Why Are Alien Ships Always So Boring?
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- Опубликовано: 1 окт 2018
- I break down some of the common flaws in alien ship design.
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Sci-Tech Intro Features Animated Elements by SKIBBZ.
Spacedock does not hold ownership of the copyrighted materiel (Footage, Stills etc) taken from the various works of fiction covered in this series, and uses them within the boundaries of Fair Use for the purpose of Analysis, Discussion and Review. Produced by Daniel Orrett. Owner/Executive Producer at Spacedock. 
Развлечения
When the insectoid species has ships that look like insects.
When the reptilian species has ships that look like reptiles.
When the aquatic species has ships that look like fish.
I want the human ships to look like apes.
"The circle of life has repeated, commence the deployment of A.P.E!"
You are very correct.
Monke ship.
The Macross SDF-1 actually does that.
Ugh!
Perhaps I misunderstood what you were trying to say, but I have to disagree with your assertion that ships with hard angles are more practical than ships with curves. In fact, it's quite the opposite, from an engineering standpoint.
To quote a passage from the appendix of The Lost Fleet: Corsair:
"The most common question asked by new midshipmen is...why does a spaceship need curves? Spaceships don't need to be streamlined because of resistance from water or air, but engineering has to pay close attention to something that midshipmen are intimately familiar with - stress."
"Concentrating stress on part of a structure will cause it to crack. What concentrates stress? Corners. Sharp edges. The geometry of a design determines how stress is distributed. Abrupt changes in geometry create places where tiny areas become the focus of large amounts of stress."
"That's why water bottles are round, not square. Square bottles would be more efficient, but the edges and corners would crack. Nature abhors right angles. Bones, branches, shells, the outsides of living creatures - all are curved to avoid concentrating stress."
"Spaceships face particular challenges, because they must constantly hold in atmosphere against the emptiness of space, and deal with the forces of acceleration, deceleration, changes of vector, and even gravitational forces if close enough to a large mass. A square spaceship with boxy edges and lines would suffer constant structural failure at those places. Engineers refer to this as A Bad Thing."
"The geometry of aquatic creatures such as marine mammals or fish offer particularly useful models for spacecraft. Not only are they designed to deal with internal and external pressures, but the creatures all have clearly laid out centers of mass..."
""...That is why the warships to which you will someday be assigned all externally resemble fish or marine mammals. Nature provided us with a highly effective design for distributing stress and focusing propulsion. All we had to do was modify it. While warship "fins" do not serve any purpose in maneuvering, they offer strong platforms for mounting sensors, weapons, and shield generators."
I do agree that curvy ships don't always look as cool, though.
I like curvy ship designs done well, but a purely animal based design seems a bit, odd. I’d personally expect a space ship built with the above mentioned concerns to end up looking like a submarine or pressurized airliner. Honestly though, curved or angular, it has to look a certain way to look “right” for a given context. Generally for me, that involves looking sleek in some way.
The best aesthetic designs IMO balance curves with angles.
I wish that I could like this more than once. This is an excellent point.
I concur. Additionally as the saying goes there are many ways to skin a cat.
Let’s look at cars for example. The only basic structure needed really is some form of housing for the passengers, an engine bay, and wheels. Just about everything else comes down to preference and design philosophies of a specialized task if that is the goal.
So long as your goal is to drive from point a to point b, you can have boxy muscle cars, sleek exotic cars, those tiny european cars, a pickup truck, van, hummer. Even if we group them by their capabilities both a cadillac and a van can transport multiple family members to their soccer games. Yet they can look totally different.
While I will concede that certain basic looks are necessary for the task, there is a lot of freedom left for the designer to do what they want. An alien may not be inspired by the same things we humans are when we make our vehicles.
Star Wars is interesting in that there are no “alien” ship designs because EVERYONE is an “alien” in some way or another, even the humans. The ships are more often designed by corporations than by specific races.
The contrast is teh Mon Calamari ships. They have a rounded, "organic" look to them. That was to show the alien cultural trends of the species compared to humans. The B-Wing had Verpine engineers on the design team. Their contribution was the ship rotating around the cockpit.
@@dirus3142 I have to agree. One of the first that came to mind was Home One.
What I wish had been done for the Mon Calamari is to make their ships in the skyscraper style, rather than the cruise liner style. Mon Calamari live in a 3D world, their ship arrangement should reflect that. So instead of broadside firing arcs, they would have guns that cover the +Z and -Z arcs and aren't capable of engaging along the sides. While doing this, the Mon Calamari ships would be rotating as needed to bring fresh shields/weapons to bear.
What about the recusant destroyer it was designed by The Quarren And has its own style
@@dirus3142 Mon-Cal ships are honestly some of the more sensible in the series. It's also funny how much of them are just underwater skyscrapers that have been refitted.
"The best non-human ship design is one that conforms with human design considerations"...
I think you're overlooking a few considerations:
1) Often, as technology increases in complexity, it tends to become increasingly..."bio-memetic"? by which I mean engineers often look to the natural world for inspiration, even more so as tech becomes increasingly miniaturised. How many commercials do we hear "inspired by Nature..."??
2) You're thinking like a human. Granted, human design principles seem appropriate to apply to ships engineered by a humanoid species, as form/function considerations would likely be similar. But a race of sentient cephalopods for instance, might not place the same importance on front/back, up/down placement, as their tentacled body-plan may allow them to operate equipment on multiple axis at once.
Or maybe said species finds flat planes and hard angles offensive for cultural or religious reasons?
Heck maybe their building materials lend themselves better to curved structures? Maybe they DO grow their ships from some sort of coral-like materials?
Maybe those "dull green-grey" warships are intended to make them harder to see/identify, or maybe their hulls feature brightly coloured declarations of hostility... to eyes that can perceive above the visible light spectrum?
3) You've got to take "Visual language" into consideration. Production artists need to be able to communicate secondary information without the need for lengthy expositions distracting from the story.
Curved, natural looking design is visual shorthand for "Advanced enough to not be solely concerned with function"... a Borg Cube perfectly conveys that they are rigid, structured and unconcerned with appearances as opposed to practicality.
Apologies for the slab of text!
100% this.
The biggest flaw of this video is that he's thinking too much like a human, and complaining about alien ships not being built with human aesthetics and function in mind.
It should be obvious that humans and aliens have different aesthetics and values when designing ships, and he can't just say that "Alien ships should look like they could be built by humans, else the design is bad and bland".
Counterpoints:
1. Houses builed as large boxes for the most part because that's easier to build and that alows for more space, not because its inherently human. Alien buildings would probably also would be boxes, but with less/more average floor hight based on their size. So spaceships would be no different. You won't be sacrificing space, material and efficiency for sake of style, if you building millitary or utilitarian vessel
2. Materials would largely be the same everywhere if we talking about the same universe
@@EvGamerBETA
1. You're assuming that all spacefaring aliens are human shaped/sized.
2. You're assuming that all spacefaring aliens are limited to base materials and composites. Any decently advanced civilization would likely use metamaterials for their craft.
Don't apologize for the "slab of text". You are one of the rare beings that actually comprehends the existence and usage of simple grammatical concepts such as paragraphs and proper punctuation.
I don't think your points are valid. Let me go down the list:
1) This is true in some respect, but you cannot emulate nature in the vacuum of space, simply because there are no organisms that live there. It's a hostile environment for basically everything, but in a sense it's the most basic one of all - you don't have to account for a lot of variables like fluid viscosity, varying temperatures, gravity, terrain and the like. Any space-faring vessel would have to deal with exactly the same problems, irregardless of who the designer is.
2) Same as before - star-ships, especially in a combat scenario, will not be designed based on interior, the same way as a submarine is not designed around it's interior. A war vessel is a war vessel. Front/back and up/down placement is important as well - that is because of acceleration, which is an inescapable fact of nature. You also want a shape with practical moment of inertia - a spherical ship with varying center of mass will be spinning nightmare most of the time. Gun placement, heat radiators and propulsion systems also abide by the same rules for everybody.
3) I get that, but you are sacrificing realism for the same of being cool. That's fine, but as the video points out, it's also a bit lazy.
Human ships: squarebois
Alien ships: roundbois
Correction
Humans: realisticbois
Aliens: roundbois
Borg:squarebois
Orkz: Rokboiz
spacejockeys: meatbois
@@26th_Primarch actually asteroid starships would probably be very practical think about it you have 40 feet of metal above you and a several mile long spacecraft that can be easily gutted.
Correction ..we have no clue what is realisticbois ,we talk about starshipbois, and they have imaginarybois parts.....
To be fair to Halo, Covenant ships are intended to be religious symbols and reminders of the power of the Prophets rather than effective military vessels. The Covenant military is intentionally portrayed as somewhat inept and only really winning the war because of their vast technological advantage. The Forerunner tech it's (more or less) based on is much more angular and "human-like". Normally at least. The Composer in H4 is an exception (and much like the rest of the 343 art, not in keeping with the style of Halo.)
@Viktor Even in Halo CE Cortana Mentions the Halo Ring Being of Religious Significance to the covenant and there was only one covenant ship
design in that game the rest of the ship designs came later in Halo 2 and 3
@@tachy1801 While certainly possible, it's nice that they added a reason for it in the lore instead of just leaving it as "they're aliens so they look bulbous lol".
Forerunners' ships look FUCKING MAJESTIC
I thought the Composer wasn't designed to be practical, it was more like a flying throne room.
Took the word right outta my mouth.
"It should be sensible and humans should be able to build it. No aesthetic shit."
*looks at real life cars*
Cars by and large support his point. There's variations in their designs and they take aesthetics into account, but they're still first and foremost design about practicality/performance. (Supercars look cool, but their shape is really about streamlining and handling etc).
What we don't see in car designs is pointless aesthetic additions that would functionally affect the car in some way - cars don't have random bits and pieces sticking out, for example.
@@TheDMG45 Not really. Car design actually proves why his point is flawed. A smooth flowing form deals with stress better than the hard-angled designs he waxes on about.
You guys are confusing public desings with military desings. I don't really agree with him, but yeh
@@Servellion But a smooth flowing form is used only because of aerodynamics. At high speeds air is like water - you have to cut through it (aircraft) or make it go pass you (cars). There is no air at the space, so a huge rock will perform in the same way as hi-tech spaceship if you give the same speed to both of them
@@olegb6809 No, in general smooth organic forms take stress better than hard angled designs. I mean why do you think the habitation section of DSVs are always spheres and not a rectangle? It's because as sphere handles the pressure better. It's more about how the stress is spread out. With hard angles structures, guess where the stress is?
This sounds blatantly anthropomorphic. "If it doesn't like look a human would make it, it's not a good design" is a... bad rule of thumb to say the least. Also very boring and unimaginative. Sure, ships in the shape of giant squids and rays aren't great, but what makes a great ship design great is probably beyond our current understanding.
Anthrocentric**
No, it's a good rule of thumb. Humans are the best.
You've got that the wrong way around. TV scifi makes ships that look cool to humans and fit human aesthetic prejudices.
Ships designed for the same environment by races of a similar tech level, facing similar physical and engineering issues would likely solve similar problems in similar ways and thus look similar.
@@arbitrarychannel You’re making way too many assumptions and viewing this in way too much of a human-centric lens. You’re assuming that different species are facing the same issues and that culture plays little to no part in how people go about designing things, and that they would have the same sensibilities as humans. But perhaps the biggest assumption you’re making is that there is essentially one way to solve these problems and that it is inevitable that all species would naturally reach the same conclusions and implement them in the same ways. That isn’t even true in real life. Everyone on Earth faces the exact same issues when it comes to aircraft design, and yet there are several ways that have been developed to solve them and nearly endless ways to go about implementing these solutions, each of which bring about their own set of new issues. For example, one of the most basic elements of an airplane is its method of propulsion. Without getting too into weeds, two of the most common types of engines are turboprop and turbofan, both of which introduce much different sets of design problems. Additionally, there are very noticeable characteristics to planes designed by certain countries that distinguish them as being produced by that country. And to reinforce my original point, this aircraft example shows exactly why aliens would and should not necessarily have the same design conventions as humans. Our aircraft all carry the same general principles because they’re all made to operate in conditions specific to us humans and our planet. Though space vessels may all be created to operate in the same environment, their designs would be informed by the environments, needs, and values of the species that build them. Not all ships should look they could be built by humans because humans would not have a need to build a ship specifically made with the needs and ideals of another species in mind.
it's sci-fi, if the ship is round, the ship is round. If it a cube, it a cube
Useless spikey bits? Ummm excuse me But THE IMPERIUM OF MAN never puts useless spikey bits on top of our vessels we put an entire gothic cathedral on our ships because we love our GOD-EMPEROR VERY MUCH!!!
For the Emperor
All hail the holy Emperor of mankind
Fer da Emprah!
The Emperor Protects!
what do you mean on our ships our ships are entire gothic cathedrals with engines strapped on anything else would be heresy
I disagree with you pretty profoundly on this one. First. as others have pointed out, round is actually more realistic and more functional than boxed. Second, on the one hand you talk about a lack of imagination. On the other hand, you applaud ships for being "sleek and stylized and having a great visual aesthetic". But that's a human aesthetic you're talking about there. There is no reason whatsoever why alien ships should appeal to a human aesthetic.
Likewise, painting a ship in "sensible, military colors" is rather useless. You may want your ship to be matte, so as not to reflect light and be recognizeable as a shiny spot that moves way too fast compared to the background - but even that is only relevant if you don't have tons of glowy bits on your ship anyway, and aren't a shiny infrared spot that moves way too fast. Beyond that, color is a purely aesthetic issue that most people will likely care precious little about in terms of military aspects.
Lastly, you miss how much of a vehicle's design is based on ergonomics. An alien race substantially distinct from humans will build substantially distinct ships.
*Spacedock:* [Says rough edges and hard corners are more practical spaceship design than smooth curves)
*Engineering and Geometry Majors:* I'm about to end this man's whole career.
To be fair, in the near-vacuum of space, rough edges and hard corners aren't nearly the problem they would be in atmosphere. EDIT: At least in regards to drag. As a few others pointed out, curves would be better for holding in atmosphere. Tally-ho!
@@rafetizer I would go more into detail, but just to be brief:
A lack of such things results in a ship being more aerodynamic so that it can go into space in the first place, as well as operate in atmosphere more effectively.
It would also provide better containment of the internal atmosphere, as there are no points of stress that it will push out against stronger than normal.
