Space Is An Ocean - Television Tropes & Idioms

The space destroyer was on a six-month cruise in the Western Pacific Sector. It was two days out of Subic Spaceport in the Philios system when the ion storm struck. Meanwhile, many of the off duty sailors and officers were experiencing nauspace and lightheadedness, the initial symptoms of space scurvy.

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.

For example...

Spacecraft are called "ships". In many series, a small craft can even be called a "boat".
Furthermore, classes of space ship are usually analogous to classes of ship: Cruiser, Battleship, Destroyer, Frigate, etc.
Some works of fiction take this even more literally
Space is two-dimensional.
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.)
Space ships 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.
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).
Journeys take days or weeks instead of months, years or millenia.
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.

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

, 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?

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.
- 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.
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.
- 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.
- In The Wrath of Khan, where the Enterprise was on a training mission, Kirk described them as having a "boatload of children" onboard.
- 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!
  - For Drama, my friend, for Drama. Drama always trumps good tactics in an onscreen battle.
- 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?
- 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.
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.
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.
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." Additionally, Mal went from being a Sergeant to Captain, mentioned several times in the first few episodes. Sergeant was his military rank. "Captain" is simply an honorific for someone who owns a ship. "Wagon" wouldn't have had quite the same ring.
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.
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.
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's Emeralda's 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).
- An article describing various literary examples of "Hornblower in Space" (including Weber's) can be found here.
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.
The Star Ocean series uses this in the title. The space portions are also clearly based on Star Trek.
Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, where the Cool Ship suddenly sinks into a literal space ocean.
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.
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 - World War II-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).
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.
Truth In Television: This troper, blinded by the awesomeness of the concept, loves to use nautical and naval metaphors for space travel. It partly has something to do with his taking naval science classes and his possible future employment in naval intelligence, but really, it's mostly just the awesomeness.
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.
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.
Spelljammer.
The movie "This Island Earth" says it all.
Walt Disney's execrable movie The Black Hole is a version of Jules Verne's classic novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea set in space.

Exceptions:

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.
StargateSG-1 also extends more Air Force than nautical analogies to its spaceflight, probably because spacecraft from Earth were added relatively late in the series. More directly, all the principals are in the SGC, which 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 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.
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) tend to be spherical- mathematically, the most efficient shape if friction isn't an issue (having the smallest surface area for a given volume).
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.

Space Friction

« Speculative Fiction Tropes »

Space Sailing

Space Is Noisy

« Space Does Not Work That Way »

Stealth In Space

Main Tropes Index

Troperville

Editing

Tools

Toys

Examples:

Exceptions: