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What do you think are the better.. and the best historical warship (and other vehicles) designs to implement to any Space Warships ?
1. Ironclad -> Pre-Dreadnough (Transitional period that began in 186x and ended in 1905, turrets and broadsides)... Any designs starting from either Virginia, Monitor to Mikasa.... 40k Imperial Navy ships (and also those of many other factions and races) are heavily based on this design.
2. Dreadnough (Turret mount only, no broadsides, AA battery mounted along sponsons).... Many scifi 'space dreadnoughs' are often associated to Leiji Matsumoto fictions (Manga and Anime, ) ever since Space Battleship Yamato (1974) onwards, Captain Harlock's ship... the Arcadia, and Deathshadow are designed as Dreadnoughs.
3. Aerial Fortress Bombers.... Terran Battlecruisers (Starcraft) are more or less influenced by this design (the likes of .. with a supergun (called 'Yamato Cannon'... after the very Space Battleship in the said Scifi, which built with a bow-mounted supergun called Wave-Motion Gun)
4. Zeppelin.... the only space warship with this design was Protoss Carrier from Starcraft.
5. Other...

Capital ships in fiction tend to take three different approaches to the whole thing:

-Oceanic battleships: Star Wars, Warhammer. Big lumbering things that tend to accelerate best in one direction and turn slowly, thereby handling like a boat. These are defined by short-ranged weapons and not great inertial dampening tech, and tend to be armed like pre-Dreadnaught battleships with turrets covering limited arcs of the vehicle.

-Giant railguns: Mass Effect, Ark Royal novels. Tend to feature in slightly harder sci-fi contexts in which the kind of weapon you could put on a turret and flip about quickly and easily isn't a great ship-to-ship gun, so they build their capital ships around giant spinal railguns. Tend to feature in settings where engagement ranges are long enough that turning the whole ship to get a shot lined up isn't too punishing.

-Big starfighters: Star Trek. Quick-and-dirty approach for very soft sci-fi settings where the capital ships pack a ridiculous power-to-weight ratio in a tiny package and can just go flipping about any which way, typically with slow-moving weapons and very good sensors.


As to historical designs:

Trying to apply "Dreadnaught battleship" to space when you're dealing with a 3-dimensional environment is sort of silly; a spaceship is going to have angles of approach that can't be covered by every turret simply by virtue of being in a 3d medium, so arc-restricted weapons are sort of mandatory.

Aerial fortresses tend to violate the rule of perception where humans think things are cool because of our intuitive understanding of aerodynamics (things that are "sleek" look cooler than things that are "chunky"), there's no practical reason for this with spaceships but it contributes to floating-ball-o'-guns designs being rare (they exist, but usually as stationary star-forts/battle-stations (Troy, DS9, etc.) rather than actual "spaceships").

The aesthetic of a zeppelin exists because of the nature of buoyancy in an atmosphere; you'll see them in hard sci-fi because they'd be quite efficient and useful in dense atmospheres if you're the kind of person who sits down and does the math, and you'll see them in steampunk because they fit the aesthetic, but I see people deliberately design airships to look like spaceships (ex. Eberron) way more than I've ever seen anyone design a spaceship to look like a zeppelin.

Taking into account the actual physics of zero-g movement, the Dreadnought style makes the most sense. You can't really avoid attacks, only absorb them.

In addition, the mass ratio that a ship needs to devote to engine and fuel storage decreases the larger the vessel gets. Which means a larger vessel can both have a larger engine(more maneuverability) while also having more capacity for other systems(like armor, weapons, life support, storage). The smaller a ship is, the more of its mass is taken up with simple propulsion and fuel which means its a waste of resources.

Larger ships can also have more in the way of heat dissipation, which is going to be the major issue of any space craft. particularly a warship. A few people have rightly theorized that space combat would really come down to whose ship overheats first, at least to the point where it can no longer fight effectively. Be that because the weapons no longer function or the crew has gotten fatal heat stroke.

Ships would be built around a single main engine or group of engines pointed in the same direction, then you would have directional thrusters to rotate the ship around its center of mass to change its orientation. A ship would slow down or alter its trajectory by flipping itself around so its main engines pointed in the direction it needed to provide new thrust in.

For armaments, it would have its weapons in turret mounts of some kind. Possibly even fully retractable into the hull itself so that they could be shielded from incoming enemy fire while they were reloading. A mixture of railguns and lasers would be a preferred mix. Railguns for actually causing physical damage. Lasers for heating up the enemy ship or blinding sensors, as well as shooting down any guided missiles.

The ships would need extensive methods of removing heat. Its very tough to shed heat in a vacuum. Massive arrays of heat coils to extend surface area. Or even something as crude as using a cooling system that transfers heat into giant chunks of material that when they reach a certain temperature just get ejected from the space craft, and collected later once they've cooled down naturally.


So you'll probably end up with ships that end up looking similar to 40k ship designs for overall profile. turrets that are heavily armored or retract when not actively firing. Arrays of heat sinks shedding radiation to cool the vessel down. But the ships would flip and rotate themselves to change their trajectory, which would mean blind spots wouldn't be a real problem since you can easily rotate the entire ship along any axis via small thrusters.