And it would have better protection against incoming fire, as it takes less energy to redirect a hit than to tank it head-on.
@@rafetizer Areas withour acumulating stress, better use of the space and more efficient, less concentration of electric charges, better mass center... and the list goes and goes. the "alien" ships are quite more "well done" than the versions with angles.
Also, remember than many of this ships from TV shows at certain point visit planets and the atmosphera isnt something that ends on a streight line. A ship with a lenth measured in kilometers would lose a lot of speed from a lack of aerodynamics due to the drag with the "not so dense" vacuum on the same altitude than a satelite and the bad design or that angle design could led to a fatal problem with the friction, etc, for example. Remember that everytime in a while every satelite must accelerate to recover his original orbit do to the drag of the atmosthere a 200kmish .
Of course, this is being absurdly picky, but the "real" thing is there.
What about ships specifically meant to operate in...space? What then? does it matter? or do physics play us even in space?
Well generally speaking, practical ships will want to needle-like, so rocket designs will probably be very popular for centuries to come, because you only need to shield the prow of the ship from radiation. Everything behind it will be protected. So ships like the Minbari cruisers in B5 or the Chig battleships in Space:AAB (both taller than they are long) would be ridiculously expensive and inefficient. And sloped hulls may help protect against debris that would smash into an otherwise brick-face. Which is a problem because of that radiation shielding need, you'll probably store your fuel and water at the forward section, since those materials can absorb radiation fine without being affected. So getting a lot of puncture holes would be bad. But this isn't strictly a reason you MUST have an aerodynamic ship, it would just be preferred if you CAN squeeze it in.
But in general it depends how relative your speed is. A series like Star Trek, where sublight caps out at 1/4 SOL doesn't really run into this problem. But a series like Andromeda (the real one not the ME one =P) where combat ships are operating at 60-70% SOL, even the trace dust and solar wind you are TEARING through will start to cause drag, and the more drag you experience, the more fuel you need to burn to maintain that relative speed, because the resistance of the space dust, even in inter-galactic space, will present an ever-increasing force on your ship the faster you go, capping your engine thrust at whatever rate you're absorbing it. (this also goes for the radiation of the universe, because at those speeds it will blue shift, making it MORE powerful than the radiation behind you, so to speak) So aerodynamic angles are perfect if you're looking for a high-speed ship, both for max speed and preventing drift.
Square panels aren't intrinsically more realistic than other shapes.
The Pillar of Autumn you used as an example isn't necessarily "well thought out" just because it's a big hexagonal prism made out of rectangles. There's no intrinsic engineering reason for it to have that shape.
In fact, sharp angles are bad for holding in pressure, and square shapes are worse than archways at distributing force.
It's particularly strange to argue that grey is a more realistic color. All these ships have running lights, so without a cloak, they aren't hiding visually. Grey isn't any more practical than bright pink or shiny gold or jet black or forest green. Humans find grey to be a somber, businesslike, military color, but so what?
red is the cheapest pigment on earth if they are painted purely for protecting components from corrosion why in the atmosphere (or in space?) ships would be red (its why the underside of ships used to be painted red)
I love the idea that since space combat is out of visual range, there is absolutely no reason to paint ships black to hide them.
"I want it to have a moral of Spongebob at the superbowl on it." - Space admiral upon realizing that they can make it any color they want
@@stefanwalicord2512 *mural.
@@matthiuskoenig3378 Also... Everyone knows that red ships go faster.
I'm always on the fence as to how willing I am frequently to allow lore-based reasons that aren't inherently obvious to the visual-only observer to explain away such things (mostly because quite frequently these justifications are added post-popularity), but with the Pillar Of Autumn the hexagonal shape was a consequence of the internal construction. The main structural members of the PoA were hexagonal in orientation, rather than rectangular. The purpose being that a hexagon is an inherently stronger shape than a square, and as such the PoA could take harder hits from any direction without risk of basically snapping the ship in half, without the mass penalty you'd get from just slathering the ship in greater amounts of armor. And given that fitting a hexagon in a square leaves wasted space, the bulk of the ships exterior just conforms to an interior layout of hexagonal grids.
Aliens would have a different sense of aesthetic than us. An alien might look at human ships and say "Good grief this is space travel not sex, why so phallic?" Then they'd get to know humans and they'd be like "Oh, that makes sense". Where you see "useless tentacles" an alien species might see as common sense engineering, they might think the best way for sensors to be arranged are through tentacles, for example. What you perceive as "sensible military colors" might be to them glaring an gaudy, depending on their visual spectrum. I mean, an alien species might have trouble seeing parts of the color spectrum like pink. Their ships therefore would be pink if they were fighting each other. Even after they've met aliens their conception of what is militaristic might still be bright pink ships, they perceive pink as being intimidating. Or yellow with blue polkadots. Who knows.
Thank you for the belly laugh after that "oh, that makes sense" line.
Tbh phallic shaped ships would actually be more sensible for interstellar travel as the shape lends itself to reducing friction from particles in space (3 per m^3). So big, boxy ships would have to travel slower to avoid this friction!
Most of those "particles" would be things like hydrogen. Something a ship traveling through space might want. So for instance if their ships stretched out magnetic collectors, sort of like giant labia, that focused the particles to a central hole collector to use. To a species like that the human phallic designs would be totally alien. A phallic design makes sense to us if your idea for travel is to reduce friction, but perhaps from their engineering standpoint, that's not so much of a priority. Which reinforces the point I was making maybe.
Aaaaaand I've taken this metaphor too far.
@@Dawt_Calm imagine the design meeting at nasa.
Concept artist: "Our new ship will be torpedo in shape to reduce friction in the void, its got 2 spherical hyperdrive engines situated at the rear that sit parallel to one another..."
Ceo: "So you are telling me you just drew a cock and balls?"
Artist: "erm yes..."
Something like this ruclips.net/video/Ju1UwmgkKgI/видео.html
If I was to argue for the colorful designs or for the "spiky bits" and other generally useless aesthetics added to many scifi ships, it would be that they function similarly to ancient helmets with plumes and brushes and painted or engraved shields on ancient warriors. Does it serve a practical purpose? No, but it adds an aesthetic look, and could even be used to show status, class, or inspire fear and dread.
Another point I'd make is that, your argument assumes another alien races values the same sense of practicality and functionality that humans do. Perhaps they are a culture which values pleasing asthetics over functionality.
Actually decorations could be meaningful. They could serve as decoys for some weapons at a distance. For example you don't really care if you lose some spikes, if it allows the main structure to remain intact.
I'd agree with that. Your comment made me think of a Cylon Basestar which could be seen operating despite the severe damage or loss of multiple arms
if they are a culture which values pleasing asthetics over functionality,they would not survive in space...
Christian Stacy same point as the last commentator :
It’s not a question of values, it’s a question of physical constraints.
Sure, plenty of things can vary, your aliens could’ve evolved on a low pressure planet, thus they’d need not to built space ships to endure pressures such as our, or maybe they evolved on a low gravity world, thus they design space ships for reentry in atmosphere, or they can build them a bit more fanciful, or bigger, because they can send material in space for the same energetic cost.
But no matter what, for any alien that has a physiology even barely comparable to ours (let’s start with « breath gaz » and « evolved on a gravity well »), and you’ll have the same basic set of constraints.
So the general shape can vary; and weapon placements or reactors can be different (which in itself could lead to different designs), but it will have to be sensible, ie : not with giant protrusions that set its balance completely off, and imposes massive stress on the material with each acceleration, as few excess weight as possible, because energy is precious and free energy doesn’t exist and even if it did, using more energy than needed comes at a cost, and with a general structure that has a reasonable chance to contain an atmosphere.
The most realistic decorations would be paint, or mosaics, things like that.
Of course, that’s a general rule, and you may have good excuses for not applying them. For example if your universe doesn’t follow the same physical rule (basically any soft science fiction setting). Wh40k’s ship design for the Imperium, for example, is a monstrosity in regard to the laws of physics. They aren’t maneuverable (only one set of reactors all pointing in the same direction), the excess weight is massive and serves no practical purpose, yaddi yadda. But from a « rule of cool » perspective, they are awesome, and they fit the Imperium perfectly.
But yeah, if you try to be a bit more grounded in reality than Wh40k, you have to keep in mind that, eldritch horrors from beyond space and time aside, ship design is constrained by physical laws (ever wondered why all ships, throughout history, have had the same basic elements and fall into certain dimensions ? No matter how dissimilar they can appear on the surface ?)
@@user-lp7tx1fe6t
Not necessarily true. What if it's an older civilization with more advanced technology? They can make up for the loss of performance through expensive aesthetics with the superior performance of their engines, materials, shields, weapons, etc.
The only way that would bite them in the ass, is if their enemy is another faction from their same original civilization, or if their enemy catches up with them technologically.
Or what if they're simply bigger, have vastly more resources and ships, and make up for their losses to aesthetics by having superior numbers?
There's plenty of ways a culture that values aesthetics over functionality, at least to some extent, could still survive.
"Ships don't need to be squids"
"Mass Effect was held to such a high standard"
Um, Sovereign was a giant space squid and the first non-human 'ship', we see in ME1.
Not the first..that'd be the Destiny Ascension during the first trip to the citadel
@@kazumablackwing4270 We see Sovereign during the intro before going to the citadel
@@cado9136 ah, yeah you're right...been a minute since I played the first mass effect.
Sovereign was also an alive, living thing though lol
@@PaulGaither hey nothing said was mutually exclusive, idk what youre up in arms about
That's a lot of words to say "If it doesn't look like a flying brick, I don't like it."
Lakon spaceways baby!
@@huxleyleigh4856 "We make the best bricks in space!"
"Borg Cubes have entered the chat"
wdym, halo covenant ships are really interesting, those natural looking bulbous sections of the ships are really cool.
Sure, they're really cool looking, but you gotta admit that some designs go way over the top. I absolutely love the design of the CAS/CSO, but then when I see something like a DSC-class, although I can see why it may look that way, it just seems so unnecessary.
they look kinda dumb from above, i've always hated the design when looking down at it.
The ones he showed there looked fine to me
@@RennieAsh the one that he showed from Halo Wars is legitimately the worst. It has a lot of pointless Superfluous bits and doesn't even look like the other Covenant Ships
Purple Gladiator eh, I disagree. They don’t look amazing from below but they still look passable. The corvettes look great at every angle.
Why are aircraft windows round? The first commercial aircraft had square windows, and stress fractures kept having them blow out and the aircraft would crash. Aircraft bodies are also round for similar reasons - contrast to WW I aircraft which were boxy. Once considerations for stress and pressure were applicable they stopped being square. Just for reasons of stress spacecraft would be generally roundish, as others have posted repeatedly.
Except space is a vacuum so no atmosphere to put stress on the hull. Having angled armour in space makes sense as it does on modern tanks where it’s angled to deflect rather than absorb impacts
@@RUclipscanbitemyhairybanger The atmosphere is on the inside, the stress comes from the pressure difference between inside and out.
But also (like aircraft), when the ship manoeuvres, thrust/steering/etc comes from specific parts of the ship (engines/thrusters/drives/etc) and the rest of the ship is, in effect, being dragged or pushed around by those parts, that subjects the ship to flexing/torque forces.
Mark Wilson stress also comes from turning, accelerating, etc.
You've probably heard of the Comet crashes. Yes, squares bad.
@@stefanwalicord2512 That plane was a bigger deathtrap than the DC-10
This time on Spacedock: I don't like that alien races don't have design conventions that mirror those of humans.
More: I don’t like when ships are designed so alien they just flat out don’t make sense.
Such designs would work for extra dimensional beings or Eldritch ones who could theoretically come from places those designs make sense. Traditional aliens, far less so.
@@nevermore7285 This video necessarily makes too many assumption about underlying technology. It boils down to "it doesn't look familiar to me, so I don't like it". For one, you'd think someone somewhere would have advanced beyond steel / aluminium slab construction.
*Whoosh* The complaint is that ships built by multiple alien races all vary greatly from human ships in *a small number of ways.* He's right, this makes very little sense.
Part of the point of these shows, B5 and Star Trek in particular, is that most of the races are at a similar tech level and are capable of cultural cross-communication. So no.@@Alpostpone
I don’t think there’s anything simplistic or unimaginative at all about some of the alien ship styles you’re lambasting. The Mon Calamari and Yuuzhan Vong ships from Star Wars especially.
the man with no taste
Normally I'm on board but I think you're way off on this one. Alien ships by definition should be alien looking. I'll agree that there are some garish designs out there, but I think that is down to taste. Not every species would be as utilitarian as you think future man should be, some might even be more reserved. Others would be outlandish. I think if there were in-universe explanations for squid looking ships, you know like they were once aquatic, or maybe their gods are giant squids. No matter the explanation I think if writers worked more with designers to integrate the designs of ships into the culture of the species, even downright ugly designs might be more forgivable.
Yeah, it seems like he's looking at it all wrong. Probably a bit of bias, too.
Thank you!
yeah for example the Shadows from Babylon 5 that he mentions cause chaos and fighting and they use fear to a great degree. Seeing a couple of Shadow battle crabs appear out of nowhere would be pretty scary for anyone.
I disagree. The aliens spent billions of spacebucks (or something that humans would represent with currency) to make a ship to do something, and they'll want it to do that thing well, not lug around loads of extraneous structural mass in the form of squid arms. Aesthetic things should be separate from, and less costly than, the basic structure of the ship. I'm thinking of painted symbols or, at the most extreme, figureheads. It'd be nice to see the latter outside of 40K.
Yup. Even following the utilitarian style, there’s still lots of room for personal touches. Races would then inevitably be inspired by things they are accustomed to seeing in their environment. Two aliens races from entirely different circumstances might then draw from completely unrelated source material.
Aliens from ocean planets may be inspired by the aquadynamic shapes of their marine fauna. A different race with heavy religious culture might chose to insert symbolisms that reflect this aspect of their philosophy. A third race might not care about efficiency at all and simply build their ships with whatever tin can parts they can scavenge to moderately hold up in space (maybe those safety hazards is what keeps their overpopulation in check).
There’s so many directions to go. So long as the design is sensible and properly integrated into the culture and narrative I don’t think any one design is inherently superior. Though I will admit I have my own preferences, but liking pie more than pudding doesn’t make it superior.
Good advice for makeing alien ships include:
>What does this ship value? (Ie: Durability, offencive nature, observation, comfort)
>What type of FTL drive does this race use? If so where and how will that be attached to the ship?
