Troperville
Editing Help
Tools
Toys
|
When and if man ever breaches the womb of our solar system and is born in earnest as an interstellar being, only one thing will be certain: It will be exactly like sailing. That, or the old West.
— Michael Swaim, Cracked.com editor.
Maybe it's the romance, maybe it's the adventure, maybe it's the obvious parallels to the Age Of Exploration, but for some reason, when people write about space, they tend to make parallels to the sea, as President Kennedy (himself a former naval officer) did in his "Space is the new ocean" speech. Often, it goes far beyond metaphor. Science Fiction writers frequently use nautical analogies for pretty much everything in space, and fill in the gaps in their own knowledge about spaceflight with details specific to sea travel.
This trope also ignores the origins of the analogy. 19th century physics stated that celestial bodies existed within a pseudo-liquid called Aether which we simply could not detect at the time. Hence the beginnings of maritime comparison and analogy.
For example...
- Spacecraft are called "ships". In many series, a small craft can even be called a "boat".
- Space is two-dimensional.
- Which plays into the fact that viewscreens are almost always two-dimensional, when displays for battles at least should be three.
- Space has friction.
- Space militaries almost always use naval ranks, and soldiers stationed in space are usually called "marines"; e.g. the "Space Marines" of Alien, Doom, Halo, Starcraft, etc. Starship Troopers did not call its soldiers marines though it could be argued that it established the archetype for later space marine forces. (Interestingly, NASA's military personnel come primarily from the Air Force, whose rank structure is based on Army ranks.)
- This troper guesses that this is because the organization and social structure on an interplanetary space vessel seems much closer to that on a sea vessel than that of an airplane. They are in space for long stretches of time, for one thing. So in that sense, space actually is more of an ocean than an atmosphere.
- As a point of reference, both the U.S. Marine Corps and the British Royal Marines actually use the same officer ranks as the Army and Air Force. The U.S. Navy and almost all others have their own officer rankings, and these differ from the other armed forces (e.g. a Navy Captain outranks an Army Captain even if he isn't in command of a specific ship). The Royal Air Force and their Commonwealth cousins, meanwhile, use their own unique system based on Army and Navy ranks (Flight Lieutenant, Wing Commander, Air Marshal, etc.)
- Spaceships have a bridge with a big window in the front that looks out on space. The bridge is usually at the front or top of the ship, because it's more awesome that way.
- Spaceships have their decks parallel to the direction of travel like marine ships and aircraft.
- Warships usually have very few guns or turrets on their "undersides".
- Warships have undersides (This could actually be justified in some cases for technical reasons - landing on things, for instance).
- Journeys take days or weeks instead of months, years or millennia.
- Then again, there's no actual scale for FTL travel either (workings of which is rarely explained within the realm of logic, unless you're reading up on the lore of EVE Online).
- The trope also greatly applies in the case of relativity theory, which always has to do with FTL travel.
- Space is chock full of whales.
- Two words: Space Pirates.
- All Space routes have some sort of Spice that is demanded by everyone
- You can become undetected in space.
Slightly more savvy writers may also incorporate elements of atmospheric flight, especially when dealing with single-man craft: Fighters are almost always aerodynamic, and ships will bank when turning if the budget allows. World War II is a common inspiration, with the destroyers, cruisers, battleships and carriers analogous to their nautical namesakes and the fighters to aircraft, using the tactics of Old School Dogfighting. Elements of road vehicles are generally Played For Laughs; if a spacecraft has a manual transmission, it's a sure sign that Rule Of Funny is a prime consideration.
Somewhat justified since seafarers long ago evolved the organizational techniques necessary to safely operate a self-sufficient vessel in a potentially hostile environment for an extended period of time, so there may well be reasons to adapt some nautical administrative and logistic features (and the terms for them) instead of inventing everything from scratch. And the widespread "space fighters" concept, though "flawed" in the eyes of certain sci-fi fans, does provide a convenient shorthand method of conveying a sense of action to audiences already familiar with aerial combat.
In Space Opera and Science Fantasy and Steam Punk Fantasy genres, writers are fond of filling Space with aether streams and solar winds, even magical ships with sails that literally "sail" through the Void. In those cases, you may find you can even breathe in Space. Vacuum? What vacuum?
See also Mohs Scale Of Sci Fi Hardness. Compare The Sky Is An Ocean, for when authors want to branch out from water, but don't care to go as far as space.
