Despite living in several unrelated continuities, it seems that human engineers in science fiction have managed to agree on two standards for ship designs.
The first design, often refered to as a “rocketship” and now mostly forgotten as
Zeerust, was a cigar-shaped needle with three or so large fins on the base. These were often either brightly coloured or chromed to make a
Shiny Looking Spaceships.
The second design, mostly based on other science fiction spaceships, follows some simple rules:
- Spaceships should be grey. While some important parts may be coloured, the majority of the spaceship should be the colour of unpainted metal.
- While not required, visibly being constructed from metal plates is encouraged, as is Borg cube-like detailing.
- Large spaceships must be utilitarian; the standard human spaceship will be mostly rectangular with engines on one end and weapons on the other.
- Fighters and other small craft will be built around a cockpit and wings to look like airplanes, but may have some style.
While it's too early to tell, this is probably not going to be
Truth In Television for military spacecraft. In space, there is no gravity or air resistance to design around, and due to the distances involved
and other factors visual camouflage probably won't be much use either. Historically, armies put quite a bit of thought into looking good and only stopped when it became necessary to do so; given the chance, it's likely that looking grand will be back on the agenda (the engineers will probably hate it,
but then again...).
Existing spacecraft have so far had a mixed record: modern rockets and atmospheric landers tend to be white and aerodynamic, but blockier than sci-fi space fighters and only sometimes winged. Craft designed for vacuum or near-vacuum atmospheres are less swoopy and more utilitarian, and reflective foil (for heat management) is common, but they do tend to look much more delicate than the hulking brick-like starships of media.
On the other hand, the products of the emerging private spaceflight industry often feature curvilinear quasi-retro stylings which bear a close resemblance to early sci-fi rockets of the zeerust school. Contrast the lines of the Scaled Composites SpaceShip series with those of the Soyuz capsules, or even with the Space Shuttle.
Also, some of these designs actually make some sense. For example, the external tank of the Space Shuttle is not painted because of the weight of the paint. For deep probes our designs are pretty non-blocky only because they are not meant for any kind of combat. Wings may be used on craft intended to work in atmosphere as well (like
BSGs Vipers), even though it wouldn't probably be very smart to make a craft like that given the hugely different conditions, especially when considering alien worlds. Unpainted metal or reflective exteriors may also be justified if the ship is intended to fly near stars: this would reflect the light assist the ship in
staying cool, similar to the way that skyscrapers in the southern USA and other hot places tend to be designed with reflective glass exteriors.
Note that fictional vessels tend to use enormous amounts of energy yet typically lack
thermal radiators
to shed waste heat (no air-cooling in space). Although that
could explain all the so-called wings...
Wings also make a great place to put extra weapons (like
missiles!), and you can sometimes store things (extra electronic equipment or fuel) inside them! You can also increase maneuverability by putting thrusters on the tips of them a la
Babylon 5 Starfuries, using the wing as essentially a big lever to rotate the ship faster. Who'd've thought?
Examples:
Modern human spaceships:
- X3: Terran Conflict's Argon, Terran, and Teladi ships all follow this.
- Stargate
- Battlestar Galactica
- Darskstar One
- Freespace
- Babylon5, humorously lampshaded in "Legend of the Rangers" with the human design of the Valen looking like "a flying brick." (No relation.)
- Sins Of A Solar Empire
- Star Wars has spacecraft starting off with more color and rounded edges in the prequel trilogy, then evolving into the gray, straight-lined, utilitarian war machines of the original trilogy.
- The rectangular aspect is averted in Star Trek, but they're definitely grey metal.
- Indeed, one of the technical manuals explicitly noted that aside from the hull markings, the tonnes of paint that normally go on ships was left off around the Constitution-class refits of the movies. If memory serves, they started thinking it looks neater that way too. And apparently Starfleet started retracting its normal way of avoiding bricks—see the Defiant.
- ST ships also tend to have smoother outlines in the later series because warp fields act like hydrodynamics.
- Battletech has mostly rounded ships, but otherwise adheres.
- Super Dimension Fortress Macross/Robotech; Except for the Macross itself (which was, of course, alien in origin), most human vessels are pretty close to this.
- The Red Dwarf is painted red, but that only serves to make it look more like a giant, flying brick.
- This troper thought they were going for a Victorian-industrial look, like the Forth Bridge. Or it was just to justify the name...
- Halo
- Home World with the exception of the Mothership.
- Lampshaded in Anne Mc Caffrey's Acorna series, where the Linyaari are openly baffled as to why human spaceships only come in one color. Slightly subverted in that Linyaari ships are, to human eyes, painted in loud and garish colors.
- Noticeable in Futurama where military spaceships are indeed mostly gray-white, but civilian ones come in all colors, the one used by the main characters being lime green and basically a short, fat version of a Zeerust rocketship (possibly justified in that the rocket shape is seen as a styling ideal but one that has been heavily compromised to maximize cargo space on a delivery vehicle).
- despite the fact they only ever seem to carry one small box, or large crate at best, per delivery.
- Caldari ships in Eve Online are like this: Gunmetal gray, blinking signal lights and angular shapes. Conversely, the Minmatar designs are even more utilitarian, containing only the bare minimum, welded together in a junkyard shop and come in various shades of rust-brown and red. However, some of the more modern Minmatar ships such as capital ships and the Maelstrom have a more 'finished' look, with complete, symmetrical hulls, although still mostly falling within the category.
- However, Gallente ships tend to have curvy organic-looking surfaces and Amarr ships are bright golden in colour and possibly most resemble the 'rocket ship' design in a few cases.
- Justified because each races ships reflect their standaradized personality.
Caldari Corporate, effecient, with emphasis on shields and electornics. Designs keep out the unnecessary.
Amarr 1st back into space. Large powerful empire. Golden to reflect the wealth and impress the natives
Gallente Freedom loving more artistic, this more flowing and free designs in ships.
Minmatar Freed slaves. So all "older" ship designs should look like junk heaps as that's all they had to work with
Thus cap ship look more finished because they actually have an empire to support a cap fleet.
- In David Weber's Honorverse it's mentioned that all of the major powers use reactive pigments to give their ships a primary color to distinguish them in visual inspections, but it's also noted how easily it is to change the paint-scheme.
- In the Wing Commander games, the human ships have varied between the utilitarian, blocky gray designs of Wing Commander III' and onwards, and more curvy designs of the earlier games. In all the games featuring the Kilrathi, most of the designs have a base tan color with various "warm" colors used for markings, but the manual notes that the color is the color of the metals used for their armor.
- Originally, the Discovery in 2001: A Space Odyssey was going to have large heat radiators to dissipate the heat from the nuclear reactor. However, Arthur C Clarke decided he didn't want to have to explain why a ship in space had wings. One of the very few instances in the movie they went with Rule Of Cool over scientific accuracy.
Early human spaceships:
- Thunderbird 3
- Gene Wars
- Moon-Rocket in the Tintin adventures Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon.
- Futurama's Planet Express Ship.
- The Luxion-class ships from Gunbuster
- Arguably, the Outlaw Star.
- Outlaw Star was a one honking lampshade. It was specifically designed to look like an old sci-fi rocket.
- There's also a probably not-unintentional resemblance between the Outlaw Star◊ and the North American Aviation X-15◊ hypersonic research plane (especially given that the Outlaw Star is officially designated XGP15A-II).
- Most incarnations of Flash Gordon.