>What type of power source does this race have? Where is it? How much space does it take up?
>What type of armour or sheilds does this race use?
>Does this race typically teleport, use shuttles, cocking clamps, or does the entire thing land?
>What type of weapons are used but this race? Are they clustered in batteries? Or strategically placed in gaps in the armour?
Best part of all... this advice works for all ships of any race. For example I don't always have aliens for the ships i use but instead I have factions and manufacturers. You can often identify the manufacturer and faction just by looking at it. Sterling ships have large paneled FTL drives, where as Hydra Argouse uses compact engines, large rotating FTL drives, or engions similar to sterling but built into the wings so they they fly in atmosphear as well as space. Phobian ships tend to have small FTL drive and massive Sublight drives because they are mainly focused in policing and pursuit craft. I could easily say they were developed by a different race because the culture of ships are different.
"They always look bad" because if it doesn't look like a flying skyscraper, Spacedock doesn't like it. It's confirmation bias.
Absolutely. It is especially amusing to think about space warfare. Moving at incomprehensible speeds over millions of miles, you need good armor to avoid even the tiniest specks of dust and good shielding for radiation, but you do not need to hide in the conventional sense of the word--the things a machine can see cannot be hidden with black or gray paint. I would expect there to be fake armor padding, bulbs that reflect light-based sensors, downright incomprehensible architecture forming illusions of shape, huge blasts of information that amount to lolcats, and other such tricks to actively mess up targeting, avoid weapons, redirect attacks, and make actual stealth possible in a real, long-term conflict. It is much easier to hide tons of flying metal in a fireworks display than to try and make the ship blend in with its mostly-empty surroundings one hundred percent of the time.
It could even be worse. There might not be space warfare the way people think of it. Any target worth attacking could just be too damn fragile to attack properly via spaceship. The best strategy for any conflict would be to make as few targets worth killing as possible--most of warfare would be negotiation, shows of force, careful stealth operations, and only sometimes big, scary, planet-ending drone strikes. Ideas of honorable battle and good sportsmanship may begin to creep in, encouraging the design of ships that look like palaces or flower buds--one doesn't attack the pretty, glittering command dome until AFTER dueling the captain for permission, after all, and everybody who is anybody knows this. Unless, of course, the idiot enemy wants an antimatter bomb shot at their home planet at near light-speed--bad form is easy to punish.
If we're going beyond warfare, and into territories of personal spaceflight, business, diplomacy, etc. things get even stranger. In the real world, Brutalist architecture regularly gets rude graffiti, glittering art installations, corporate logos, and even PLANTS grown on it, and if the most practical, cheaply made, and utterly utilitarian styles get the human touch, I would expect even the most pedestrian alien space-stuff to get the alien touch. Maybe the people that make giant insect/sea-urchin spaceships think spikes are aesthetically pleasing or funny, the equivalent of gluing eyelashes to a car's lights. Maybe the weird spiritual elf-people have holy angles, and their designs all have to include the golden ratio or else be deemed both ugly and sinful. Maybe the alien tumor-covered ship is actually just their equivalent of a chain restaurant, and the whole thing is meant to resemble their favorite dish, stylized for commercials.
I mean,true,he is biased,but you also have to keep in mind that this video specifically is a short,so not a fully in depth researched video,just something made without a proper script for fun.He did mention its his personal opinion on the matter and not some objective fact and while I disagree with his opinion myself,I think he deserves to be cut some slack for at least trying to give a few reasons why he thinks those types of ships look fairly generic.
I'm surprised he's not treating Borg cubes as the best design.
@@AnuumFortis People are allowed to have their opinions. But other people are also allowed to point out why those opinions are incorrect. I think the responses I've seen have been very polite, so we have been cutting him plenty of slack already. His rant on grey jedi on the other hand deserves all the ridicule for stanning someone else's even worse rant.
Also, if you look at real space ships (we do have them now) they are very rounded with no hard corners as is mentioned in one of the old comments, sharp edges concentrate stress in a small line increasing the risk of material fatigue, which is bad.
And many ships are designed to be able to operate in an atmosphere which promotes aerodynamic design.
And if you look at cars, they started out very squarish and evolved into very fluent forms today.
The same with trains, compare an old steam engine with modern engines, or just the last versions of steam locomotives that was much more aerodynamic.
It seems like better tech overall favors more fluent lines with fewer hard edges.
Hey, to each his own. Personally, I can't stand the grey, greeble/nurnie-encrusted "human ISO space brick" anymore. I've built far too many of these in the last 25 years.
"Today we are going to forget that Warhammer 40K exists" that's the real title of this video
Panzer Daily um warhammer 40k has all of these problems except in warhammer 40k the humans are the giant cathedral ship aliens
@@Valiguss not really though. All of the Alien factions have very clearly defined styles fitting their species' general asthetics. Upon seeing a 40k ship you'd immediately be able to tell wich faction it belongs to, because the ship designs mirror their design philosophy.
And once you get into the lore, you will also understan WHY these ships look the way they do.
@@draochvar9646 exactly ship designs are the single thing I like most about 40k (otherwise I'm not a gigantic fan). You have spirit like Eldari hit and run ships, Streamlined , we don't have to give a fuck about physics Necron living metal Tombships who don't need much space for Weapons, the "It sticks together because DA BOYS BELIEVE IT AND GET ME MOAR DAKKA AND BOOSTERS , DID YOU JUST FORGET DA RED COLOR YO GLOB" Ork designs and the Imperial Cathedral in space ships. The Gothic steampunk AdMech whose ships are literally gigantic cathedrals to the Omnissiah and the mashine spirits which actually makes them work Better, the Imperiums Ships with ramming and spily bits and the actually more sensibly designed Battle Barges that are clearly troop transports and boarding ships as well as warships.
I mean. If we are arguing artistic merit and imagination Warhammer wins, if we talking about practicality... I mean.... no warhammer ship would work irl, they rewrote the laws of physics to make them work
@@alyssinclair8598 it works within Warhammers universe with all the warp stuff. Of course it's not realistic
eh i find your taste in alien ships to be boring, i agree there should be more diversity but there's no aerodynamics in space, so octopus ships are fine by me
@N-word Surfer exactly - dog fights are just impractical and the speeds and distances involved with star ships would make combat visually boring. Weird, deadly and scary, but visually boring.
@@01MrCapricorn no, it just means you have to get more creative. If you want dog fights, force both sides into the situation where it's the only option.
But if you enter a planets atmosphere areo Dynamics is a good idea and also being wide is just more Target to hit.
Sci-Fi movies and shows have to make their money back, so there are certain tropes the writers have to include. Dogfights in space is one of those tropes.
@@frankg2790
Honestly I believe we will be using drones to take out enemy ship weak points and they'll be doing the same while also trying to take out the attacking drones.
That's something that really, _really,_ *_REALLY_* annoys me: Not the whole "Alien ships are boring" thing, but the fact that human starships are almost *_ALWAYS_* angular and "utilitarian" in design; you can still have curves and be utilitarian. Instead of thinking of starships like aquatic ships on the surface you should think of them somewhat akin to submarines; having a very simple, utilitarian design that's sleek and aerodynamic with smoothed out edges, little to no angles, and a curved, sleek utilitarian design built to withstand pressure.
And can I just say that this is not the only thing that in my personal opinion makes a starship good or bad? Because there's one other thing I *_ABSOLUTELY FUCKING HATE:_* Greebling. I despise greebling with an absolute passion: It makes things look overcomplicated, poorly-designed, messy and ugly, and everything looks like junk that's about to fall part. It makes me scream internally every time I see an amazing, sleek and _beautiful_ design absolutely ruined by greebling and I hate it so goddamn much, however the *_ONLY_* exceptions for greebling I can see are in things that are either damaged, worn or otherwise have exposed internal components; just no greebled hulls or plating.
I don't know if this counts for greebling, because I learned about the concept from people that thought what Star Treks Enterprise does with the golden-silver plating counted, but it occurs to me that some amount of unusual changes in appearance is to be expected from a ship that travels over great distances. Parts that need repair, discoloration, upgrades-in-progress, repair drones, sensor arrays, technology meant to fool enemy vessels, or simple cultural artifacts like ads, threats, or religious icons could build up on a ship over time. I do agree that in many places, this is taken so far the ship becomes both ugly and kind of impractical-looking, though. What would happen if even a fraction of the little bits stuck to a Star Wars-style ship broke off because of a stray rock? Why are there so many things sticking out, if there are smooth, perfectly not-messy ships flying around doing the same things?
What is greebling?
@@boring_incarnate The process of adding random bits and pieces (Typically shaped as mechanical/cybernetic components) to lazily add extra detail to an otherwise plain surface.
I think we have the exact opposite taste. I hate sleek designs and I always prefer the most inefficient and non aerodynamic shapes possible for everything. Not even just fictional things, my favorite cars are rusted out beater trucks from the 70s because they have have terrible efficiency but overpower it with raw engine power.
All that being said, there's good greebling and then there's bad greebling. Star Wars has good greebling, all of it looks like it has a purpose and helps to give the ships character. Battle Beyond The Stars has terrible greebling, all it does is serve to make the ships a visually cluttered mess.
I've always found that greebling gives the impression that a ship is missing its outer plating, like a plate of armor got ripped off and you can now see all the technical bits that should've been hidden underneath... which in turn, if that's the way the ship is designed to look normally, makes it look fragile because if it gets shot there I highly doubt any of the greebling is going to do anything more than explode. Personally I like ships to have surfaces akin to modern military philosophy, with a near-seamless shell of well-designed armor that parts only in a very few, specific and well-protected places to allow things like antennae or sensors to poke through without just having this massive side-panel that looks like it's missing its armor plating.
My friend designed a ship that look more like a giant cross bow for a race called the Spravac. The over use of spikes and strange design was made to emphasize the fact the species is not practical when it comes to aesthetics and appreciate their violence and brutality with glee.
3:37 oh no he's talking about the expanse again!
THE EXPANSE LIVES!!!
Hellfire nobody cares only sci fi is minecraft builds
Of course he is it's that high realism series with magic windows in space
@@hkxeno001 never forget the cant
Ship design? Flying bricks should suffice. Like all my ships in Space Engineers.
The other than the stress forces been fairly bad, flying bricks make the most sense in most settings. One series of books I read also explained why their warships had this as part of the design. 1 side had all the guns and armour, the other sides nothing really. As the range a space battle is fought at allows you to constantly align 1 side of your ship with an enemy, and the only really effective weapons at those ranges and speeds can't hit unarmoured locations (missiles litterally can't turn around to attack from the rear without having drives that are insanely overpowered as to make them impractical)
@@cgi2002 missiles with lasers.
@@RobertSzasz true that would be viable if you had a suitable way to create one. Bomb-pumped lasers (basically a nuclear warhead with all its energy converted into a beam) are fairly popular in sci-fi. Do still have the issue of even an "unarmoured" hull in space isn't really. It has to be able to stand up to impacts and radiation to a high degree. Also missiles in a realistic space battle aren't missiles as we understand them, they would be far too slow unless used by a defending fleet (who have a massive firepower advantage due to relative velocity). Missiles would more likely be launched by some sort of accelator (mass driver) on ballistic trajectories, and only use drives as late stage targeting. This also implies a drive can be made small and cheap enough to be disposable, which in a high tech universe is a real problem.
@@cgi2002 but the payoff against a Target with only one defended side would be so, so high. Just a couple lucky hits against energy management and the engagement is over.
@@RobertSzasz oh I agree. However the series I read doesn't use laser warheads. If they were a thing I suspect the counter other than more armour would be increased point defence.
Got to admit missiles do make more sense than basic kinetic weapons with the right warheads in a situation with disposable drives. Much depends on the tech base and if the sci-fi universe follows all the rules of physics, sadly most don't or they pick and choose specific rules to obey/ignore.
There are only 2 principles to design ships aesthetics around.
1st) What is their means of propulsion?
2nd) What is the shape of their phallus?
3:04 " Mass Effect held itself to such a high standard before then." Uh, no, both Reaper and Geth ships were based on insect shapes, not practical considerations. Andromeda was actually consistent with the rest of the series in that regard.
Insect shapes are *very* practical.
@@RonJohn63 Practical for insects, yes. For space ships, not so much. For space WARships, not at all.
@@Hunpecked why not? Insects are laterally symmetrical and have a hard, rounded (which is good for a pressure vessel) shell.
@@RonJohn63 Crabs are laterally symmetrical and have hard shells. Some insects are flat, some are rounded, all (?) have legs, and many have wings. None of these are practical designs for traveling and fighting in interstellar space. The ME artists were interested in "cool" shapes and nothing else.
@@Hunpecked a lot more than crabs are laterally symmetrical and have hard shells.
to be fair, most Trek aliens are just humans with random prosthetics and a single shared personality quirk
There is a reasonable canon explanation from TNG for that.
Mass much less than Earth and there won't be enough gravity to hold on to much of an atmosphere and even with a half reactor at the core not enough magnetic activity to keep any such atmo from being stripped away by solar winds. Top five elements in life on Earth are all in the top ten most common in the galaxy. Central brain with ranged sense organs nearby in a protective shell (AKA "head") will think and respond to stimuli faster than a distributed system.....
I've got a lot more, but sufice it to say that for my money two arms, two legs, and a head attached to a central core with an upright posture is one of a handful at best of reasonable space traveling configurations.
As for a single culture with little individual deviation defining the entire species all I can say is "easy writing?".
+Rocketman reasonable sure, but wouldn't call it a great reason. Still never did watch trek for the writing.... it is such a terrible mess which is why I don't understand why many fans get worked up when they screw with "cannon".
Zero Cool You have no idea what are you missing.
+Rocketman missing? I've seen every episode of every series(except ToS can't stand the camp) about 70% of trek(excluding movies that is more 50/50) is bad just how I feel.
Attacks B5 ships for looking organic, when the examples he used are actually organic.
I wonder if there's a difference between LOOKING organic and being organic.
The difference is that only the membari and the first ones (like the vorlons) had biotechnology. The centauri and the bakiri don't have biotech. They're on par with or below earth military standard.
@@Terrahex1 the ship looking organic just means it was designed that way, which as discussed isn't usually very practical. The ship being organic means it looks that way because it's actually either a loving organism that was grown or is made from living organisms that grew, so that's just naturally how the organism(s) look. It would be bizarre for a ship that is actually organic to not look organic as well, as there are certain shapes and patterns that life almost exclusively grows in.
