Ugliest Starship

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

That’s just the thing, though; most deckplan designs are “slapped together” at best; they don’t prioritize functionality at all. They’re either designed after a certain aesthetic appeal, or they were designed around some specific encounter... dramatic firefight, locked room murder mystery, what have you.

By failing to put function over form, they become laughable with regard to their supposed fulfillment of their stated purpose.

When I plan out a ship design, I start out with a simple network map of cabins/compartments/rooms/modules/whatever, prioritizing who should and shouldn’t go where, and minimizing how long it takes people to go to those places they need to go. From there, I consider the mechanical needs of the ship; dividing the maneuver drives and sensors to the extremities of the ship, placing turrets for full coverage with no blind-spots, and so on; purpose-built design requirements are also at this step. Only then should you consider the broader shape of the ship, and whether you can fit the full volume of the required decks into an artfully graceful hull.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

Sure, but how many of those have the propellers at the front? How many cars have five wheels? That's what I'm talking about here. In reality, design is limited by how the technologies involved in them function.

Form tends to follow function; in the case of spaceships that don't have to follow aerodynamics, how the designers prioritized the desired features.

Yes, certainly, but we don't have much in the way of definitions of the technical parameters of that functionality. What we have are 40 years of Traveller designs following the designers' whims. It's way too late to try to impose rules for how ships should look like.

 

[fusor]

Yes, certainly, but we don't have much in the way of definitions of the technical parameters of that functionality. What we have are 40 years of Traveller designs following the designers' whims. It's way too late to try to impose rules for how ships should look like.

Well, the former isn't necessarily a problem, since we don't have technical parameters for star trek warp drives either but still managed to get some design consistency there. The latter is really the problem, because they could have come up with something 40 years ago for the OTU but didn't. So we end up with a patchwork of designs, some of which look functional and decent, and others look useless and fuggly. (I mean, the Strike Cruiser from the CT FIghting Ships book is just pure daftness for me. It looks like a lopsided sideways skittle with incredibly fragile struts connecting the 'head' with the 'base' - not exactly the sort of thing you want to have in a vessel that's going to be in the thick of combat).

 

[nats]

Practically every sphere shaped ship in Traveller is ugly, the classic destroyer being one of the worst:

But most of the ships in Supplement 9 Fighting Ships were pretty horrible as well, the quickest designs anyone could come up with, mostly very simple geometric shapes like boxes, triangles and spheres. I really dislike that Supplement, its one of the worst CT books of all time for me.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

I completely agree, most ships in Fighting Ships looks silly to me.

But people like me produce very few illustrations, so we can thank the people drawing cool ships for most of the iconic Traveller ship designs we have.

Thank you, and keep up the good work!

 

[Reynard]

The boon and bane of Traveller ship design is there are no limitations or restrictions especially for the engineering section. There are no hard and fast rules except Jump produces a jump bubble around the ship, maneuver moves and turns the ship and the power plant supplies power. That's a lot of freedom that lends to everyone's creativity and not a few who really should avoid drawing the exterior views and I'm sure a few of mine have suffered there.

I remember how Star Trek in the eighties began disregarding their canon designs and the original reasons for them (the nacelles needed to be away from the main body because of the warp fields) and new ships got weird which FASA picked up on for the RPG.

"Practically every sphere shaped ship in Traveller is ugly, the classic destroyer being one of the worst:"

Ever see the Daedalus class starship from Star Trek? Looks a lot like the Traveller destroyer.

 

[mancerbear]

People who design pretty buildings that constantly break down don’t get a lot of repeat business.

You obviously haven't been to Canberra, Australia

 

[nats]

People who design pretty buildings that constantly break down don’t get a lot of repeat business.

You obviously haven't been to Canberra, Australia

Yeah Richard Rogers has made a living designing interesting buildings that don't work very well, but his buildings are fantastic artforms that affect everyone who sees them. Form can follow function but that should never prevent a lovely unique design from being created. A beautiful building will never be as efficient as a boring rectangular building but aesthetics are as important as function to civilisation. An architects job is to enrich society as much as design efficient building for their clients.

