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As has been established, Space Is An Ocean, and in fiction, naval and maritime terms are often applied to spaceships. Some works, however, take things further, and make their characters go Space Sailing on literal ships IN SPACE! The reason for this? The Rule Of Cool, and nothing else.
While, in Real Life, there are proposals for spacecraft with solar sails, that's a different concept. Those would be spacecraft-with-sails but otherwise designed like any other spacecraft; these are literal oceangoing-type boats in space, with all the shape and features that implies.
A subtrope of this is the idea of a space Titanic, an oddly common meme. They are invariably doomed.
Interestingly, Space Ships don't go after Space Whales as often as you might think. They are quite likely to house Space Pirates, though.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Particularly abundant in the Leijiverse—the anachronistic vehicles are partially what give the shows their charm.
- The anime Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water has none other than Captain Nemo take a Yamato-esque New Nautilus into space to battle a gigantic Atlantaean Flying Saucer named Red Noah. The scene in which the New Nautilus first breaks free of the ground it is imprisoned in is a direct and clear homage to the similar scene in the aforementioned Yamato.
- The anime Odin: Photon Space Sailor Starlight begins with a scene showing lots of futuristic ships plying the spaceways — then brings on its master stroke, a new, better space ship, which is... a wooden sailing ship, complete with decks and rigging and masts and such.
- Space Carrier Blue Noah, AKA Thundersub.
- The Hyper Galaxy Dai-Gurren from Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann looks much like a HUGE aircraft carrier.
- Had Toei Animation accepted the Toon Makers bid for remaking Sailor Moon (in the infamous "Saban Moon"), instead of DiC's dubbing, Americans would have gotten the Sailor Senshi battling evil by going sailing in space... on space-windsurfers... involving fights with such ships.
- Sol Bianca revolves around a space "submarine", which "dives" and "surfaces" to enter and leave its cloaking effect.
- Crossbone Gundam has the Mother Vanguard, which has broadside beam cannons, a sail that mounts more cannon plus missiles and a high-speed flight system, and a masthead statue of a woman made of gold. This fits with the series' general pirate aesthetic, even if the ship was built before the heroes decided to become Space Pirates.
Comic Books
- This
 article is about a wooden-hulled starship from a Star Wars comic.
Film
- The Fhloston Paradise hotel in The Fifth Element actually does double as both a space and a (hovering-just-above-the-) sea vessel. It looks like a futuristic version of a steam paddle boat. The steam-stacks, however, may be just for show — it is a luxury toy meant for the amusement of rich tourists, after all.
- In the movie version of "Brave Starr", Bravestarr and JB travel on a spaceship with sails, which has leather couches, huge picture windows, and shelves of paper books.
- There is a B-Movie called Message from Space, which has this very thing, but takes it to the extreme. These space sailors are wooden Renaissance-era ships! Oh, and it also includes Humongous Mecha, Planet Looters, Space Pirates, and even a planet with rocket engines! Also has a musket-toting droid.
- Disney's Treasure Planet takes this to the extreme, with a 70/30 blend of 18th century ships combined with technology. It works quite well.
- WALL-E featured the Axiom, a "Starliner" with a design evoking that of a sea-going cruise ship.
Literature
- In John Ringo and Travis S. Taylor's Into The Looking Glass series, the Human-Adar Alliance's first warp ship is a converted Ohio class ballistic missile submarine. The Adar, upon learning the origin of some of the terms used in the first book of the series (Into The Looking Glass), decide the ship must be named the Alliance Space Ship Vorpal Blade, much to the chagrin of all the humans who know about it.
- In Philip Reeve's Larklight novels, the star ships are nothing more than Victorian sailing vessels with alchemical engines.
- In Leo Frankowski's The Two Space War, Hyperspace is literally two dimensional, and spaceships are sailing ships made of wood infested with an alien fungus.
- A follow-on novella to David Drake's Ranks Of Bronze, "Delenda Est Carthago" by Eric Flint features the newly created space navy of Terra, based on stolen technology brought back to 21st century Earth by the survivors of Crassus' Roman legions. Said technology included a warp drive and Deflector Shields which would also work to keep the air in, resulting in humanity's first space fleet consisting of converted submarines, frigates, carriers and battleships, pulled from the waves and into space. The battleship Missouri's part of the action was particularly reminiscent of Uchuu Senkan Yamato. There was, however, one ship included in honour of the returned Romans: a restored Roman galley. The fleet commander was constantly infuriated by the fact the galley's crew were still rowing.
- David Drake also has the Leary/Mundy series where the ships maneuver through a hyperspace with sails.