Right? Pick a non-organic ship to whine about it looking too organic. And also be sure that whoever you pick isn’t more concerned with appearance than anything else (Centauri) as they might want the organic look just because all of the more powerful races go with it.
@@Terrahex1 We build organic-looking art, fountains, monuments, even buildings now. They look organic because the form language imitates forms in nature, such as marine life or leaves.
For a ship or building to *be* organic, it would have to be the product of some kind of bioengineering: a living organism (either plant or animal) that was artificially manipulated into becoming a living building or ship.
When someone who isn't an engineer tries to assert what designs are "reasonable"
Pretty much. And being hypocritical enough to make those assertions after claiming all these alien designs look the same and telling people to be more original while simultaneously saying that the ships need to look like something made by humans.
how is a flying squid spaceship reasonable? how are massive round domes all over your hull practical?
Alien ships almost always focus on being floating enigmatic artworks rather than being spaceships.
@@ArchivedFox curves are far stronger shapes than straight lines and angles. Angles and straight lines focus structural stress into small regions, greatly weakening the overall structure, whereas curved structures disperse stress, strengthening structures. Typically "organic" shapes also tend to have dramatically better mass-strength ratios, so are stronger despite using less overall material. As such, the more advanced a space-fareing civilisation is, the more complex structures they will be able to manufacture and thus the more organic in appearance their spaceship would be
@@almachizit3207 you gave a good argument. I will agree with you on curves granting large amounts of structure support, but that isn't how most of those ships are designed. They generally falls into two forms.
1. the ship covered by random domes. This is bad because while a dead on shot to these domes would be better protected, that isn't where they will be hit. More often these domes are along the sides of the ship instead of on the front. exception being the next example.
2. the squid based ships. These are far better than the bubble ships for defence, as the atleast put it's defence on the front aimed toward the enemy (assumably). This one will always have tentacles and a spiral design. While cool looking, it dramatically increases the difficulty to manufacture.
meanwhile, you assume that human ships are all flat angles, even though every single human ship Ive seen has a sloped front. If not a slow one sided curve like the normandy (not including star trek's curve cause that would've made an amazing alien design).
@@ArchivedFox where is the assumption that ships will be shooting eachother head-on coming from? In Star Wars for example, it's very common for 2 capital ships to broadside each other. Same goes for ship combat in 40k. It's also conceivable that various vital elements of the ships may be contained within their own domes for individual protection, which, if you have the technology and manufacturing to do that, makes a lot more sense to me than having these parts stick out unprotected, as most scanning, communication and shielding equipment seems to do in "human" style ships.
On the point of shielding, if some form of energy shielding exists in that setting, it will most likely take a sphereoid shape, so having a ship made of domes and curves would mean that the shields better conform to the ship, meaning there are less weak spots or regions where the shields have to be projected unnecessarily far away from the ship (as is the case for Star Destroyers for example, which is why fighters can get inside the shields and inflict severe damage).
I'm sorry, did you seriously just crap on B5's art design? Did you even watch the show? Each race had their own style, and it often reflected their level of technological advancement (ie. why the Narn ships looked almost human, similar tech levels). But they most certainly weren't vague and just bulbous for the sake of it, there were unique styles and trends.
They never had to tell you who a new (or sometimes centuries old) ship belonged to, because you knew from the style... "We've Centauri battleships, and this new ship is clearly a Centauri frigate" ... "oh those weird ships a thousand years in the past that we've NEVER seen before are CLEARLY Minbari"
He's half-right. The ones belonging to the major species that they spent serious money on (except the Whitestar and other "organic" ships) look good, the rest are terrible. If you're not human, Minbari, Centauri, or Narn, your ships probably look like garbage. B5 was made on a shoestring, and in the League, First Ones, and forehead-alien-of-the-week ships it shows. And even then, the EA ships stand head and shoulders above all the others...because those were the ones they spent the most money on.
@@tankermottind the organic ships are fine. you are just being a twat.
@Paul Thomas Johnson Tbf half the point of those kinds of ship design is that they are so far ahead that they use completely different technology and build their ships in a completely different way, so using human standards to judget them just doesnt work.
@@termitreter6545 Old timey Londoner looks at modern car. "Where is the seat for the rider to sit on this carriage. How are passengers suppose to face each other to quibble over vapid house affairs. Why is there no mounting hitch for the horses."
B5 the ships that looked bulbous and coral were because they were living ships... they actually specified with most that they were grown or had living hulls.
Yeah. Apart from The Shadows, the Vorlons, and the Minbari, all of the non-one-off races had fairly grounded designs (even the Vree whose ships were classic flying saucers). The Narn ships were clearly utilitatrian although they did go to the trouble of putting curved 'organic style' armour plating on, and the Centauri designs adhered to a basic philosophy of a raptor-like 'neck' with the rear of the ship being a cross of horizontal and vertical curved platforms. The Minbari had a organic design partly to set out that they were comparatively advanced and could afford these stylistic choices and partly to show they were aligned with the Vorlons (although their designs did change from the 'horizontal' designs seen 1000 years ago to the more 'vertical' design seen in the main story arc)
@Fell Skywalker I totally agree the spacedock guy is pure clickbait.
@@jamespaguip5913 Spacedock is ok. This is just a "short" where he's just ranting about something off the top of his head. And yeah, this particular one is sort of crap. But a fun excuse for the comments section to talk about good designs and physics.
thats why I love wh40k Human ships - catedrals with guns, chaos - same but evil, eldar - wings and smoothness , orks - big, crude, junkyard on top - necrons/taue/tyranids all tooootally different :)
I never thought about it that way! It's true. Like the ships from XVII-XIX c. ! Full of stuff just to look awesome:)
If the ship is pink, save a bullet for yourself... Because Slaanesh Patrol!
or forge fast an adamentium pants! :)
@@Cziro_
We'll just fuck your eye sockets.
@@noisemarine561 trust things to get weird once the Noise Marine shows up,.... tsk.
I get that humanoid alien races should have ship designs that look like humans could have designed them (since yeah humans did design them technically) but do you think that still applies when the aliens aren't humanoids at all? Take the Tyranids for example, whose ships are living organisms that travel through space, it wouldn't make sense for something organic to look like a human vessel. I do agree that they shouldn't be just spikes and random bits everywhere like the Shadow ships from Babylon 5, but some degree of foreignness should be present when you are dealing with a species completely unlike humanity.
I think another thing that wasn't as touched on that should be is that human ships largely look the way they do because of them being inspired by and based on pre-existing military and transportation technology, and much like life would evolve differently in different conditions, technology would also evolve differently in different conditions. Human ships are largely based on naval vessels and aircraft, and the ship classes reflect this as well. But there's absolutely no reason as to why alien ships should look that way or have the same ship classes, because it's entirely possible for aliens to evolve in conditions where there's either no need for naval vessels because of no oceans or there's no need for aircraft because the weather or atmosphere prevent them from being viable.
@@DolusVulpes calls into question how they got into space in the first place, but I do agree
@@naverilllang that question is the question that defines how their ships should look, and what their space combat tactics are like. Combustion, fission, and fusion aren't the only forces capable of moving objects that large out of an atmosphere and across space, just the ones that we humans discovered before any others, and we're only just now discovered the concept of manipulating gravity or even space itself to move instead of trying to fight against them. But there's no reason an alien species would develop the exact same technologies in the exact same order. Theres also the question to ask of what materials the aliens have available to them to make things from, and what technologies those materials actually allow the aliens to discover. We're very lucky as humans that Earth is so incredibly rich in metals like iron, copper, and titanium. While these elements are certainly present on every planet, it's very rare for them to be as abundant as they are on ours. How do you suppose an alien species machinery would develop if they didn't have these materials in such abundance to develop from? What other metals or minerals would they use instead?
@@DolusVulpes iron is one of the most abundant heavy elements in the universe, and indeed on of the most common overall. It'd be really weird to find a rocky planet _not_ composed in large part of iron. So unless life forms in a gas giant, we can expect they'll have access to iron. In fact, our solar system is pretty close to average as far as element distribution goes. Earth is in no way extraordinary in terms of size, position, or composition. But if they did evolve in a gas giant, and thus had limited access to heavy elements, they'd have to be able to fly. Or maybe swim? Either way, it'd render the whole "planes not viable" thing mute.
My point was more that flight in some capacity is a prerequisite to space flight. Before you can learn to go to space, you have to learn how to get off the ground. Therefore, any space faring civilization would have developed some sort of aircraft. Whether it flies using an airfoil, buoyancy, vertical thrust propulsion, or even that weird "ballooning" thing spiders do to ride magnetic currents in the atmosphere, they'd have some sort of aircraft. Perhaps not 'air' craft, but you get what I mean
@@naverilllang I didn't know that about Iron, but my point still stands that the distribution of elements would be wildly different on different planets, and some of the elements essential to our technology and machinery are a lot less abundant on other planets, so would likely be used less or not at all by life that evolved on such planets.
As for flight being a prerequisite for space travel, that's actually just not true at all, and the only reason people might believe it is because we developed flight before space travel. In actuality, the only thing they have in common for us is that our method of flight and our method of space travel both use combustion, and the simplest way to prove that is to compare how our aircraft work to how our spacecraft work. Aircraft are designed to operate within our atmosphere and take advantage of atmospheric conditions to fly, while spaceraft instead focus on being so sturdily built and propelled with powerful enough engines that they can ignore as much of the atmosphere as possible, and instead force their way through it into space, where atmospheric conditions don't matter at all and movement is determined solely by momentum. If anything, submarines have more in common with spacecraft than aircraft do in terms of design and weaponry, and even then there's a world of difference in functionality and design philosophy required, as submarines are designed for extreme gravity and pressure that requires constant control of the pressure to move, while spacecraft are designed for no gravity or pressure, with no need to manage pressure beyond keeping it stable.
While you are correct that they would need to develop a way to actually get something into the atmosphere before being able to pierce through it, I feel that it would be incredibly generous to call the method we use to do so "flight", as it goes against how all natural and artificial methods of flight operate.
Also consider that another species could easily instead see the solution to the problem of space travel being to build a giant cannon of some sort and shoot the spacecraft out of it with enough force to break the atmosphere, with the spacecraft propulsion systems only needing to activate upon reaching the edge of the atmosphere or beyond. You could argue that fired projectiles "fly", but they don't do so using any form of actual flight technology, and the technology they use doesn't require aircraft to have been developed.
Spacedock: I hate Organic ships designs
The expanse which he praises: Has Organic alien ship designs.
I can only think of one alien ship in the Expanse tv show. The Venus protomolecule thingy is really more of a seed
I think he's gone too far with this Opinion piece, how can u not love a good creative alien ship desihgn lol ???
@@thetombuck he said he likes the books too and all roman tech is semi organic
@@DaraGaming42 I think his point was more than he doesn't find a lot of alien designs to be that creative.
@@andymac4883 He also said the biggest offender was Babylon 5 which was extremely creative with the diversity of designs. And if he's gonna complain about impracticality, he shouldn't be showing a Romulan D'deridex warbird when praising Star Trek for doing it right. I like the warbird btw. Big ol "yeah, I know there's a huge hole in the middle of the ship, idgaf cuz I can still vaporize your ass".
For curved designs, I gotta give props to the late 90s show Androneda in which a vaguely pill-shaped design was used by the Systems Commonwealth and Tarn Vedra. It makes sense in-universe because their version of FTL involved riding these cosmic string things, and the elliptical shape seemed most efficient at keeping the ship stable in FTL. The entire design of Commonwealth/Vedran ships with the exception of the Siege Perilous class, is designed with FTL functionality first in mind and it became a cultural aesthetic.
The Siege Perilous was a Vedran take on the design of the Pyrian "torch ship", Pyrians being one of Tarn Vedra's main rivals, but they clearly copied the design more to project power to their enemy than to actually be sensible because unless you have the very specific main weapon of a Torchship it's an awful design.
I will say that the Androneda Ascendant and other ships in the Glorious Heritage class are my favorite "unusual" design.
I never understood the concept of angular being realistic for science fiction ship designs. In reality curved forms make much more sense. (When it comes to resisting the tremendous internal pressure of the ships life support atmospheres, liqified gaseous fuel, etc on a ships pressure hull). < (Edited for clarity)Any fold Any Corner. becomes a stress point. There is a reason why Zeppelins, submarines and real world space craft look similar. Rounded cylindrical forms disperse pressure evenly across their surface. The most realistic design for a large ship would be a sphere. Rounded shapes are also evident of more advanced manufacturing techniques. The reason most large structures built by humans are rectangular has nothing to do with strength. It's because most large materials come in sheet form. More Advanced Techniques like 3D printing will free us from this need. As to the use of odd seemingly Superfluous shapes. That simply is a way of showing that their technology it is not the same as ours. If a race of intelligent Dolphins were to make a ship it would not look like what humans would make. Why have parallel decks if your race is used to the concept of navigating in three dimensions.
Darius Crawford There is no friction in space. You could literally fly a giant cube and there would be as much resistance as a missile: None because you don't have to move any pressure/air out of the way. In fact if you're talking about the pressure of gravity and such, having a boxier ship reinforced like a triangle truss would be the most effective.
Darius Crawford Its more clear now, often people will cite aerodynamics as a reason for more missile/egg/potato-shaped crafts, but you're right.
When it comes to the vacuums of space, it they would probably make and use different ships for different places (shame that many sci fi universes don't actually have many ships though). They would also use them for different reasons, something used for trading should be nowhere near an explosion, but should have some good cargo space and fits for communications and such.
Its probably something ignored because in the future they fused unobtainium with steel.
@Xoverrak Exactly. My first explanation was kind of vague, and I have heard that bs aerodynamic reasoning as well before... What I really would like is more of a variety in ship designs. besides Star Trek these days basically everything in American sci-fi ends up looking more like a gun than a ship. (Halo) why does every thing need to look so militaristic. I mean if someone's going to buy a pleasure Cruiser or space yacht they're going to want it to look as exotic as it costs. While Merchants should have a completely different design entirely. But you do seem to see too much similarity in most universes. I'm personally a fan of more rounded ships and incorporate flowing forms into my own designs. Though generally for a Justified purpose.
Darius Crawford I enjoy EVE because of the variety in it. My favorite designs are a bit more square and rectangle in shape (Things that Tsumotu Nihei drew for example) but I absolutely love Amarr and covenant ships. Grineers from Warframe also have a nice mix of industrial coupled with curves somehow.