 

[FallingPhoenix]

Realistically, reactionless or not, Maneuver Drives would be much more effective if they were separated into partial units and put at every extreme of the ship away from the center of mass; better leverage there. And just inboard of the Maneuver Drive units would be the sensor units, similarly “leveraging” the improved perspective that having its units mounted at the extremes provides. A ship would be much more likely to be “pulled” from the front and the sides than “pushed” from the back, unless it’s just some massive freighter or “ship-of-the-line”, for which turning performance is less important for one reason or another.

Maybe there's a core piece of the M-Drive that's way more expensive then the rest and so breaking it up into a whole bunch of little pieces would make the drive ridiculously expensive.

Maybe multiple M-Drives interfere with each other, so you actually have to use gas jets for turning.

Maybe the single drive actually generates a field that you can modulate to "push" on specific parts of the ship as you choose, thus allowing the single drive to be just as effective as multiple drives.

Maybe M-Drives do 'pull' and we've just been looking at the ships backwards this whole time!

With no real life analogue for a reactionless drive, and nothing solidly defined in the existing rules (as far as I know), we can pretty much justify it however we want, and thus, at least as far as M-Drives, there's not a solid "function" for form to follow.

Another issue that Traveller ship design completely neglects are the massive radiators required, for which the typical “propellant exhaust port” cannot realistically be a match.

I'm pretty sure I can count on one hand the number of sci-fi settings in any type of media that actually use radiators on their starships. I love reading the online discussions about how space combat might work when you take that sort of thing into account, but when it comes to Traveller, where you already have a Jump Drive that uses completely made up physics (jump space) and a reactionless drive (which uses made up physics), it's probably just easier to "shunt your waste heat into jump space" and not have to worry about radiators (and allow for stealth in ice cold space, though I may regret opening that can of worms...)

 

[fusor]

With no real life analogue for a reactionless drive, and nothing solidly defined in the existing rules (as far as I know), we can pretty much justify it however we want, and thus, at least as far as M-Drives, there's not a solid "function" for form to follow.

In TNE at least, the maneuver drives used in previous editions were defined as being Thruster Plates (pg 73, FF&S). Though they were presented as an alternative option there and acknowledged as being very unrealistic because the ship literally pushes against plates mounted on the hull in order to to move.

Though even that gives us a few clues. For starters, the plates take up area on the hull, and the implication was that they had to be oriented in the opposite direction of travel (i.e. pushing on plates mounted at the rear of the ship would move the ship forwards).

e.g. a 100dt scout/courier in TNE would need 2000 tonnes of thrust for its 2G acceleration, so needs 50m³ of maneuver drive, which requires 10m³ of surface area on the ship's hull.

 

[wbnc]

[
I'm pretty sure I can count on one hand the number of sci-fi settings in any type of media that actually use radiators on their starships. I love reading the online discussions about how space combat might work when you take that sort of thing into account, but when it comes to Traveller, where you already have a Jump Drive that uses completely made up physics (jump space) and a reactionless drive (which uses made up physics), it's probably just easier to "shunt your waste heat into jump space" and not have to worry about radiators (and allow for stealth in ice cold space, though I may regret opening that can of worms...)

Well other than games where heat management was a key feature such as Battle tech heat build up tends to get passing references. I remembered this bit from the Mss Effect codex...which made some effort to address that issue in a Codex entry....

Dispersal of heat generated by onboard systems is a critical issue for a ship. If it cannot deal with heat, the crew may be cooked within the hull.

Radiation is the only way to shed heat in a vacuum. Civilian vessels utilize large, fragile radiator panels that are impossible to armor. Warships use Diffuse Radiator Arrays (DRA), ceramic strips along the exterior of the armored hull. These make the ship appear striped to thermographic sensors. Since the arrangement of the strips depends on the internal configuration of the ship, the patterns for each vessel are unique and striking. On older ships, the DRA strips could become red- or white-hot. Dubbed 'tiger stripes' or 'war paint' by humans, the glowing DRA had a psychological impact on pirates and irregular forces.