Examples:
- Traveller Also has this heavily for the terran, er, imperial side. Naval style commands were for military ship crews, traders require ship's papers (an amusing bit of fluff has a crew wondering why it's called papers if it's all on computers), Captain and all the attendant ranks as well. Smaller ships would be called boats, and have gigs to pick up crew from larger ships.
- Freelancer fits this trope to a tee. There is friction in space: you lose speed if you kill your engines, and your ship returns to normal speed once you stop hitting the afterburners. Spacecraft are called ships, and although civilian spacecraft are called fighters, transports, or even space trains, capital ships are known as cruisers, frigates and even gunboats. You wander around a Two-D Space, capital ships have a bridge with a big window more often than not, the Sci Fi Writers Have No Sense Of Scale and somehow managed to create entire planets only a few times bigger than a tiny little outpost, and on top of that, planets and stations are like fixed islands, completely devoid of rotation and translation. However, the game is well done enough to actually make this weird form of outer space rather believable.
- It should be noted that you can 'switch off' your engines during flight, which causes you to keep going at whatever speed and direction you were travelling in while allowing you to change the orientation of your ship. This troper used to start the hyperdrive and then turn off the engines to make ineffectual blitzkrieg attacks on heavily defended targets.
- Much the same in EVE Online, with ship classes of Frigate, Cruiser, Battleship and so on, along with plenty of space friction. So much space friction in fact, that after much forum discussion it had been suggested that EVE space is more akin to Jello that water (Word Of God says the programers cheated the space physics by using fluid dynamics formulas in the engine.)
- However this is considered one of the Acceptable Breaks From Reality in such games. Elite 2 - Frontier and First Encounters had more accurate Newtonian physics, but most people specifically hated this aspect. This was partly because the AI would occasionally start 'orbiting' the player and being difficult to hit. Also because most people couldn't navigate well and had to use the autopilot, which was much quicker and easier to use regardless of skill. The player is meant to be in control, not the computer. This troper thought the realistic physics and scale was great, but is sadly in the minority.
- This could be a case where it is a deliberate simplification, games should probably not equal work, that is more of a realm for simulation instead. Games that are too realistic can fail to become popular since they then cease to be entertainment.
- Star Trek made as much of the nautical metaphor as it possibly could. The episode "Balance of Terror" hyperextended the metaphor by presenting a cloaked ship as analogous to a submarine.
- That same episode egregiously featured Sonar in Space to the extent that the crew of the Enterprise had to be quiet while the Romulans were hunting them.
- Extending the metaphor that smaller craft are "boats", Picard's personal diplomatic craft in Star Trek The Next Generation (shown on-screen only in The Movie Star Trek: Insurrection) is called a "yacht" (or a "gig") in the Technical Manual.
- Played with in The Wrath of Khan, where the Enterprise beats Khan's ship by maneuvering in 3 dimensions. Spock specifically mentions this, saying Khan is used to "old wars" and thus doesn't think in three dimensions, only two.
- Kirk is one to talk, though. He's still thinking of space as an ocean- just one with submarines. Once he has snuck around Khan, instead of just reorienting the Enterprise and shooting forward, he "surfaces" back into his original plane to attack, sacrificing some of his surprise for no good reason!
- More seriously, the nebula setting works into why things happen as they do: sensors don't work, so the only way for the ships to find each other is pretty much by looking out the windows, which changes which strategies are reasonable. The whole "Two dimensional thinking" thing probably only works because of the nebula: had Reliant's sensors been working, it wouldn't matter that Khan didn't think to look up or down: he could just ask the computer where the Enterprise was.
- From Star Trek: First Contact: "Then perhaps today is a good day to die! PrePAARE for RAMMING SPEED!" ... Ramming speed? Get around in War Galleys much?
- The famously unstable warp cores, relatively weak defenses against moving objects (Klingon ships were torn apart by Jem'Hadar rams), and the fact that Borg don't mix well with physical attacks actually justifies it.
- The "nose" on the Defiant was supposed to be a last ditch missile/ram, at least according to the DS 9 Technical Manual.
- Star Trek had from the beginning drawn a historical line from the first marine ships of Terra's Age of Exploration to the ships and aircraft of the 20th century, from there to the first space flight vessels, and from there to the Federation spaceships. Just look at the opening credits of Star Trek: Enterprise! Also frequently mentioned was the fact that the name Enterprise had a long tradition, being carried by sailing ships, a U.S. aircraft carrier, a U.S. space shuttle, and finally by the first (fictional) starship of Earth. Picard even had paintings of naval vessels in his room and in Star Trek: First Contact there was a whole wall full of little golden facsimiles of ships and aircraft named Enterprise in the Captain's Ready Room.
- A Star Trek novel described Starfleet regulations as being "copied from old US naval regs". While this book isn't canon, it does suggest that Starfleet was consciously modeled on an oceanic navy.
- Anything written by Diane Carey. Somewhat justified by the fact that she has actually worked as a sailor, but still... Author Appeal ahoy!
- A few productions of Gilbert And Sullivan 's H.M.S. Pinafore were set in the Star Trek universe.
- Ironically, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry was an Air Force pilot himself.
- The Star Trek Deep Space Nine episode "Explorers" involves Captain Sisko playing Thor Heyerdahl in a replica of an ancient Bajoran ship powered by solar sails.
- It was revealed in commentary for Star Trek The Next Generation that the Enterprise-D was planned to carry whales and dolphins to help navigation as they are more experienced moving in 3-D space. Sci Fi Debris pointed out that bees would be just as effective.
- In one of the novels (Dark Mirror by Diane Duane) the Enterprise-D does carry dolphins. Apparently, not only are they intelligent and capable of communicating with humans, they can sense dimensional distortions. Handy.
- Star Wars, where the concept is taken to its reductio ad absurdum endpoint in Attack of the Clones where Obi-Wan Kenobi is forced to dodge seismic charges (read: depth charges) that make a loud "sonic" boom in a vacuum.
- Correction: forced to dodge things that may or may not have a sonic component in a universe filled with sound in space, in the upper atmosphere.
- Nope. They're seismic charges. And he's in space, out of atmosphere. The writers have admitted as much, and are well aware that it makes no sense, they just thought it was cool enough to get a pass.
- It's well established that sound travels in a vacuum in Star Wars. I don't get why people get so pissy about that.
- No it doesn't, accordingly canon, a term that doesn't exist in Star Wars the cockpits of ships just emulate what one would have heard if there was sound via calculations of sensors, which makes sense as pilots naturally react to this. So the sonic boom there could just be a speaker in Kenobi's cockpit.
- "They're seismic charges." Correction. They're called seismic charges. Doesn't mean they actually are. Just like we call a technical schematic "blueprints" even though nobody uses blueprint machines
 any more.
- Firefly made frequent use of the nautical metaphor, even though it was somewhat at odds with the style of the show as a "western in space". In particular, Mal will not stop calling the ship a "boat." "Wagon" wouldn't have had quite the same ring.
- The Alliance cruisers in the series were designed to avoid this. The result is a ship consisting of four large vertical towers, with fighters and other craft launching upside-down off a flight deck at the "bottom" of the ship. It looked more like a mobile city than a ship. The smaller warships that appeared in Serenity resembled nautical vessels more, but that's likely because they're meant to operate in atmospheres as well as space.
- Babylon 5 did dispense with the atmospheric flight analogies, but retained many of the naval ones. It is even mentioned on-screen in the movie "A Call To Arms" that the command decks of Earth ships are traditionally modeled on a submarine. Probably because submarine warfare is the closest analogue to space combat you are likely to find until it actually exists: the arena is 3D, visual targeting is useless and a small hole in the ship is a major problem rather than a minor inconvenience.
- They did this specifically to avoid the cliche of a circular bridge with the captain in the center, popularized by Star Trek.
- Interestingly, while they kept the "carrier with fighters" metaphor many scenes do a good job of showing why this would be a very bad idea in space combat.
- The movie Treasure Planet and the webcomic Sluggy Freelance both take this trope to extremes, with spaceships that have big honking sails on them. While solar sails are in fact a reasonably scientific idea, they probably wouldn't be slung on masts of craft which were basically spacefaring galleons, leaning instead towards thin sheets, many hundreds of kilometers across, designed to
catch particles of the solar wind reflect photons. The characters are not in outer space in those ships, but rather in a kind of backwards universe where normal physics do not apply uniformly. It's referred to as "Timeless Space", and there is not only gravity and an atmosphere but also an ocean beneath them—but touching that ocean will cost a character all of their time and effectively kill them. They think, at least.
- The White Wolf role-playing game Mage: the Ascension also has an example of this, in that the Sons of Ether (techno-mages based around the ideals of pulp fiction sci-fi) actually have sailing spaceships which catch the "etheric" currents in space, known as Etherships. The fact that Ethernauts have a tendency to stand boldly on the deck of such ships dressed in nautical outfits that look like they've come right out of an Errol Flynn movie and fire lasers made to look like cannons at their foes is well in keeping with the triumph of style over "rational" science mentality the Sons of Ether are defined by.