Live Action TV
- Doctor Who has not only the new series Christmas Episode "Voyage of the Damned", one of the aforementioned Space Titanics, but also the 1983 Fifth Doctor serial "Enlightenment", where he and his companions find themselves on board a Sufficiently Advanced Alien Edwardian ship in space, powered via solar sails, which is participating in a race around the planets, along with other such ships from different periods from human history, including a Greek trireme...with rowers.
- Voyage of the Damned could be justified, though, since the aliens purposely made it to look like the Titanic, and many other spaceships in the series look nothing like boats. In other words, it doesn't look like a boat because space is an ocean, it looks like a boat because they wanted it to. The aliens, that is, not just the script writers.
- Star Fleet gives us the Skull, a space going pirate ship complete with sails.
- Gokai Galleon from Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger, the Space Pirates Super Sentai. It's the Red Ranger's mech, the central piece to the Combining Mecha, and transportation (with pretty nice living quarters) for the entire team.
- Commander Sisko from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine built a lightship that employed a solar sail for propulsion - Bajorans had even traveled faster than light with these contraptions.
Tabletop Games
- This was the whole point of the Dungeons & Dragons Spelljammer setting. In this case, it wasn't interstellar space so much as interplanar space. Somewhat justified in that the whole thing is done by magic. Also, sails only provide maneuverability — conventional means of propulsion has the same performance when strapped on almost any object of acceptable size.
- The Eldar of Warhammer 40000's ships use solar sails for propulsion... which means that if you play as them in the space combat spin-off, Battlefleet Gothic, you'll have to keep track of which side of the table is sunward and adjust your movement rates accordingly.
- In the regular 40k, Dark Eldar skimmers fit the trope to a T. Especially fifth edition ones released in November 2011.
- GURPS: Spaceships discusses solar sails. You can even give space boats wooden hulls if the setting demands it or the characters are incredibly desperate.
- One example is the Star Galleon which uses astral sails to move through space and designed to sail on a normal sea.
Webcomics
- The "Oceans Unmoving" storyline in Sluggy Freelance. This one wasn't space either, but flying sailing ships in a place outside time itself, which sailed above the frozen oceans of the title.
- This one was an interesting variation in that, although the ships' hulls looked like those of sailing ships, they could have masts on the bottom as well with additional sails.
- Oceans in the Sky features, very prominently, a sailing ship capable of space travel as a plot point.
- Grandpa's battleship in Homestuck, though The Medium is not exactly space. The white and black armies have such ships as well.
- In Phoebus Krumm thanks to "S-fields" starships are open-topped sail ships with no electronics on board. Not really any explanation why they're open aside from the field containing the atmosphere, and it seems like a rather bad idea since the field vaporizes organic matter that comes into contact.
Video Games
Western Animation
- The Three Two One Penguins episode "Runaway Pride at Lightstation Kilowatt" featured an entire setup of this, with a giant cargo spaceship and a lighthouse-like beacon that was set up on a beach-like asteroid with energy waves floating off of it.
- Codename: Kids Next Door had this when the candy pirates "modified" their ship for space travel (modifications consisted of an air bubble...thing and engines
- Duck Dodgers featured a spaceship designed to look like an eighteenth-century pirate ship assaulting a spaceship designed to look like a nineteenth-century cruise liner. Also, the Klunkian (not Klingon) warship resembles a Viking longship, complete with oars.
- Futurama, the Space Titanic episode "A Flight to Remember". It survived Zapp Brannigan's decision to take it through a field of comets ("Ah, yes, comets, the ice-bergs of the sky!"), but then he had to steer it near "that black-ish, hole-ish thing". Also, a Dark Matter Tanker appears in "The Birdbot of Ice-Catraz" and a Pirate ship at the beginning of "Godfellas".
Real Life
- Even through WW 2, most submarines (such as the German U-Boat) were faster on the surface of the water than they were submerged, despite their entire purpose being to operate underwater. American subs even carried five-inch guns for surface combat since a ship could ill-afford the average loss of about 20 knots. This was due to the keel-shaped hulls, which cut through surface water but displaced it poorly submerged. It wasn't until the 1950s and the age of nuclear reactors that submerged speeds started to overtake surface speed, mostly attributed to changes in hull design. The engineers of the early 20th century simply went with their traditional boat-building skills, failing to take into full account the physics involved.
- in the defense of the engineers of the early 20th century, the technology of the time did not allow submarines to submerge for more than a few hours at a time, and they had to surface to run their diesel engines and recharge. since they would be spending more than two thirds of their time at sea on the surface anyway, the designers optimized them for surface operations. several of the earliest true submarines had shapes designed for more efficient submerged travel, but they proved less than stable during surface operations and their replacements were designed along lines more stable while surfaced. It took the invention of the engine snorkel in World War 2, which allowed submarines to run their air breathing diesel engines while submerged just below the surface, that submarines could be designed for superior submerged speeds.
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