Strip radiators are not as efficient as panels, but if damaged by enemy fire, the ship only loses a small portion of its total radiation capacity. In most cases, a vessel's DRA along allows it to cruise with no difficulties. Operations deep within a solar system can cause problems.

A ship engaged in combat can produce titanic amounts of heat from maneuvering burns and weapons fire. When fighting in a high heat environment, warships employ high-efficiency 'droplet' heat sinks.

In a droplet system, tanks of liquid sodium or lithium absorb heat within the ship. The liquid is vented from spray nozzles near the bow as a thin sheet of millions of micrometer-scale droplets. The droplets are caught at the stern and recycled into the system. A droplet system can sink 10-100 times as much heat as DRA strips.

Droplet sheets resemble a surface ship's wake through water. The wake peels out in sharp turns, spreading a fan of droplets as the ship changes vectors and leaves the coolant behind.

How you would manage a droplet sprayer system is a bit of a mystery to me....Ideas a plenty but not exactly sure how effective a sprinkler head would be in space...especially one that creates droplets smaller than a human hair.

 

[rust2]

In the Stellar Wind RPG it reads like this:

"All spacecraft produce heat as part of their normal operation. Electrical equipment, life support machinery, weaponry, power plants, and even crew all create waste heat. If this heat is not controlled, temperatures inside a spacecraft very quickly rise to lethal levels. Waste heat is energy in an unusable form and is measured in watts, kilowatts, megawatts, etc. A ship produces waste heat equal to its current power consumption. Spacecraft get rid of waste heat by radiating it into space. A ship’s hull can radiate 5 kW of waste heat per ton of size. If a vessel needs to radiate more heat than this, it must use heat radiators. A heat radiator transfers a ship’s waste heat to a cold plasma, which is then played out into space along magnetic lines of force where it radiates away the heat pumped into it by the ship. Once cooled, the plasma returns to the vessel and the cycle repeats. A heat radiator can shed one megawatt of waste heat per ton of size."

 

[Condottiere]

Most commercial ships would only need some form of propulsion that pushes them from or towards large gravitational sinks.

 

[Jame Rowe]

I always thought that the Type Y Yacht was ugly. Surprisingly ugly given how it's a noble's plaything.

Tis a bit of a dogs dinner that one..
Here's one I did.

I have started a more streamlined one as well.
BTW Check out Jess DeGraffs version. That is rather good too.

It's still ugly, but at least you make it a QUALITY ugly.
I'll be looking forward to your streamlined version.

 

[Mithras]

I came to post my views on the yacht, Jame, and you did do a decent job with it, but it's no good ... it's a horrible blob! I did a bit of tinkering with the safari ship and also the Type T crusier, both are beautiful designs and would certainly grace the hanger of a noble. I tend to think of yachts in the mould of the Nubian cruiser in The Phantom Menace. Shiny!

 

[legozhodani]

Have to agree the safari ship has always been a thing of beauty in my eyes. A no point have I ever looked at or used a yacht in a game. Ought to but never have. Looking forward to seeing what appears in the new HG. Not bothered about building ships to honest, a bit of tinkering maybe. Most players seem to not give a hoot about how it works or placement of stuff.

 

[middenface]

Ands here is my streamlined version the DeVass Class Starship.

 

[wbnc]

The art is top notch.

The design is a bit blocky and rather plain for a noble's transport. It reminds me of the shuttle from the old BSG.

 

[mancerbear]

Ands here is my streamlined version the DeVass Class Starship]

It's a bit better. I like it, middenface. Still not what I'd see most nobles using as a pleasure craft, but perhaps your "stock" private vessel?

 

[Jame Rowe]

Practically every sphere shaped ship in Traveller is ugly, the classic destroyer being one of the worst:

(SNIP)

But most of the ships in Supplement 9 Fighting Ships were pretty horrible as well, the quickest designs anyone could come up with, mostly very simple geometric shapes like boxes, triangles and spheres. I really dislike that Supplement, its one of the worst CT books of all time for me.

But it's so ugly it's cute!

The Chrysanthemum has always been one of my favorite ships. I've questioned the layout on the grounds of it being very "Star Trek" though.