- In Uchuu Senkan Yamato, Earth explicitly refits old (as in WWII-vintage) battleships as starships, and even continues to paint anti-fouling paint on them below the "waterline." The paint, however, makes sense, as the ship is intended to still function on water.
- The same thing happens in Gou Gou Sentai Boukenger - The GoGoVoyager is a (VERY large) battleship which, naturally, reconfigures into a giant robot, DaiVoyager. At the end of the series, GoGoVoyager has been converted into a spaceship... quite badly, if the cockpit is any indication.
- Space Pirate Captain Harlock (like Yamato, another series Leiji Matsumoto worked on) is likewise steeped in nauticality: the main title song references the "Sea of Space", the titular space pirate's ship Arcadia has a sterncastle, with a Skull and Cross Bones pirate flag hung above it, and the ship is steered with an old-fashioned wooden steering wheel.
- Harlock's friend Emeraldas' ship Queen Emeraldas is a literal ship, suspended from a zeppelin.
- The anime OAV Sol Bianca takes this one step further, in that the titular ship enters and exits hyperspace like a submarine diving or surfacing, complete with waves.
- Infinite Ryvius takes this further still; the series takes place after the Solar System is given a Negative Space Wedgie. The result is the "Sea of Gedult", a nebula-like cloud engulfing the bottom half of the ecliptic plane. Ships that go too far — "deep", you might say — inside are crushed by the radiation and gravity anomalies, unless they're built to withstand the "dive". In other words, submarines [-IN SPACE!-].
- The videogame Rogue Galaxy took this to the extreme end. All of the space ships are literal wooden ships, complete with masts, anchors and the like - except with rocket engines and forcefields built into them. They also have various interstellar lifeforms that look just like sea creatures.
- The Honor Harrington novel series technology was set up explicitly so author David Weber could do Horatio Hornblower in SPACE, with formations of spacecraft blasting away broadsides at each other and even using "gravitational sails" to navigate hyperspace (hyperspace itself having "currents", "waves" and areas just too damn stormy...err, gravitationally random, to move through safely).
- Echoes of Honor is basically a retelling of CS Forester's Flying Colours — only much, much bigger. Instead of escaping with twenty prisoners in a dinky cutter like Hornblower, having destroyed three small rowboats sent to chase him, Honor escapes with half a million prisoners and an entire battlefleet, fighting major battles on the way.
- An article describing various literary examples of "Hornblower in Space" (including Weber's) can be found here.
- They missed the RCN series, though it may not have been written at the time of the article.
- Probably because the RCN series is more Aubrey-Martin in SPACE! than Hornblower.
- Taken very literally in an early issue of Fantastic Four. There's only time to send one of the Inhumans to rescue Reed, who's stuck in the Negative Zone; Black Bolt chooses Triton, the merman, because space is like an ocean.
- While Mobile Suit Gundam mostly avoids this territory, White Base still has a big, old-fashioned and suspiciously nautical steering wheel on the bridge.
- Strongly subverted in the series after that. Many mobile suits are designed specifically for space use because of the lack of gravity to weigh them down. As it turns out, water is not the best environment for a Gundam since they tend to sink and get crushed by the pressure.
- The Star Ocean series uses this in the title. The space portions are also clearly based on Star Trek.
- The first game even starts with a snippit of spoken dialogue taken directly from Star Trek - in English no less!
- Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, where the Cool Starship suddenly sinks into a literal space ocean.
- In this case, it was supposedly space so condensed that it acted like water. This included things like pressure. In fact, when that pressure resulted in the super-condensed space punching holes in the hull and "flooding" the ship, they decided that it was more accurate to call it "spacing" than flooding.
- Used in Accelerando by Charles Stross to justify shooting digital communist lobsters into space. They want to return to the ocean, but as digital entities that's not possible. Putting them in a space ship's computer and launching it into space, however...
- The film version of Wing Commander, ridiculously bad as it was, did do an interesting variation on this trope. In it, space was like an ocean, but spaceships were more akin to submarines than sailing ships. Missiles had to be loaded into great honking tubes, they had depth-charge-like weapons...it still didn't make up for the plot, but can be an interesting diversion, at least. It was also responsible for one of the worst Did Not Do The Research induced wall-bangers of all time. When the protagonists hide on an asteroid, they must avoid enemy detection by literally going silent- down to HOLDING THEIR BREATH- to avoid detection by what can only possibly be enemy sonar. IN SPACE.
- Not to mention that, when they push the wreckage of a crashed fighter off the 'catapult', it doesn't float off, but FALLS STRAIGHT DOWN. This troper watched about half the movie while underway on a submarine, before it was unanimously turned off by the crew.
- When the small fighter craft launch from the major ships, they drop slightly when emerging from the runway, as if they were taking off from an aircraft carrier. Which would possibly make some sort of sense - if interstellar space had a planetary gravitational field.
- The FreeSpace space sim games refer to spaceships in nautical terms. The militaries that use these ships are called are called navies, and use navy ship classifications and personnel ranking. Fighters are akin to World War II atmospheric fighters - WorldWarII-style dogfights are actually mentioned on the box as a primary selling point. FreeSpace 2 even has a hidden pirate ship, the Volition Bravos, as an Easter Egg (it can be summoned using a cheat code).
- Free Space is an interesting example, because the terminology it uses is kind of...tormented. It turns out that the largest, most powerful warships in the game, which amount to a analogue battleship/aircraft-carrier hybrid, are referred to as "destroyers," while the smallest, cheapest warships are referred to as "cruisers." And in the second game, set 32 years after the first, the new warship designs, intended to replace most of if not all of the cruisers left in service (which were starting to show their age at the time of the first game, but which have had to be kept around, probably due to economic considerations) are called "frigates." Let's also not forget the very strange terminology used to refer to fighter units. Apparently, it's not "squadron," but "squad." And this troper, although he loved all the Free Space games very much, still can't get over how they referred to small, usually three- or four-fighter tactical elements as "wings." In today's air forces, wings are large units, which squadrons are subordinated to; it'd be like getting platoons and battalions switched. All of this occurs in spite of the fact that they apparently hired an ex-military terminology consultant, a Marine NCO, which is attested to in the credits. It is true, however, that most navies today refer to their warships only as "frigates" or "destroyers." Countries with aircraft carriers, especially eleven or so carrier battle groups, are quite rare, and only two or three navies still refer to any warships they operate as "cruisers."
- The PC game Star General plays World War II IN SPACE for all it's worth, hardly surprising considering that the same developers brought us Panzer General and its successors. Not only do all the ships correspond almost exactly with their World War II namesakes, some of the factions seem to be Fantasy Counterpart Cultures for various combatants from World War II, including incredibly obvious Space Nazis.
- David Drake's RCN series is loosely based off the 18th century British navy, complete with spaceships that travel through hyperspace using sails. However, the sails are handled fairly realistically: stripping a ship's sails with a plasma cannon is a quick and easy way to keep it from escaping into hyperspace, the sails need to be furled and stowed before entering an atomsphere, and when deployed, interfere with the ships's realspace maneuvering and combat.
- In the same way that Honor Harrington is Hornblower/Nelson IN SPACE, the RCN books are Patrick O'Brian IN SPACE, with Daniel O'Leary in the role of Jack Aubrey and Adele Mundy as Stephen Maturin (only with her being the ship's comms officer rather than its surgeon).
- Drake's Reaches novels (Igniting the Reaches, Through the Breach, and Fireships) are Hakluyt's Voyages crossed with the adventures of Sir Francis Drake during the wars with Spain. It's 16th century exploration & piracy IN SPACE.
- The space battle which opens Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith takes this to an extreme, with kilometres-long spaceships side by side, firing broadsides at each other like ships of the line from the Age of Sail. Any doubt as to what the scene was trying to evoke was removed when you saw the gun crews loading and firing their giant blaster cannon through force-field gunports.
- Don't forget, when the separatist capital ship turns (now perpendicular to the surface of the planet below) the artificial gravity that would certainly be needed to, uh, have gravity, mysteriously disappears and the characters FALL to the front of the ship. Oops.
- Said Capital ship was HEAVILY damaged, as well as STILL under fire from several other ships...It even started to break up a short time later. More than Likley, the artificial gravity was disabled.
- The Warhammer 40000 spinoff game Battlefleet Gothic is a great example of this. The game and the ships in it joyfully embrace the coolest aspects of naval combat through history, with vast hypertech vessels using Napoleonic broadside-based tactics of lines and crossing the T, ancient Greek-style ramming and boarding actions, early 20th century torpedoes and torpedo boats... Eldar ships even have solar sails, need to be at the right angle to the sun to work most effectively, and sometimes tack.
- In the end of Sega Genesis game Ecco the Dolphin, Ecco swims from Earth to Vortex, a planet in the pegasus constellation.
- Played straight in Vorpal Blade by John Ringo. Humanity's only spaceship is a converted nuclear submarine. He also speculates that there are "standing gravity waves" in interstellar space; the space equivalent of oceanic currents.