@@rekzzak Xoverrak not at all knocking that I'm a very big fan of Sidonia no Kishi. Particularly in that unlike Gundam that series actually doesn't play loose with the physics. And yes there is a good mix in Eve. When it comes to the kinds of rounded ships I like. I'm into Scott Robertson and Daniel Simon's designs.
The reason the Aurora class ships and other Ancient/Lantean ships looked like they were made by humans is because they were, tge Alterans were the first evolution of Humans, the Tau'ri were the second
Bulbous green/grey ships covered in antenna are unrealistic....
Soviet space agency, "Я тебе в шутку?"
The abridged version of this video:
"Alien ships should look like they could conceivably be built by humans"
Kinda takes the fun out of alien designs when you want them all to just look like stuff we'd build.
It's more like they should look like stuff anyone would build.
I suppose it depends if you want to sacrifice variety for realism.
You could have the same discussion about fantasy weapons.
"It's more like they should look like stuff anyone would build."
Based on what? What constraints could there possibly be in space to direct shipbuilding towards a certain direction? And, if so, why is that direction, according to the video, so blocky and grey?
If the Shivans make their ships glow bright red and also have spikes protruding, are their ships somehow less useful in the vacuum of space?
"ships glow bright red and also have spikes protruding"
Color is mostly irrelevant but shape is not.
Think of the space ship as reverse submarine that is also getting bombarded by high energy particles and where every bit of mass adds tremendous amount of energy needed to get it moving.
Actually by mass you will probably want your ship to be mostly fuel (and will probably also use that fuel as shielding).
Also there is a problem of micrometeoroids for example if you were going at only 0,1c then meteoroid with 1mm diameter will have energy of 170 kg of tnt
Another example (again 0,1c) if your armor could block 1kg of tnt (concentrated in 0,025mm^2) then the max diameter of the meteoroid would be only 0.18mm.
(for comparison 120mm sabot has energy of 1,6kg of tnt)
Unfortunately I wasn't able to find the frequency of micrometeoroids in interstellar space.
Still if your ship has cross section of about 1km^2 every second you will hit everything in volume of 299 79 km^3 and every year volume of about 9,45*10^11 km^3 (for comparison the volume of sphere with radius from sun to Pluto is only 2,47*10^10 km^3)
So I would still expect for the ship to meet few micrometeorites on the way considering the trip can easily take thousands years.
Also while there are only few hydrogen atoms per 1 m^2 (I read anything between 0,1 to 1000 depending on where you are (also on different source I read about 3)) even if I go with only 1 and I assume human body cross section is only 0,6^m2 you will get hit by about 18 million hydrogen atoms every second (again ship travels at only 0.1c).
Spike shapes are not only ineffective but once they get thinner than 2 times the thickness of armor you need they have 0 useful volume and are giant waste of energy.
I would expect the ship to be cylinder (or a sphere depending if the things you slam into or the background radiation are bigger problem my bet would be on the cylinder (also makes it easier to place O'Neill cylinder in your ship)) with radar networks and point defenses that could probably annihilate any (sea) warships we have today.
Honestly now that I did the calculations the interstellar travel suddenly seems a lot harder than before I did.
By the way Im a bit tired so sorry if I fucked up any of my calculations.
Edit: missing "at"
www.google.cz/search?rlz=1C1AVNG_enCZ721CZ721&biw=1920&bih=969&tbm=isch&sa=1&ei=nhfBW7TcLMKcadaTp-AD&q=houses&oq=houses&gs_l=img.3..0i67k1l3j0l7.16773.16773.0.16882.1.1.0.0.0.0.82.82.1.1.0....0...1c.1.64.img..0.1.81....0.UEVVKLmiVU4
Mostly squares and comparing houses and space ships is somewhat unfair try comparing it with normar ships and
www.google.cz/search?rlz=1C1AVNG_enCZ721CZ721&biw=1920&bih=969&tbm=isch&sa=1&ei=whfBW4_6JqqalwSC3KTwCQ&q=ships&oq=ships&gs_l=img.3..0l10.64649.65415.0.65527.5.5.0.0.0.0.108.352.4j1.5.0....0...1c.1.64.img..0.5.350...35i39k1j0i67k1.0.S9EBlUaG65E
Do you see anything too wierd even though it would still work?
As far as it being boring to watch/read/play that depends on how much you value realism in the stuff you read/watch/play.
+Mousazz
"If the Shivans make their ships glow bright red and also have spikes protruding, are their ships somehow less useful in the vacuum of space?"
Yes. It's energy wasted and superfluous mass.
I normally love your analysis and agree with it most of the time, but on this occasion... Naaaa. I think part of the problem is how science fiction defines aliens. It's interesting that you're holding up Star Trek as a gold standard (and I do love Star Trek) but its art design for aliens is simply terrible, because it was limited in the 1960s by the bounds of the production standards of the time.
To put it bluntly: If your goal is to be realistic, why are we assuming that the gold standard alien has two legs, two arms, two eyes, and roughly humanoid features? The only reason Trek did that (aside from being the sixties) is because it was easy and cheap to do, and it took them 20 years to throw a lampshade on it by writing a script for TNG about how all life in the Milky Way was seeded. That was a great episode and a good solution to the question, and I'm not going to disparage it, but I wonder if Roddenberry might have done things differently had he not needed to deal with the realities of production budgets.
We have this terrible habit of just visualising any alien life as being in some way similar to us. You don't need to travel very far to see just how properly weird life can be. Look at the stuff that lives in the deeper parts of the ocean - that's more alien than just about anything we've seen in science fiction, and we haven't even left the planet to find it.
So why then is there an insistence of ascribing human design values to alien spaceships? The Kumari only works as a good alien design because Andorians just happen to be physiologically similar to humans, with the same basic biological needs and engineering perspectives. They walk on two legs, and they like roughly flat surfaces because they are easier to walk on, and so they - like us - build flat decks on top of one another that are easy to understand within that experience.
A more insectoid species, or perhaps an aquatic species, might be more at home in something resembling more of a beehive. And even that's a narrow imagining of the possibilities.
Surely it far more likely, given the infinitely complex combinations of chemistry in nature, that any alien that might be out there is going to be like nothing we've ever imagined. It's impossible to assume what sort of architectural considerations will govern an alien spacecraft without knowing the alien's biology.
The only thing that human and alien spacecraft would have in common is the considerations they've given to physics and maneuvering in a zero gravity environment.
The problem inherent to every single example you've used is that they were all designed by humans, and all have human features. Even a Bird of Prey or Romulan Warbird looks like something that came out of Mad Max, and in a different setting, I wouldn't question it as an (admittedly flamboyant) human vessel.
Embrace weirdness, I say.
I don't think the Bird of Prey is that flamboyant, the Coni from Trek is far more flamboyant with the little neck holing the saucer etc and the Romulan D'Dreidex(I think I butchered that) well it does look cool def more flamboyant with all that empty space but they could have a functional reason for that.
Agreed he very much looked at this from a very anthropomorphic view
That’s an incredibly, incredibly superficial view of it. Point to me things on a Spaceshuttle that tell you a furless ape made it. The function and available resources will much more greatly dictate the design of something than the number of limbs. Sure the controls might look different but he isn’t talking about that. He isn’t even saying make it look the same as the ships, but make it look like something humans would make, as in make it reasonable.
Physiology is not superficial. How a sentient species lives and thinks is critical in dictating what it would design. Every single design in science fiction has come out of a human's head.
You've buried the lede in your own reply:
"He isn’t even saying make it look the same as the ships, but make it look like something humans would make, as in make it reasonable."
That's my entire point, right there. Why does it need to be reasonable to a human? It's an alien ship. Not a human ship. Our rules need not apply to something that came from an alien species that has - in all scientific probability - absolutely nothing in common with us.
RapierOne “Our rules need not apply” that’s the problem though: it’s not OUR rules. They are physical rules/laws. It doesn’t matter what your alien looks like, putting random spikes and bulbs on your spacecraft takes more stuff to make it. Given certain resources and a certain task, there will be a best design(s). This isn’t me saying that all ships in space need to look the same, but rather that these differences should not take on the form of “this side knows how to make straight pieces of metal and this side knows how to make curved pieces of metal”. Maybe one civilization doesn’t have the resources to make a lot of good warp drives, so their ships are either expensive and impressive or small and compact, to account for only ships with large budgets getting good warp drives while other ships need to be small to work with weaker ones. There’s so many cool things one could do if they consider the means and motivations and less on the appearance of the aliens. We don’t drive giant bananas, we don’t live in treehouses, so why would another alien species fly a giant beehive just because they were insectoid?
Worth noting that many of those "impractical" features aren't.
A few others have discussed curves etc, so let's talk about fins, spikes, etc.
These increase the surface area of a craft, something you need if you want to bleed excess heat off into space. They also allow things to be mounted a greater distance from the main body of the ship: sensors, maneuvering systems, com systems, etc benefit from that.
And relating to the sensible paint job... check out dazzle paint sometimes.
There isn't really any practical reason for a boring paint job.
If anything, human ships are the boring, poorly thought out ones.
because humans are less advanced
so their ship are less thought out
I speculate that the fins on Minbari and Centauri ships in B5 are part of their more advanced gravimetric drives. Like emitters that have to be placed away from the main hull rather than inside it. Not too dissimilar to the warp nacelles that most Star Trek ships use.
I love the idea of a fleet of space warships covered in random patterns of crazy reflective dazzle paint.
No mention of the most square of all ships:
The Borg cube, which is my favorite alien ship for no real reason.
Agreed. The cube form reflects the concept of a modular mindset and a lack of individuality. Functionality over style.
@@loonyt22
Except a cube isn't the most functional shape.
But this makes it even better!
It tells us that the Borg are SO advanced (and therefore dangerous) that they do not need to care about efficiency.
They only care about it when they want to. But they do not need to.
In other words, a vessel can be a cube instead of a sphere.
This is simply because Borg shielding and gravity tech is advanced enough to compensate. And they have enough energy generation to supply power to all that tech.
You're being pretty hard on B5. B5 really set the standard for alien ship designs because (1) tech levels actually make a difference (virtually all Star Trek empires are on an even level technically. There's a HUGE difference between even the Minbari and lower tech races, and an equally large gulf between them and the First ones) and (2) all the ships are visually distinct. A Vree saucer looks nothing like a Brakiri cruiser which looks nothing like a Narn ship and so on. Even the racial shuttles are visually distinct. And the "organic coral ships" are pretty much all First One ships. They're advanced enough that we have no idea how their ships work and there's nothing wrong with them not looking like bog standard flying skyscraper human ships.
WUZLE, yes yes yes. The first-Ones ships are amazing designs. Love the one that looks like a giant sideways mushroom with 'caps' floating around it. It looks so strange and alien. 'Kiroshacc lordship' I think it's called. I spelled it wrong obviously.
The 'Thought force' is my favorite first-one ship. The Traid, Darkknife, and that thing with with rainbow lightning are very cool designs too.
Nothing boring about those ships.
B5 "First television series to use CGI as the primary method for its visual effects. First TV use of virtual sets."
TNG & early DS9 models were mainly handcrafted in wood ;)
@@KevinJDildonik The human ships once again make sense. But look at the Minbari ones. Those three giant things protruding from their Cruisers make no sense, especially since they use gravity drives so those cannot be pylons/wings used to steer the craft more efficiently, also because they are not in the right position to achieve maximum effectiveness. On top of all of this with a gravity drive you do not even need your ships to have a forward or a backward part since you do not have engines in the back.
The last part applies perfectly to their fighters and White Stars.
The Minbari (not Mimbari) design their ships as they do because they have different design sensibilities. They're obviously quite inspired by Vorlon ships and their own home world's flora and fauna. Minbari are also one of the few races that have gravity drives - the Centauri also do, and the First Ones all use unknown propulsion.
The Sharlin-class cruiser (the ship you're referring to) has two "fins" out the bottom and one along the top, the bottom two having weapons or sensor protrusions. They may not need pylons or wings to steer in space, but they provide a few things - one, an instantly recognisable ship profile, which can be used to intimidate other races; two, a separation from the main hull, which may allow things like sensor or stealth systems to operate better away from the main weaponry; three, allowing weapons better targeting solutions or multiple independent targets that would be more difficult to do in a single weapons emplacement.
The White Stars are a combination of Vorlon and Minbari technology and designed by the Minbari. There are multiple independent weapons systems on the ship in the "wings" and the bow of the ship which, as some are Vorlon technology, may have greater cooling needs and thus need separation, especially on such a small ship.
ships in b5 looked awesome.
they are not designed to make scientific sense. imo its science fantasy not fiction.
ships are designed to represent the culture of the alien race not to make perfect sense
also why should shadows and vorlon ships look like earthtech they arent humanoid species.
To be honest I find your view here rather unimaginative - are you born from a generation that only watched the original Star Trek series and every other intelligent life form was basically a human in a different mask?
It also seems you are assuming that humans have acquired ALL the knowledge the universe has to offer already so that ships should be designed in a way that makes sense to us HUMANS.
As space travel is spoken of in the same way as sea travel, how would a person from the middle ages talk of the USS Gerald R. Ford Aircraft carrier? They wouldn't be thinking that humans could build it because they didn't know how to do those things then. This is the same way I feel about all the ships you have just slated especially B5, all the alien races had been space faring for far longer than we had so why wouldn't they be able to create more amazing looking ships.
I find it funny that you question why an alien race would build their ships like that - look at flaming Starfleet.... who the hell would build a space fleet like that? and its so boring, because whatever they do they HAVE to incorporate a disc section - which has always proven crap in battles but it sure looks cool on screen getting a hole punched through it.
B5 human ship design was at least based in reality, thanks for skipping past that.
I am amused by your choice of ship as being a good alien ship - it looks to have wings.... how is the imaginative? We have grown up thinking wings are cool from living in an environment where you need wings to fly - in space you don't, so your choice basically looks like a plane - ooh good choice aliens :)
I am glad that shows like B5 thought out of the box for their alien and ship design, it sparked my imagination when i first watched B5 all those years ago. I feel let down by sci-fi nowadays when the aliens are the usual bipedal variety and all the ships look like humans built them.
But whatever, its your opinion and this is mine :)
The only thing that should be called out for 'not making sense' is physics defying stuff. Something being colorful doesn't make something boring automatically.
Chara
I'm going to reply to you in 2 other comments, since I feel you're wrong there as well.
