm looking at that now. I was mulling over this game my friend made where he had earth classify its ships by size. And the biggest was pretty huge, but it was shaped like a big missile basically. It may be as size increases, spheres become less efficient due to mass, and hollow orbs would be unstable kinda, so something that has a shape that can provide thrust in several directions, like space spiders would be best on small scale ships. But you have to take into account, what kind of ship would Japan build, and Russia, and the US? I also have orbital fighters which are jets with ramjets and space thrusters that can stay in space for a while. And then there's the aliens... I have to design ships for basically 8 other spacefaring species other than humans. However, I think I'm keeping sizes pretty small, even for the two superadvanced species.

[nijineko]

geodesic dome is the strongest shape for large scale design. the bigger it gets the stronger it gets. only shape known that does that.

[Engineer Doramos]

Thanks. I remember hearing that on some tv show at some point too. I'm having trouble thinking of a geo-dome ship though. I think I will use those for colonist temporary living pods, which of course will be the house of choice in slums and refugee camps everywhere by this point of time. The problem with domes as a spaceship design is the likelihood of attack in space in this setting. The bigger you are, the easier you are to hit and breach that pretty dome. And if you fill up a sphere or semisphere, you have a lot of mass to slow down maneuvers. Saucer shapes for big ships which must transport fighters, like carriers or battleships might be best. That way, you can have a large shape for docking that you can make harder to hit by the angle at which you are seen by enemies. Of course, by that logic, the cigar-shape is also good for large ships that don't need a lot of docking area for fighters, like frigates and destroyers.
Then smaller scouting and private-class ships would probably be built for maneuverability and appearance would be based on placement of thrusters.