- This troper would like to point out that this isn't so much John Ringo's speculation as an actual theory about what could be at the edge of solar systems.
- Spelljammer.
- The movie "This Island Earth" says it all.
- Walt Disney's movie The Black Hole is a version of Jules Verne's classic novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea set in space.
- The Bioware RPG Mass Effect has this in spades, with nearly all of the terminology used by the Normandy crew (skipper, aye aye, aweigh, ashore...), the fact that the force it serves is the Alliance Navy, and the fact that a few other species' ships are given naval names as well (ex: the Quarian Flotilla).
- In the British sci-fi series UFO it appears that Space Is The English Channel given the number of Battle of Britain tropes it draws upon: Moonbase is the beleaguered sector airfield, SID (Space Intruder Detector) the RDF radar post, and calmly-speaking young women (WAAF's) vector in SHADO Interceptors (Spitfires) against the anonymous alien invaders (German bombers). But given that the Moon takes 27.322 days to orbit the Earth, one wonders why the aliens don't just attack SHADO headquarters when the Moon is on the opposite side of the planet.
- WALL-E. The Axiom's autopilot, who is literally the ship's steering wheel, turns so that the ship tilts and everybody slides across the floor. Also, the captain is dressed similar to a sailor.
- In BURN-E it is revealed that the ship had actually tilted several degrees to one side. Not that it makes much sense, but it was pretty cool.
- The Escape Velocity series of shareware games use most of these aspects. Spaceships are ships, bridges are either at the front or on top, 2-d space, sound, only a few days to the next system, etc. However, until the player buys and "inertial damper," there is no friction in space (unless, oddly enough, your ship is disabled), which makes combat turn out like jousting.
- Mystery Science Theater 3000 tended to vary in its depiction of space depending on which was funnier at the moment. In The Movie, the Satellite Of Love's controls were shown to be identical to a boat's helm, and Gypsy, piloting the satellite, was wearing a sailor's cap and singing a sea shanty.
- The novel Berserker Fury is the World War II naval Battle of Midway In Space!. The AI robot ships are the Japanese and humanity is the Americans. Complete down to the planet named 50/50 (Midway), the "space carriers" Venture (USS Enterprise), Stinger (USS Hornet), and so on. They even broke the Berserker code, like the USA broke the Japanese Purple Code.
Exceptions:
- Averted or played straight in the PC game Terminus, depending on the player's choice of "realism". The game features an actual sliding scale by which to set how realistically the ships move in space. If set to "Newtonian", there is no friction and thus constant motion does not require constant acceleration. Stopping requires using reverse thrust, and a ship's mass affects how well this works (trying to stop a cargo hauler full of ore will take minute at least). You can even overaccelerate and tear your ship apart, though they do give a max safe velocity. {{Two-D Space}] still applies, though.
- Battlestar Galactica avoided many of the Space Is An Ocean trappings, but substituted many more parallels to atmospheric flight (even the rank structure appears to be based on the Air Force).
- The original, yes. The re-imagining places the rank of Commander - in the first BG, analogous to a lieutenant-general or general - firmly as the equivalent to a naval captain, adds the rank of Admiral, puts Space Marines onboard its ships and uses enlisted naval ranks. Not to mention the use of terms such as CAG, CAP, snipes, and so on.
- The re-imagining also has the CIC (rather than the 'Bridge'). On both the Galactica and the Mercury-class Pegasus the CIC is deep inside the ship, with no windows to the outside.
- On the other hand if one compares Galactica not to a battleship but a modern aircraft carrier...
- In all modern (US) Naval warships, the CIC (Combat Information Center) is located inside the ship. The bridge is where the lookouts are posted and the ship is driven. There are no weapons systems, except point (self defense) weapons on the bridge. All of the "fighting" occurs in the CIC, none on the bridge. The Gallactica is an Aircraft Carrier, complete with landing decks and launch bays (analogous to catapults on a carrier flight deck). The enlisted ranks mix between naval and other service. Chief (Either Navy E-7/8/9 or Air Force E-9) Tyrol was busted to Specialist, which is neither an Air Force or a Navy rank. He is told to report to a Petty Officer, which is very Naval. A recent episode shows his former rank as "senior chief", which is also quite naval.
- It doesn't just have point-defence batteries, it also has main batteries akin to those on a battleship. It's a battleship/aircraft carrier hybrid, In Space. That's the point. Admittedly, if one compares the Pegasus to the Galactica, the Pegasus places more emphasis on the former and the Galactica more on the latter.