Submarines could also be considered "ships", yet their shape and capabilities are almost completely alien in comparison to surface ships, like Frigates and Destroyers.
But even amongst surface ships, let's take the battle of the ironclad prototypes - CSS Virginia vs. USS Monitor.
The Monitor has its deck almost level with the waterline, with a large rotating cylindrical turret on top, and a protruding chimney. Heck, it actually looks similar to a submarine.
The Virginia, OTOH, looks like a metal hill, with its upper deck high above the waterline, and all the weapons etched into the sloped metal sides. Its upper walls are sloped opposite of a normal ship's - it actually looks like an upturned boat, until you realize that the main ship part is almost fully submerged in the water.
Except for the organic space-ships, most of the angular designs do, actually, I'd say, look "extremely different, but somewhat familiar". And that's fine with me. But not with the video's creator.
Submarines are probably a better analogue for spaceships than boats and ships honestly.
Fair enough.
Aesthetically, I myself like the "mushroom" design found in ships like Even Online's Avatar or Homeworld's Kadeshi mothership. The front is sort of angled like a submarine, and the back... ideally shouldn't ever come under enemy fire.
But I doubt they're any practical.
There is something to bear in mind here: Similar form vs similar function.
Ships can looks drastically different but would still have the same basic purpose/role.
I’ll be honest 40k alien ship designs seem really good, yeah the eldar have the bio punk coral look, but that is explained well in lore with the material they use, chaos is just human ships that are A really old and forgotten designs or B twisted by chaos, Tau look really cool, with a sleek fish kinda look, crossed with Japanese culture and advanced sci fi tech, and orks have their ramshackle look to everything they do
One thing I love about the imperial/chaos designs is that whilst they do still have arguably the most utilitarian design in 40k, they are also the most distinct compared with other IP.
I love the Kumari, one of my favourite starships in all science fiction.
Star Trek: Enterprise was actually very good overall at ship design. Vulcans had quite an interesting motif in design as well, with a ring-based warp nacelle that brings to mind concepts of the Alcubierre Warp Drive. The modular nature of Suliban ship/station construction was unique. Xindi vessels did a very good job, in my view, of distinguishing between the multi-species Xindi culture.
That series had some flaws... but distinctive ship design for the major players was not one of them.
The unique artistic aspect is one of my favourite things from FTL. Each alien race has different styled ships, different behavior, different combat preferences, they all have a culture.
There are few cases where the bulbous shape makes sense. At the moment I can think of 2, both from Star Wars. First is the Mon Calimari ships. Looking at who built them and their purpose, some of which being buildings underwater before engines were attached, the aquatic theme makes sense for them. Second is the Yuuzhan Vong, the reason their ships all look organic and grown, is because they are. Each of their ships is grown and is technically alive, so again, it makes sense for them.
I can see some rich privateers who want to flaunt their money and have their ships easily identifiable making their ships look organic and aquatic looking. Other than that, I totally agree.
aquatic/organic designs are inherently better at dealing with pressure
@@matthiuskoenig3378 Designs where (most) of the inside and outside are at the same pressure are best at dealing with pressure.
I like a lot of the Covenant ship designs, they follow the covenant's whole theme pretty well, and are pretty practical looking, and have a very clear design based around the glassing beam.
You say "boring alien spaceships" and I say "Romulan Warbird."
re: Babylon 5, The Centauri and most of the League of Non-Aligned Worlds had reasonable ship designs, too. Basically any species that was roughly a contemporary of Earth satisfied your condition. Babylon 5 reserved its weird flowy/flashy ship designs for ancient races, I think specifically because they wanted the ships to appear inexplicable and bizarre to fit with the consistent theme the show had that it was impossible to comprehend the technology of the more ancient races.
Yeah I agree with this. To expand on this thought, the "coral" aesthetic was mostly used for races with living ships so they had a good reason to look like that. Even the exceptions are informative, with the Minbari being the ones that straddle the divide between ancient and younger races. And they were themselves heavily influenced by the older races so there's a provenance for that look in-universe. To me it's entirely possible B5 was partly responsible for this trend which has become overdone without the in-universe rationale that made it work for B5.
This is such a narrow-minded perspective. "Alien ships should look like something concievably built by humans." Is, IMO, a ridiculous statement. Why do aliens need to be constrained by our logic? Fackin hell, the human ships in sci-fi don't even look like the various spacecrafts we've already built.
Don't get me wrong. I agree that Spacedock's point in this video seems rather narrow-minded. But, the reason why real-world spacecraft look the way they do is because of our current, limited technological capability and the fact that most of the crafts we've built are designed to fly in an atmosphere and/or survive a "controlled" re-entry.
That's a major difference compared to your typical sprawling sci-fi story.
I think you didn't understaind, he doesn't say : "if there are alien their spaces ships gona look like concirvably buily by human". He just say th at it's that type of space ship that are more appealing.
anoukhman No, he said "I think alien ships should look like it could have concievably been built by humans, just other humans."
You know what's boring? *humanoid* aliens.
@@durakeno5575 yep but he is alway talking about the space ship design.
anoukhman yes but he's restricting alien design to human anatomy. An intelligent alien species would build their ships to fit their anatomy and base their designs on their history or homeworld fauna/flora. Airplane design was inspired by birds at least. Maybe the aliens have some special trait that they could build around on. There's too many factors to influence ship design to constrain them with Human Logic and common sense.
I have to disagree. One factor that you seem to have overlooked is that in almost all the examples you list, all have come from some visual medium, ie. Game, TV show, movie ect. And the reason alien vessels look so drastically different than humans is for easy identification for us the viewer. Nothing is more frustrating than seeing a heated space battle and trying to determine which ship belongs to who in all the confusion. If an alien race has technology similar to that of humans, then yes it would make sense that the ships would look similar, however, you need to take in account that not ALL races in the galaxy share the same level of technology with others, so there will be differences.
I have to disagree on the Kett ships from ME: Andromeda.
The Kett's character designs and lore I found very unoriginal, but the aesthetic of their tech works pretty well. Those battleships are a sensible, compact shape while their T-shaped fighters look like something built for space dogfights, and they all have recognizable components on them (guns, bridge, windows, ports, sensor thingies...). The greenish dieselpunk-looking metal they use feels rugged and grounded. Up close they look like they're made of stamped metal sheets.
In another setting they wouldn't look out of place for a sinister human civilization, I could totally see someone like the Grineer from Warframe or the Helghast from Killzone using tech that looks like that.
Maybe it's "boring" to you, but not the aliens who design them. 😕
There are a lot of advances in 3d printing of metal pieces. Alot of what has come out locks very organic and it wouldn't be too surprising that a future human ship would have a fish like appearance
It is boring because that kind of style is overused in science fiction due to the majority of writers being too lazy to think of anything original.
@@frankg2790 And giant bricks with enormous rockets are original?
@@frankg2790 yeah, because apparently grey bricks are creative 😒
The essence of sci fi is bizzaredom; you’re complaining that many lack imagination which perplexes me because your imagination is the limiting factor here. You seek consistency in design when the entire point of sci fi is to develop every possible design that could be. I argue that you are the one lacking in imagination
No. His complaint is about how often Sci-Fi uses "form over function/style over substance" too often. Just because someone wants starships to have "boring but practical" designs doesn't mean that they lack imagination. .
Frank G but he’s also completely talking out of his ass. He’s not an engineer. Given his considering boxy ships with shear angles “realistic”, I doubt he understands basic geometric considerations like stress concentration factors.
His perfect alien ship probably wouldn’t survive a turn.
Agreed. The idea that alien ships are too alien and not human enough (apparently because humans have already come up with the best possible designs) strikes me as parochial.
I see Tyranids being thrown up on there, but I would say that it's a bit unfair.
although I will bend on how the ships actually appeared in Battle fleet gothic (its 40k, giant impractical flying space cathedrals are a thing, what are you going to do) Tyranids shouldn't be scrutinised for being the generic 'Hive mind aliens' when they are the base the entire trope was built on (technically its the Zerg from Starcraft but since it was originally going to be a Warhammer game, with the Zerg being the Tyranids, my point stands)
GW literally just took xenomorphs and made them purple, they are a generic rip-off.
@@shilopnamreg6468 I will only give you that for their more initial tyranid designs, model wise. I can’t see that being true for just about anything else.
@@khaaneph7311 Tyranids are a half-way point between the xenomorphs and the bugs from StarShip Troopers. And with their respective redesigns, it seems Tyranids and Zerg cross-pollinated a bit.
This is kinda why I’m a big fan of the Star Wars CIS ship designs. Yeah, a couple ships are designed a little aquatic, but that’s because those specific ships are designed by the Quarren, which are aquatic, and they take design cues from Mon Calamari, which are also aquatic, and ALSO design their ships to withstand and travel through deep sea pressures. Even then, they still have hard edges and antennae clusters and overhanging redundant armour and all that jazz.
Just a quick 3 questions.
1. why would a grounded design make sense when no real life technology we have ever created can come remotely close to creating a lightyear faring ship
2. why does everybody think space wars/battles are just world war 2 dog fights with lazers. If your going for a realistic approach at least build on nukes and a point defence lazer system
3. why do you think Aliens are just a different sect of humans. Its far more likely that different levels of sentience exist in the cosmos. Limiting your designs to just that isnt logical/artistic
@mandellorianDont forget about the radiation which is 8 to 17x greater than a blast at sea level (killing all the pilots of all light armoured ships in the area) and the emp effect (Starfish Prime had an area of affect of 1000 miles), and the thermal energy fireball is still present which is ten times hotter then the core of the sun.
@@michaelcaboose8685 yep - that'll do it!
@@michaelcaboose8685 any ship so lightly armored that its crew could be killed by a nuke from any significant distance wouldn't last long in space anyway, and the same goes for one not hardened against emp effects
If it ain't fast, it has to be heavily armored. However, nukes in space is a bad idea. Nuking an enemy from orbit is a good idea under the right circumstance.
@mandellorian It would be a good point defense weapon. It gives off a large EMP and huge levels of radiation. enough to kill any fighter pilot. Probably not the best ship to ship weapon but you got lasers for that.
3:47 For the record, those are actually human ships.
Advent are still my favorite Faction.
Same, that's how I recognised those immediately. Psionics with lasers. Can't go wrong with that.
yea, and a few second later he lumps the Advent in with 'space elves'
nah, they're banished humans that return for revenge actually
Not to mentuon those ships look nice too.
I'd argue that an angular design is less realistic than a rounded one, for one simple reason: Pressure.
We make our submarines, planes, and space ships rounded, because a corner is a structural weakness. In an area, where you have to deal with pressure differences, corners are going to experience a higher stress than the rest of the structure.
I mean, sure we can imagine that these ships are using some future, super strong, alloys, where such thinking might not be as big of a concern, but corners are still going to be the point that experiences the highest amount of load and thus most likely spots to target by the enemy.
The Gamillans from Space Battleship Yamato had some good, grounded looks. Especially the aircraft carriers.
Generally, I think you should consider the background of what the aliens are using to make the ships when coming up with the theme of that alien race. If they are using some kind of biological production method to shape the materials, it would make sense that it would look like sea coral. You should also consider what techniques for bonding materials are used, as well as the joint types and general aesthetic design of the race. Technically, all those weird sea creature-esque ships could have very well been made by other humans, perhaps that design style proliferated across that planet. Perhaps the aliens are basing the ships off of their other architecture that does have a weird blob looking aesthetic due to their traditional background materials or something. Of course, figuring all this out means designing an entire race from the ground up, so most writers will probably just copy something else that looks cool and call it a day. So in the end, if the writer obviously put more thought into the plot than into world-building I can forgive some copycat ship design.
Thanks for giving us something to think about~
Just look at car design over the decades... Fins... Fake turbine looking things...
even if you were growing the material like some sort of coral, youd likely control its growth, like we do with bonsai plants or square watermelons. good points though
I agree, wraith ships from stargate are kinda bulbous in design but that's because they are organic and its part of how the wraith technology works, people like the wraith hive ship BECAUSE the writers did enough world building for the wraith and the ships. the big issue that Daniel was pointing out though is too many ships look that way just "because" if a ship has a good reason for looking the way it does that can potentially make it even more interesting but so many alien designs dont bother with this
@@omg_RANCORS thats a good point too and indeed many organic looking ships in general are suppose to be massive living organisms naturally adapted or deliberately engineered to live in space and then somehow altered into ships.
another thing that needs to be pointed out is that since it's all suppose to be in a vaccuum, any weird shape will work so long as the center of mass is accounted for, to which the worse and most impractical designs would be the federation starfleet ships from star trek, with the large discs that jut out at angles from the main bodies, creating two lopsided centers of mass.
One of my favorite design is the Chigs fighter from Space Above and Beyond. Since the look like something is design for void combat.
Agreed. What makes the Chig ships work is their geometric aesthetic. They look alien without falling into the trap Daniel mentioned.
James King Great comparison.
@@Mahbu Aye, that show had great designs. ISSCV craft are actually one of my all-time favorites. Which is strange to say about a flying box, but they are just so wonderfully utilitarian.
Right on. They were simple and basic. Yet had a style that was functional. They look like what a army would build to operate in space.
Heh, I still remember Chiggy Von Richthofen.
If aliens made a show, and used our techniques for designing a human space ship, it would literally be shaped like a guy doing the Buddy Christ pose.
One of the scariest and most iconic alien ship designs for me is the Borg cube. It's brutalist; ignorant of any concept of aesthetic or artistic need to make something analogous to a jet or anything that flew in an atmosphere, and is the 3D embodiment of a computer chip. They just needed a structure to travel from world to world growing their number. Back when they were first introduced in TNG their cube scared me more than any finned badguy vessel.
I think it's kind of ironic and yet I don't really disagree that you find Star Trek one of the better examples of alien ship design, because I think Star Trek is kind of known for aliens that are basically humans with some weird protrusion of the week. But I agree that so often, the creators of a lot of sci fi try to be different for the sake of being different regardless of whether it makes sense.
he mentioned more than once that he thinks that alien ships should be basically the same as built by humans but slightly different. Which Star Trek does. Because almost every alien there is basically a human with a weird brow or spots. I think it's a wrong way to look at aliens. Aliens would not be just humans in different bodies, their minds would have also be alien which means things that we take for granted would be wrong too. For example green for ok/good and red for no/bad. Aliens might have evolved where green means bad.
"Star Trek is kind of known for aliens that are basically humans with some weird protrusion of the week."
