Victor_D wrote:I'd say that aesthetics are only something sci-fi writers consider. For "real" designers of (space) combat vessels, function is paramount. You don't build ships to look good, you build them to be powerful, well-armed and sufficiently protected. If the resulting design also pleases the eye, that's all good, but it's an unintentional by-product.
For instance, modern "stealth" ships (I mean navy ships, here on Earth) look quite cool, but not because they were supposed to look cool, but because the methods to reduce their radar cross-sectiom accidentally result in something that also looks good.
I don't think it's accidental. Aesthetics and functionality are not entirely independent; combat vehicles look cool in part
because they are functional. We have an inherent visual sense of what makes things dangerous, fast, or powerful.
bunnyboy wrote:I think form given by function is often aesthetic even without any effort to design its appearance.
Essentially this, yeah.
But I think the original post is probably asking mainly about the characteristic of the ships:
GrandAdmiralFox wrote:Now, @Arioch, you might know me as Aaron Neumann via my GMail or MisterArtMaster on DeviantArt... and I have been working on a few ideas on the side and wanted to ask you some questions, particularly on how you 'design' ships in your universe. With so many ways to design ships out there, I wanted to see how you do it so I can perfect my own.
Right now my system is a bit of a god-damned mess. I want the mass and density to be 'realistic' but I also don't want it to be completely constrained by 'realism'... if that makes sense...
The first step is to have an idea of how you want combat to play out, as this will be the most important factor to consider in the design of ships. The rules of space combat don't necessarily have to be strictly realistic, but they should be consistent. Do battles feel like naval ship to ship combat, or air to air dogfights? Do you want to give a feel of WWI/II dreadnought naval combat, or age of sail line battles, or post-WWII carrier warfare? Are battles small-scale duels between small numbers of highly maneuverable ships, or are they large-scale formation clashes between fleets of hundreds or thousands of ships? Are weapons one-shot-kill affairs, or must you hammer at the enemy to wear down his defenses? How important is position? How easy is it to engage an enemy that doesn't want to engage you? Points to consider:
- Size of fleets
- Modes of travel: where do battles happen?
- Speed and maneuverability
- Power of weapons vs. defenses
- Effectiveness of Small Craft vs. Large Vessels
- Effectiveness of Missiles vs. Direct-fire Weapons
In the case of Outsider, we have moderate to large fleet actions with lots of ships. The concept of strategic action is that movement is sort of analogous to timescales in WWII naval combat, in which movement of forces from one location to another takes days or weeks. The predecessor story to Outsider had struggled with a jump drive system modeled on the one used in
The Mote in God's Eye in which ships used a Newtonian model and were limited to 6 G acceleration and could only cruise for long periods at 1-2 G's; this made transits take months. For Outsider, I decided to allow artificial gravity/inertial dampers and increased baseline acceleration to 30G (I think the
Lewis and Clark from
Event Horizon was mentioned to have that capability, and it seemed right). Battle happens on the scales of inner solar systems. I wanted a system with a mix of weapons in which the battleship was king, missiles were a significant but secondary threat, and in which small craft were used but in a niche role. Weapons do significant damage, and ships usually can't resist more than a few direct hits.
Once you have an idea what the rules of combat are, the next step is to develop tactics and doctrines for fighting. It's especially good if you can find more than one tactical doctrine that works, so that opposing sides may have some diversity in how they solve these tactical problems. Your doctrine of fighting will inform how your ships should be designed. For example, the Loroi focus on speed and offensive beam firepower, and make significant use of fighters in a defensive role. The Umiak focus on well-protected ships and powerful short-range weaponry, and use their industrial might to improve their numbers and use of expendable weaponry such as torpedoes. So Loroi ships have long sleek ships with large engines and big guns that point forward, and Umiak ships are lumpy armored chunks that bristle with short weapons that fire in all directions.
Deciding the sizes and masses of ships is a question of doing some research into the scales of real and fictional vessels, and choosing for yourself where on the curve you want to sit. Examples vary widely: many sit close to real-world naval examples (like
Star Trek) in which a typical cruiser is between 200-300m in length and has a similar density to a WWII ship. Some (like
Star Wars have a much grander scale in which vessels can be several kilometers long. Densities are sometimes light to reflect the limitations of accelerating mass in space, and sometimes they are very heavy to indicate the serious hardware that would be needed to generate such huge amounts of power (
Babylon 5, despite its relatively realistic combat rules, had very large Terran vessels with extremely high listed densities).
Finally, a note on armament. I see a lot of fictional design in which the ships are simply encrusted with weaponry; but if you look at real combat vehicles, this is rarely the case. Weapons are usually the most expensive part of the ship, and they often have internal infrastructure requirements (power, heat management, ammunition storage and delivery, etc.), and there is usually a practical limit to how many targets one ship can be expected to engage at one time. Even if your combat rules specify lumbering battlewagons with lots of small guns, there still needs to be some kind of practical restriction on how many guns a ship can mount. Even in the age of sail when ships of the line mounted 100 guns or more, they were limited by weight and arranged in gun decks that by volume only took up a small part of the ship.
If you really want to get deep into how these systems interact, you can model them in game system (I used
Star Fleet Battles and
Starfire, and later
Attack Vector) and simulate some battles to see what works and what doesn't. But that's probably overkill in most cases.