- StargateSG-1 also extends more Air Force than nautical analogies to its spaceflight, because the SGC is under the U.S. Air Force. (And they did the research, right down to the show having an official Air Force technical advisor on military matters.) Additionally one of the spacecraft in Stargate Atlantis was dubbed the Puddle Jumper, an aircraft name (though it was called a Gate Ship by the original creators).
- In a possible reference to this trope, when Ba'al screws around with the timeline in Stargate Continuum, the Navy runs the Stargate program in the alternate timeline instead of the Air Force. The original SG-1 are all slightly put off by this revelation.
- In general, Space Above And Beyond tended to have nautical metaphors for the larger craft and, like Battlestar Galactica, atmospheric flight metaphors for the one-person craft. The analogy seemed to be with an aircraft carrier.
- Super Robot Wars: Original Generation used Army ranks, while using terms that seem to be a combination of nautical and atmospheric flight along with some new ones. This could easily be explained by the fact that star travel is still really quite new — they have some orbital colonies, a base on the moon, and a space station in the asteroid belt.
- Parodied on Back at the Barnyard. Otis and Pip are in outer space, with no idea of how to pilot the space shuttle they are in. Pip makes a remark about how, "that ship has sailed." Otis acts as if this reference to ships gave him an idea, saying, "Wait a minute? Ship? Sailing?" But then he admits, "No, never mind, I've got nothing."
- While the design of his spacecraft reflect a working knowledge of engineering, almost every book Robert A Heinlein wrote that took place aboard a spaceship assumed nautical, particularly Naval, discipline and traditions, from Laz & Lor's stick-on Captain's insignia to Captain Hilda of the Gay Deceiver. This might have had as much to do with Heinlein's own Naval career as anything, although it has undoubtedly shaped the trope to some degree.
- Halo both uses and subverts this. The UNSC ships are fairly boxy, but still has the bridge on the outer portion with a big window. The Covenant ships however, (I think) have their bridges close to the centre of the ship; which also has a streamlined design.
- The books make this more clear-Covenant command centers are located as deep in the ship structure as possible, and there are hints that the UNSC (United Nations Space Command, the interstellar human government) was consciously modeled after oceanic naval traditions.
- The latest book, The Cole Protocol lampshades the foolishness of this placement, as well as the difference in philosophy when a raiding Covenant Elite speculates that humans have far more reckless courage than most other races of the galaxy.
- Transhuman Space averts the nautical analogies for the Americans because (logically considering the link between NASA and the USAF) the space military is a branch of the USAF. On the other hand, the British space military is a branch of the Royal Navy because the submarine service had the necessary experience with nuclear reactors and tin cans surrounded by hostile environment.
- In Ender's Shadow, Bean arrives at Battle School and goes exploring. He remarks: "Most poles and ladderways would merely let you pass between floors - no, they called them decks; this was the International Fleet and so everything pretended to be a ship."
- Peter F. Hamilton's spaceships (especially in the Night's Dawn trilogy) are spherical, and for a reason: Adamist (that is, non-biotechnological) starships use a "ZTT drive" to jump across lightyears. The drive creates a wormhole that, like a black hole, has a spherical event horizon. Activating the drive while the ship is in non-spherical mode (that is, with sensors extended) will lead to everything beyond the event horizon being torn apart and compressed to fusion density. BOOM!
- Edenist voidhawks, however, are far superior to Adamist ships in every way - including FTL travel - due to the fact that they are made of "bitek" (a biological material). Voidhawks are lenticular in shape rather than spherical. Blackhawks - bitek starships with Adamist commanders - on the other hand can be pretty much any shape.
- Hamilton uses many Space Is An Ocean tropes, but in a manner that is far more ''2001'' than ''Star Wars''.
- The trope is referenced in this Irregular Webcomic strip, with the obligatory link to this page, where the NASA worker assures the (soon to be literally) Ascended Fanboy that Space Does Not Work That Way.
- Final Fantasy IV combines Space Is An Ocean with Water Is Air, the result being characters that are perfectly fine walking around the moon. No mention is made of the possibly harsh environment of a lunar landscape, much less that of the massive underground lava cavern.
- To be fair, the moon you explore in Final Fantasy IV is really an artifical planet intentionally placed in orbit of Terra.
- Conquest Frontier Wars has a Navy life stucture with space battle ships and even a space aircraft carrier, other units do look more like airplanes.
- In "Night Train to Rigel" by Timothy Zahn, space is actually a railway system. Go figure.