I never understood why Star Trek is always singled out for this. Yes this is something they often do, but they were not the first nor the last Science Fiction universe to do this. Star Wars, Babylon 5, Stargate, etc have all done it. Why pick on Star Trek?
NihilusShadow I actually consider myself a big fan of Star Trek. The books are about the only arena that I haven't really delved into. No Star Trek is certainly not the only franchise guilty of being unimaginative when it comes to the the design of alien species, but you can't deny that it hasn't always been the priority of the various production teams. And when you have a franchise as big and long running as Star Trek, your're going to be known for various aesthetics. Which is fine by me. As long as they are telling a good story.
I love some B5 designs, hated others, but they certainly had a method to their madness. There were beings hundreds of years (e.g., Centauri), thousands of years (e.g., the Minbari), and even millions to billions of years (First Ones) more advanced than Earth. The older, the more outlandish, was the general design direction. The fact that you said Narn ships looked like they could have been Terran built, illustrated how the designers succeeded in conveying the message: the Narns were indeed only slightly older than humanity. And if you see for example, a Mindrider's ship (like in my profile pic) and said "WTF is that?" and "how the hell does that work?", the answer is a very Vorlon-ish: "GOOD!"
Babylon 5, Star Trek, Star Wars, Galactica, so many other movies/shows ... they each offer some cool/awesome designs and some dumb/fugly designs.
For me, the most appealing designs are those which are most "understandable" and immersive, most consistent with the "science" of the sci-fi setting, they're "engineered" in some particular form because it's described as necessary to how they function. And everybody follows the same "rules" unless their tech has advanced to any entirely different paradigm.
I think "low tech" metal stuff tends to look more "realistic" than shiny glowing godtech stuff - just personal preference - but both approaches have been done well and done badly.
Not only was "the more outlandish the more advanced" a thing, but it was recognized as such in the world. The Brakiri intentionally designed their ships with a sculpted biological look to seem more advanced than they really were. The Centauri ships looked like flying cathedrals which they probably regard it as legitimate showing off of their advancement with stylish ship design where the Brakiri were faking it . The Mimbari were also affecting the "biological" aesthetic although they would of course have some deep sounding philosophical reason for it to hide that they were just copying what they saw in the previous shadow war. The Humans, Narn, and Drazi had practical looking ships with lots of exposed greebles because they had fewer resources to spare on aesthetics due to their less advanced technology bases, and they didn't care to fake it like the Brakiri. The Whitestars do look like plucked chickens though.
The Andorian battlecruiser you showed off could easily be mistaken for a ship in BSG Deadlock, and I love that about it. If you brought the underside of the forward "head" back, put those outrigged pylongs on the ends of the wings, flipped those wings 180 degrees and put them on the central neck, you essentially have a "pocket battlestar" looking ship, and I love that about Andorian vessels.
The Andorian ship was designed by John Eaves, who is a fantastic artist and long time veteran of Star Trek. He deserves all the praise he can get.
Well, let's be honest: A lot of alien designs come about because they're trying to distance the design from something a human would build. And, honestly, there's some truth to that: An alien isn't human. Alien construction wouldn't follow human logic.
Moving back to space opera, most alien ships are designed along the aesthetics of the race or a motif. Usually this justifies the look. Sometimes you might need to think on why they look like they do. (The Covenant, for example, likely rely on the Huragok/Engineers for a lot of the basic construction patterns for their ships. Given that the Huragok are blue-purple gas bags, well...)
I've thought about this sometimes, alien spaceships and architecture in sci-fi often looks like the aliens themselves. I.E aquatic aliens fly around in whale-shaped ships, green coloured aliens fly green ships, space bugs have organic ships. But really it doesn't make all that much sense, as humans our buildings don't look much like us, they are largely boxy and functional. We are a curvey, round, species but the things we build are reflective of practicalities.
We humans should start painting everything in human skin colors and make as many structural designs resemble our own physiology as possible.
@StadtplanDan Right, and that's the gist of Daniel's complaint; my point is that what we define as practical and logical wouldn't apply to a different race. Practical and logic in spacecraft design is something that'll vary with a species' phsyiology, psychology and environment. What would be practical for humans to tool around in would be a nightmare for a species that evolved around more avian lines (Cramped space, lack of air movement, likely lack of perches or areas to launch oneself from), and even those species that evolved around similar lines would likely have very different needs; ie, an aquatic race who evolved in shallower depths would design a ship that would be a deathtrap to one that evolved in conditions akin to deep sea trenches.
General Coma This guy gets it. Aliens would have somewhat different needs and resources, but so do different groups of people. Do Russian and American planes looks super different from one another?
Here's the fly in the ointment: Anytime people say "spacecraft", everyone immediately thinks "ground-to-orbit launch vehicle"; ie, the modern rocket. That the design must follow rules of practicality and be friendly to the various laws of fluid dynamics and lift, largely for the purposes of stability and fuel consumption.
And if you're building stuff designed to operate in an atmosphere, then yes, that will be practical. However, if you're building in orbit and not intending to operate in atmosphere (or are just wanting to be Flying Dumpster levels of impractical in atmo anyways), then you really don't need to worry about that. Enough RCS and thrusters and pretty much any design can be considered spaceworthy. Human logic just tends towards "Cigar-Shaped tubes", when really any design would work.
Oh, and @PajamaMan, to answer your question: Only on the military side of things, and only in recent generations of fighters. You'd be hard pressed to confuse an F-22 or F-35 from MiGs of similar generations (the -31 and -35) because the bodyshapes are actually surprisingly different.
I don't... think I agree with you
im suprised he even wathes Sci=fi, if u dont like Alien ships, sopace elces or any of that then u really should avoid scifi, i think thats why he enjoy stargate sg1, theres no space eleves or any alien ships , othr than the same goauld ships for 8 seasons , BTW Stargate is an amzing. I lovestar trek and most scifi becasue of the space eleves, wierd alien ships and all that .
why would u run a sci fi channel if u hate aliens and thre ships ???
My ship doesn’t have extra bits, it has remote heat sinks (;
There’s this game I play called Endless Sky. It’s like an open-source game so a lot of different people have contributed. And as a result, the ships are all gorgeous. Each alien race has its own aesthetic, and they really stick to it. You can tell which species made each type of ship, and yet each design has its own uniqueness. It’s truly impressive.
Whoa. I completely disagree with your opinion.
I disagree that most "human" warships look remotely plausible as military vessels. Assuming armor is relevant and the ability to take damage while holding together is a useful design feature, having the framework of the ship built as separate boxes linked together is preposterous, especially if the bridge of the warship is mounted in some external component that can be easily shot away. Streamlined or organic shapes minimize surface area while maximizing internal volume so they are more plausible than boxy shapes for military vessels. If the weapon of choice is relativistic canister shot (to maximize the amount of kinetic energy transferred across the target instead of just punching straight through), or something similarly catastrophic (by about 10% of the speed of light, kinetic energy is on par with a nuke, and by around 90% of the speed of light, the kinetic energy is greater than the yield of antimatter and it just goes up from there), then maybe armor doesn't matter, but there would still be the need for outer hull areas to protect from radiation and collision with interstellar debris so a hull will be needed and making it a rounded shape is still more efficient than something boxy. Meanwhile, a shape that is most likely to hold together despite battle damage and where as much stuff lies between incoming damage and the central CIC (cuz an exposed bridge is just dumb, especially for combat at ranges where vision is irrelevant anyway) so streamlined shapes are still better. For nearer-future spacecraft grounded in actual physics (because spaceships are not ships, and space fighters are not airplanes), one of the biggest mistakes is designing vehicles that shoot in the direction opposite the thrust of the main engines, unless the effective range of the vehicle's weapons is absurdly short. Instead weapons should fire to the side, so that the spacecraft can make maneuver burns perpendicular to the line between the spacecraft and its target to maximize its ability to dodge incoming fire. The exception to this would be a highly maneuverable vehicle with short-range weapons like mass drivers that fire at velocities that are conceivable with near-future technologies, where firing in the opposite direction of the engines would allow flying perpendicular to the target while keeping the guns pointed at the target, or in extreme cases flying circles around a target while continuously strafing it. The implications of the Orion nuclear pulse spacecraft concept combined with nuclear-pumped x-ray lasers seem highly advantageous in a nearer-future spacecraft, as the nuclear warheads that fire the x-ray laser blasts could potentially also drive the vessel, and driving the vessel in discrete powerful impulses combined with rapidly spinning the vessel to different orientations would allow radical jinking to avoid enemy fire. Designs that concentrate armor on one face or which have ablative armor separate from the hull, even potentially sacrificial armored drones would also be intriguing, and would be increasingly useful with more devastating weapons like relativistic kinetic energy weapons. But then, maybe I've spent too much time on the Atomic Rockets site... :p
Yes, streamlined shapes are in terms of armor usage much more efficient. It also has the advantage of having no clear cut-offs, which present weak points in the design.
Relativistic projectile weapons are very inefficient as weapons, due to them simply carrying too much energy to really make an effective weapon, and also due to the general challenge of accelerating them. The closest you could get as a semi-practical device is either a dust gun (micrometer-sized or smaller projectile) or a laser sail (efficiency rises as it approaches c.).
The canister shot doesn't help with avoiding overpenetration either, it just helps with applying the damage more equally over the cross-sectional surface area of the ship. As the particles would travel about a meter or two and armor, and then be almost completely absorbed.
Depending on the shape of the ship it's usually recommendable that you fire along the line of thrust because then you minimize your cross-sectional area and can make use of nose cone armor to resist the enemy fire. If the cross-sectional area of the front is 10x smaller, you would only need a tenth of the thrust to dodge with the same success rate as a ship trying to perform a broadside. Side thrusters would make sense in such a scenario.
Mass drivers aren't particularly practical, they usually deal with immense limits on their acceleration gradient. Which is amplified if you try to use guided munition to increase the hit probability. At 100,000G and a barrel length of 50 meters, your muzzle velocity is measly 10km/s. Even today's laser technology would seemingly make a better space weapon already.
Nuclear-pumped x-ray laser or x-rasers are something nice, especially if you can combine them with advanced techniques such as metastable innermost molecular states, producing narrow spectrum x-ray pulses. You could easily get ranges similar to that of most optical laser kill envelopes.
One possible nuclear-pumped device of my own variety, that I've discussed with Matterbeam, is the magsail-casaba combo. You use a casaba howitzer, and a magnetic sail to push off the plasma beam. Due to the beam being reflected and also little to no thermal energy being absorbed it can simply take the momentum of a 10,000km/s / 3.3% c casaba howitzer beam, and use a mag sail of similar mass ( 4.184 kg for a one megaton casaba howitzer) and traverse space at that velocity. Destroying almost any target it hits with one or two strikes.
Antimatter-like performance actually requires 0.94c, due to having twice as much kinetic energy as its own rest mass (antimatter always annihilates itself and an equal amount of opposite matter). At 9% you get as much performance is you burned one kilogram DT completely, at 3.5% you achieve the predicted yield-to-weight ratio for the US planned 50MT - 4.5 tons package. And at 2% you achieve the performance of the W56 warhead, the highest yield-to-weight ratio device ever built.
A well thought post. While a curved shaped hull can maximize internal area, actually USING that area is a different matter. Works for some cables or conduits, but you probably don't want those to be the first thing to break in the case of damage. It might work for fluid storage, but most things just don't have a convex curve that will actually utilize the space provided.
You totally were right that the guns should be on the side, rather than opposite the direction of thrust. Now if only alien ship design actually had some sort of reaction control system so that they could rotate instead of magically "turning" when the only engine they have is forward thrust. Hollywood magic!
I think in terms of military spaceship they would be build in two layers much like the concept of submarines. Internal pressure hulls where the crew spaces would be and then an external hull which would be used as armor and protective layering to the inner hull.
Also I think all projectile weopan systems would predominantly be turret based like you said simply to be able to fire into any arc without having to expend fuel or mass to transition the whole ship into a direction to bring weopan to bare.
Streamlining curves would seem to be more structurally resilient and reduce use of mass, but at the same time some flat planes would be advantageous forthe deflective nature they would impart against projectiles. Much like slab tank armor taking glancing shot. And to add the fact that that sheets are simpler to produce and construct with.
Also more circular design would be used in a no gravity environment so why would ships be built in levels. Makes more sense for cylinders within cylinders. This would be structurally stronger, easier to construct, and be better suited to space.
@@ARMOROID5000 For space hulls, multiple layers are needed to form successive layers of whipple shields to break up incoming projectiles - just like with the hulls of modern spacecraft, only more so. See also www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewardefense.php as to weapons, not all weapons can be readily mounted in turrets. Particle accelerators and the more powerful mass drivers would require huge acceleration tracks that would need to be installed in large areas of the hull. Lasers require a wide focal array for two reasons, the first being that the beam must be spread so that the light intensity striking the focal array is low enough to not destroy the array, and the second being that the range at which destructive intensities of laser light can be focused on a target is proportionate to the width of the array. So while it is possible to create laser turrets such as that used by the YAL-1 airborne laser, this is likely to become much more difficult as laser power grows, and it will always be possible to create a more powerful and long-ranged laser with a fixed focal array than what can be installed in a turret.
I think the scariest aliens would be essentially another set of humans that don’t have any humanity and don’t feel fear or pain
Alien spacecraft design tends to be "what if insects, but spaceships." Forget Warhammer where the Tryannids absorb other ships and metal and you have a giant beetle in space where it makes sense (since they are giant space insects, oxygen notwithstanding), the dumbest design are the bad guys in Star Fleet (the one with puppets, not Star Trek). For an alien race that is very, very humanoid, they have a dumb ass idea of doing worse than those Mass Effect caterpillars where they have what looks like a totenkopf caterpillar as a carrier and on its legs are ants that serve as fighters. That would make sense if it was an insectoid race like Zergs or hell, Tryannids, but the aliens there were shown to be as close as you can get to a Terran without being one. Even more than the space elves trope.