- Battle Space, the space-combat game based in the Battletech universe, avoids most of these aspects. While played on a 2D board, ships act in 3D space, there is no friction so all movement must be countered by spinning the ship around and applying thrust, some larger ships (jumpships/warships) have ambiguous hulls to hide the bridge (though, it should be pointed out that every captain would have intel on all non-top secret ships, so this would be moot), and fighters, dropships, and a few landing craft are the only things that can enter the atmosphere without being destroyed. There are still many that are unavoidable (space travel times, ship class names), but most of that is handwaved as otherwise it would be horrendously boring.
- The tabletop RPG ''GURPS Trans-Human Space both uses and averts this trope. Set at the turn of the 23nd Century (2199-2205), in sci-fi universe that doesn't leave the Solar System, the United Kingdom's space forces are formed by the Royal Navy, while the Chinese are based on the Army Rocket Forces, and the American space force is an extension of the Air Force, who beat the Navy outin a bidding war.
- The new Star Trek movie certainly doesn't get rid of its Space Is An Ocean tradition, but it does have a bit more of a three-dimensional feel. If you look very closely at the beginning, for example, you see that that a ship is "upside down".
- It also employs the fact space is three dimensional when the Enterprise warps into the debris field from the destroyed fleet, and has to barrel roll as well as dive underneath large pieces to avoid them.
- Star Trek Nemesis was about the first Star Trek production that actually took into account the idea of a battle that takes place in three dimensions. As one section of the Enterprise's shields started to fail, they would rotate the ship to present an undamaged side. As a result the two ships would alternate flying under and overtop each other.
- With regards to physics, Babylon 5 neatly avoids this trope for the most part. In particular, it avoided Two-DSpace and Space Friction. Ships - particularly the White Star - frequently fly up from underneath to attack and battles in general function with 3D in mind. Also, ships keep their momentum when engines are cut and even keep the same direction when flipping around (until they then apply engines to accelerate in the new direction). The Star Furies in particular are a great example of how the show attempted to adhere to actual physics. Pretty much everything about how Star Furies function follows the laws of physics. All in all, in terms of physics, Babylon 5 neatly avoids this trope.
- Well, it does and it doesn't... They seem to try to avoid it, but they don't always do it right, and the Star Furies are usually the worst offenders. The main problem seems to be something related to Space Friction, whereby 'Furies make proper 3D rotations but thereby seem to lose all velocity in the direction in which they were originally pointing! An example of this is the grappling sequence in "Soul Hunter", in which Sinclair makes several attempts to grab hold of the tumbling Soul Hunter ship while Ivanova screams at him that she's going to have to blast it any second before it hits the station: the grappling maneuvers are excellent in terms of physics right until Sinclair finally succeeds, at which point both he and the other ship magically lose all their velocity towards the station AND the tumbling rotation, and he can fly off to take the ship into the docking bay.
- Babylon 5 is an odd mish-mash when it comes to Space Is An Ocean. Earth Force ships are clearly called Destroyers and Cruisers, but command bridges do not have windows and are tucked inside the rotating sections that provide Artificial Gravity (through centipetal acceleration.) However the presidential starship is referred to as Earth Force One, which actually even sounds somewhat like Air Force One. It does look more like a ship than a plane, though, and it even launches it own escort fighters. The White Star ships fit The Bridge trope to a T. The Narn ships have a three-man flight deck with no room to move, and anyway the crew has to be strapped in as the ships do not have gravity. Earth Force's military ranks are all over the place, as well. Captain John. J. Sheridan is obviously a Captain as the U.S. Navy understands it, which is the equivalent of a Colonel in the Army, (O-6) not an Army Captain (O-3). The equivalent of an O-3 in the Navy is Lieutenant (full), to which Corwin is promoted. However, classification breaks from Naval convention to Army one with his superiors: they tend to be Generals (General Hague, General Lefcourt).
- It should be mentioned that the most powerful EarthForce ships are listed as destroyers (with most of the old wartime heavy cruisers and dreadnoughts being destroyed or mothballed). In fact, the Omega-class destroyers are the same size as the old Nova-class dreadnoughts (being derived from that design with the addition of a rotating midsection), which means that they don't use tonnage to determine class. The Victory-class destroyers and the Warlock-class destroyers further support this point, both being much larger than the Omega and way more powerful.
- Lots of speculative fiction in all media depict spaceships designed to land on water, since an ocean provides what amounts to an infinite runway. Some examples include the Bebop from Cowboy Bebop, the Seeker from David Brin's Startide Rising, most of the Space shuttles in Jerry Pournelle's Co Dominium series, and the actual Apollo spacecraft sent to the moon.)
|
|