For a more rationalized version of this trope, there's Gundam, ie the UC and CE universes. On one hand you need to make Z-bad guys' ships look distinct, so while Earth ships look like space versions of today's surface vessels (even the Pegasus class just looks like a reshuffled carrier for people with OCD ie the superstructure and bridge aren't offset; the Archangel is just that but what if it's curvy like some rich guy's yacht, or if White Base and Queen Amidala's limo had a baby), Zeon had what looks like "what if a submarine, but in space...and also green" and ZAFT has "what if Thundersub, but green, and exaggerated proportions of that." On the other hand they're not egregious insectoids. Zeon ships still pretty much had protrusions but nothing you wouldn't see on normal ships (ie comms equipment) and ZAFT vessels' hunchback Thundersub look is due to having the mobile suit catapult in the center of the ship, presumably so the catapult bits extend out and are the front of the vessels and keeping their best assets - the younger pilots - more protected until they're in a position to use the Djinns' or the Gouf's maneuverability. Hell, in that one, the bigger question is why the hell did they suddenly shift to the BBM-01 Minerva that looks like Thundersub (and in the same sensible color) but with a tumblehome bow and none of that suface vessel undercarriage where the normal submarine is kept (that makes TS look like a carrier on top of a WW1 u-boat).
And then Gundam Wing somehow went with Peacemillion looking like it inspired Queen Amidala's limo (which in turn inspired Ancient Aliens' render of the Yellow Emperor's craft...I am not joking, look for that episode) while Libra seemed like the weird pyramid in Tosho Daimos (the bad guys there are like winged Aryans in Greco-Roman attire with Egyptian stuff) mated with some kind of crystalline interdimensional being (eg the 3D Mark TimeSpy thing).
3:51 Although I have never played anything X, I will use my voice in a not-so-usable manner because I'm angry at this...
SHIPS IN X REFLECT THE TRAITS OF THE SPECIES PILOTING IT!!!
Also, do you seriously expect LIVING SHIPS to look like something us Humans could build?
Do you even know what aliens look like and what their traits are?
Agreed. As for the Boron example, if my memory serves their ships are also supposed to be able to submerge when landing on their homeworld - but I'm not sure about that atm.
"Do you seriously expect living ships to look like something us humans could build?" Yes, to a certain extent. There are certain structures which exist in both biology and engineering for the same purposes, there are even computer programs involved in engineering meant to optimize structures, turning out results that can often look strikingly biological. Moving forward into the future it would not be surprising to see a lot of technology which looks somewhat organic. In addition, if you were starting off from biotechnology trying to achieve the same results as normal technology, your biotech will at some point hit a stage where it looks mostly like synthetic tech. Also species using biotech would logically still be constrained to a certain extent by the needs of their tools, some things for example like combustion engines, rocket engines, turbines, (most of the systems dealing with extremely high energies, temperatures or pressures) exceed what living materials can generally tolerate.
But red makes it go fasta! An’ da spikey bitz iz good fer krumpin’ hoomies!
I suppose that is Ork talk from WH40K?
WAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!!
It's always been interesting to me how people claim aerodynamics isn't necessary in space. Certainly it's less of a factor than in our atmosphere, but when you multiply the craft's velocity by the speeds necessary to traverse the vastness of space in a timely manner, tiny specs of dust and indeed even photons will have an impact. Even so... perhaps you can get around this by projecting some sort of magnetic field around the front of the craft to repel objects in your path.
The fact that you think that alien ships would be similar to our own does make sense because of the same environment. However, rounded and sloped designs are actually pretty effective and efficient from a mass-to-surface-area perspective and for deflecting projectiles, even if deflecting only a few will do any good. I think that the sloped angular design of ships isn’t actually all that utilitarian, its trying to take the aesthetic of oceanfaring ships into space. Space is not an ocean. If anything, the cylinders I talked about would look a bit more like your classic rocket. Even though it doesn’t look like that because of massive rocket stages, but actually because it’s just a shell of armor. The actual ship is more wiery and frame-ish, with centrifuges, propellant tanks and such inside (look up the HOPE spacecraft and you’ll get an idea) with the cylinder part just being armor and weapons. Aliens and humans could pull this off and might even find that it’s the most effective design. So, in a way, you are correct, but the design that you think that both aliens and humans would make use of kinda isn’t.
On the bright side, anyone who pulls this off can consider their work hard science fiction. Most people seem to find this type of design boring, but I’m partial to it for some reason.
I don't think bioships are necessarily bad. You discredit them as silly based on personal preference and then accuse creators of having no imagination. That seems counterproductive.
I have actually seen a few quite interesting ones on DeviantArt as part of people's personal musings on the shape of alien spaceships.
As far as "sensible spaceship design" goes, on a military vessel, you don't really need anything more than a cigar shape with a main engine cluster on one end and a bfg/sensor array on the other.
Now just sprinkle the surface evenly with directional thrusters and have it bristle with point defense turrets.
There is no "up" or "down" in space, so any ship needs to be equally defended from all sides, but that's honestly about it.
The only variation would be the exact length and diameter of the cigar shape.
Anything else is for flare only and has nothing to do with functionality. Warships don't do things for flare only.
Also minimal windows are a must. Make them tiny, few and far in between.
Space fighters probably wouldn't be a thing either, or they would be deployed in the form of autonomous drones. (Or at least remote-controlled ones, but that would be a step-back).
Not only does it make sense if the ship is organic, but biomimicry is a totally legitimate field of design.
hes being a bit of a Snob latley, constantlycondemeing various sci-fi tropes, one week he hated on Carrier/ Battleship hybrid ships, another week he complained that Sci Fi battles with ALIENS arent realistic enogh and now hes complaining that SciFi TV Shows have too many Bio-Ships and Space Elves. im kinda getting turned off his attitide and channal for the last month or so, He used to just analise the craftsf from diferent Si fi show in an almost Encyclopedia kind of way, now he adds how much hates a ship after he annalyses it .
also its SC-FI , its not meant too be too realistic
Awesome comeback!
Bio... nearly unlimited resources... natural resources (metals) limited supply. Makes since to me
Agreed, the Vorlon ships were organic and made to operate in Space and provide everything the operator needed. I liked them, the Shadow vessels were made to be the opposite of the Vorlons, even though they were organic too they looked evil.
I feel like the pseudo-organic alien ships are a totally valuable trope when used properly. It is a good way for a creator to differentiate between two entirely different processes of technological evolution. it only really works for me when the aliens arent supposed to be understood, and that it calls for a more clear distinction between "aliens" and "space people". Once multiple technological societies begin to interact, however, I feel that the spread of technologies and even aesthetic sensibilities would foster at least some sort of homogeny between space vessels. Not super convenient when trying to differentiate ypur different flavors of space people, but at least worth considering.
Your post made me reflect on Space: Above and Beyond. That show had mankind fighting against truly alien foes called Chigs. The Chig ships were organic, but had hulls with a distinct geometric style that avoided the traps Daniel mentioned.
On the other side is Star Wars which embodies the blending of different styles you described. The Mon Calamari are the only canon race with weirdly alien ships. Regarding Legends, Yuuzhan Vong win the weirdly alien award with ease.
Forget pseudo-organic. Some of the Babylon 5 ships _are_ organic.
I'm not really sure what he's complaining about there as you have the humans and Narn (which he liked) with the Centauri on one tech level.
Then you had the Mimbari ships which are so advanced they're not even using the same drive systems.
Then you have the ship on screen which, not only was designed to be able to enter atmospheres, but to look unlike any species' designs. They were also a step ahead of the Mimbari ships because they used a combination of their tech and Vorlon tech.
Then you have the "first ones" which are insanely advanced races and some of them (like the Vorlons) are actually using organic ships straight-up, or designing their ships around some massive and complex system we don't even comprehend.
B5 is a great example of how to do this troupe right on all scales. It's not the hardest sci-fi setting, but everything fits exactly where it should.
And strongly evident in Trek, where every civilisation has broadly similar technologies
DynamicWorlds I like the designs on B5, but I see where Daniel is coming from.
When B5 debuted in the 1990s, the alien ship designs were truly fresh compared to most of its competitors. However, as Daniel noted, lesser sci-fi shows have aped the worst elements of that style. This results in a bland sameness throughout the genre.
Naturally, any alien ship design that bucks this trend like the Andorian warships is refreshing.
I just love organic designs in general, regardless of who makes them. The Grineer and Orokin in Warframe both have really organic aesthetics, but aren’t alien.
The Grineer ship designs are stated to have been inspired by sea snails, but only their armor plating is curved. There are gaps in their armor are filled with practical details that make them feel more grounded. While the Orokin are almost the opposite. Their architecture has organic components similar to bone marrow as a framework to help it repair damage, but it grows into shapes that far look more artificial.
Human ships always looks like AR-15 rifle with all special equipment fitted.
Disagreed, covenant ships look the best.
and i like the UNSC'S ships because i love the idea of a big @$$ gun on every space ship that does a crap ton of damage also a big fan of rail guns
@@8vantor8 MAC's aren't rail guns, they're coil guns.
@Kory Chouinard I understand that, but MAC's in Halo lore are specifically stated to utilize the coil gun concept.
The covie ships at least have a lore explanation for their "exotic" designs. That being: the covenant are religious fanatics and the San-Shyuum are vain AF.
@@jgt2598 i apply that principle to the warhammer 40k imperium ships, their design may not be efficient but it is required by their religion, also you need to take into consideration if an alien species was advanced enough they could make their ships look like whatever they want
I actually think about this exactly the other way. In Halo I really like the Covenant design and the fact it is so different from human ships.
And I am no fan of the "preybirds" (are they called that) You know, these ships from Star Trek, I think they look just strange/bad. I guess we have very different likings in terms of Spaceships.
Im glad someone else has piped in, I usually find myself agreeing with Spacedock on a lot of sci fi related topics but ship design at it's core is an expression of the race that created it, I think all the more spikey fin protrusions the better, we have plenty of defunct pseudo science what's to say other species don't too and in that effect decorate their ships with seemingly useless material that they consider crucial to space travel or what not, that's my two pence anyway
@@thehypest6118 Yea, or even a expression of culture and believe maybe. Human ships look mostly so "generic" and functional and clean because we predict that mankind will believe in science and progress in the future. Maybe Aliens go on spacetravel with a different approach.
Bird of Prey. Originally oversized fighters in space, only for some random Klingon engineer to make a capital ship with that shape.
@@thefirstprimariscatosicari6870 Ah, ok. Thanks for the correction.
I'm really sick of ships that look like space hawks (wings). I prefer my flying titanium space bricks, thank you very much.
I love how all the ships he applauds as having a creative design look the same. if you want to be “realistic”, you’ve got the ship from avatar, which throws its garbage at its enemies because of the power of issac newton
The knowledge gap means we can design the spacecraft in whichever way we wish, in my opinion.
While EVE falls into this trap pretty hard with the Jovians and arguably the Gallente, I think the designs and aesthetics of the rhe Amarr, Minmatar, and Caldari really work. All look designed for what they're intended for but also influenced by their culture and ideas of art.
It’s almost as if it was made so that viewers/players could be able to distinguish, at a simple glance, what was about thoses ships, what faction they belonged to and that they weren’t humans (and so, good guys in 90% of cases)....
I've usually taken the organic, aquatic designs of alien ships to mean they're so far advanced technologically that they can afford to build the kind of impractical "rule of cool" crap that artists dream up. NASA wouldn't have the budget for that kind of stuff. If they did, they'd build two ships of a more practical design.
The one alien ship design that looks most believable to me is a Borg cube. It's functional, versatile, it works in the environment for which it's intended without extra frills, and the very look of it says, "We don't care."
The Borg sphere even more so.
Dave H Most of these organic ships aren’t built. They are grown. Things do not grow in squares unless they’re crystals.
On the contrary, the aquatic design makes them even more practical when it comes to resisting incoming shots, in stark contrast to a more rough edged side which does the exact opposite.
Meaning that in Halo for example, even if build by the same standards and the same materials an Covenant ship would resist incoming fire much better than the UNSC designed ships.
And as with the colours. We are still talking about space.
Space: Where ships have to reach speeds in the tens of thousands of km/h just to have any hopes of reaching the center of an solar system when flying from the edge of it within an sensible time.
In contrast to what we see in films and series where ships can be seen flying by each other each, in reality they wouldnt even be noticable et all.
Given the nature of the speed you are then going with, it further necessitates that ships need to keep a good distance appart from each other ranging at minimun a few thousand km - meaning that its literally impossible to visiually detect an space ships wether its purple green pink , or a simple black on its hull.
Oh and btw. the Borg cube is anything but practicle. In fact the flat surface of the hull makes it so that incoming firepower instead of being redirected unto a larger area like it would do with an curved design, will be absorbed completly on a small area of the surface.
And outside of that the movement part would necessitate that one side is the front and the opposite of that the back due to there needing to be engines. If not and the engine power is placed equally on all 8 sides you would have either crippled your max non FTL speed, or increased your energy requierment by an factor of 8.
And not just that, the 7 additional engines would then also requier constant check ups and repairs - meaning that your incrased your need for ressources and gave just by that your ship 7 additional weak points where when something goes bad, it can comprimise the ship.
The is a reason why a more rocket shaped is generelly prefered - simply because it puts the engines as far away from most parts of the crew as only possible.
And then there are also smaller issues like needing to have a several times more higher need for weapons implacements with further would drain your ressources and consume even more energy.
@Invictus, Except that the Borg cubes are genius in that... You are right now bringing up every reason why the design would leave them vulnerable or limit them... So why do the Borg chose it? Because there is nothing you can do. Borg Cubes aren't attack ships, they aren't remotely military ships... They are very much a drone as the creatures inside them. (also Borg ships self-repair. They don't need a repair crew meaning a more rounded design benefits that... not long)
Well for a such supposed supirior race they are really dumb that is.
I mean using a shape that not just doesnt help them, but serves in all regards as a detrimant is a good sign to this.
Especially since they chose the infirior cube instead of an ball shaped vessel.
And saying that the borg cubes arent military vessels stands kinda contradictory to both their nature and what the cubes are constantly used for it.
Anyway, its about the shape and design.
Talking about the logic and sense behind Start Trek is futile, simply by virtue of it having none at all.
Everything you like looks like it could be off a 70s or 80s scifi book cover. Everything you don't like looks 90s. Is this perhaps more to do with overexposure than any other factor? Weirdly I think that alien spaceship design runs ahead of but kind of parallel to car interiors.
You criticise the imagination applied to alien design generally but this kind of contradicts your 'should be buildable by humans or humanoids.' A species that formed a spacefaring civilisation that originated in a gas giant - or even just underwater, would need radically different properties and design. Not that I'm suggesting that the tired 'organic' style would realistically fit either of those briefs.
Your criticism of
I can see alien ships having bright colors, to human eyes at least, vs military colors. There's a good chance they'd see higher or lower into light spectrum so what looks bright orange to us may be a dull brown or even grey to their eyes.