 AnomanderRake wrote:
Capital ships in fiction tend to take three different approaches to the whole thing:

-Oceanic battleships: Star Wars, Warhammer. Big lumbering things that tend to accelerate best in one direction and turn slowly, thereby handling like a boat. These are defined by short-ranged weapons and not great inertial dampening tech, and tend to be armed like pre-Dreadnaught battleships with turrets covering limited arcs of the vehicle.

-Giant railguns: Mass Effect, Ark Royal novels. Tend to feature in slightly harder sci-fi contexts in which the kind of weapon you could put on a turret and flip about quickly and easily isn't a great ship-to-ship gun, so they build their capital ships around giant spinal railguns. Tend to feature in settings where engagement ranges are long enough that turning the whole ship to get a shot lined up isn't too punishing.

-Big starfighters: Star Trek. Quick-and-dirty approach for very soft sci-fi settings where the capital ships pack a ridiculous power-to-weight ratio in a tiny package and can just go flipping about any which way, typically with slow-moving weapons and very good sensors.


As to historical designs:

Trying to apply "Dreadnaught battleship" to space when you're dealing with a 3-dimensional environment is sort of silly; a spaceship is going to have angles of approach that can't be covered by every turret simply by virtue of being in a 3d medium, so arc-restricted weapons are sort of mandatory.

Aerial fortresses tend to violate the rule of perception where humans think things are cool because of our intuitive understanding of aerodynamics (things that are "sleek" look cooler than things that are "chunky"), there's no practical reason for this with spaceships but it contributes to floating-ball-o'-guns designs being rare (they exist, but usually as stationary star-forts/battle-stations (Troy, DS9, etc.) rather than actual "spaceships").

The aesthetic of a zeppelin exists because of the nature of buoyancy in an atmosphere; you'll see them in hard sci-fi because they'd be quite efficient and useful in dense atmospheres if you're the kind of person who sits down and does the math, and you'll see them in steampunk because they fit the aesthetic, but I see people deliberately design airships to look like spaceships (ex. Eberron) way more than I've ever seen anyone design a spaceship to look like a zeppelin.

So it is easy to conclude that Yamato is impractical IRL space combat? even with itself have 'railgun' thing (In my definition. Railgun shoots solid projectile with strong EMF field pushing projectile forward with at least 1 Mach speeds or more, (EMF) energy acts as propellant but not projectiles, what's your definition of 'railgun'?.. Yamato has 'Wave Motion' supergun as I said before and the clip below did show how the ship of this design fight (and its uncanny ability to beat an entire alien fleet with its turret mounted main guns, with laser weapons served as AA battery)






And Leiji Matsumoto did design bigger (and even badder) space dreadnough (more guns, turrets on its keel). too bad it's not called Yamato even it looked alot like ones or looks like being a successor (due to copyright reasons... I've forgot to tell you that Space Battleship Yamato series (Names and storylines) was owned by Yoshinobu Nishizaki, while Leiji was employed as art designer (Ship and characters). but he contributed much to the project because Nishizaki got a jail term because he went bankrupt and thus Leiji must to the rest... (and once Nishizaki finished his jail terms in 80 or so. he sued Leiji Matsumoto of copyright infringements)

https://tokinowa.fandom.com/wiki/Mahoroba

Do you think this is a practical design? or still ruled that the likes of Mikasa fights better if it becomes spaceship?

I think you're wrong about the engine/fuel efficiency of large ships.

While I am not a physicist, I did A Level Physics. It seems to me that in space there are no factors of drag, so the ability of a ship to manoeuvre and accelerate comes purely from its thrust to weight ratio.

Thus a ship of 10,000 tons with a thrust of 1,000 tons will accelerate just as fast as a ship of 1,000 tons with a thrust of 100 tons.

I don't see any particular reason why a larger ship can't have an equally larger engine. It's just a matter of design and engineering.

Anything based on Soviet warships... that's my answer.

DeathKorp_Rider wrote:
Anything based on Soviet warships... that's my answer.

Name it. The soviet ship that could form a basis of a space warship design. Did they have anything bigger than IJN Yamato class?

 Lone Cat wrote:
Do you think this is a practical design?

No. None of these designs are practical or realistic, at all.

 Lone Cat wrote:
What do you think are the better.. and the best historical warship (and other vehicles) designs to implement to any Space Warships ?
1. Ironclad -> Pre-Dreadnough (Transitional period that began in 186x and ended in 1905, turrets and broadsides)... Any designs starting from either Virginia, Monitor to Mikasa.... 40k Imperial Navy ships (and also those of many other factions and races) are heavily based on this design.
2. Dreadnough (Turret mount only, no broadsides, AA battery mounted along sponsons).... Many scifi 'space dreadnoughs' are often associated to Leiji Matsumoto fictions (Manga and Anime, ) ever since Space Battleship Yamato (1974) onwards, Captain Harlock's ship... the Arcadia, and Deathshadow are designed as Dreadnoughs.
3. Aerial Fortress Bombers.... Terran Battlecruisers (Starcraft) are more or less influenced by this design (the likes of .. with a supergun (called 'Yamato Cannon'... after the very Space Battleship in the said Scifi, which built with a bow-mounted supergun called Wave-Motion Gun)
4. Zeppelin.... the only space warship with this design was Protoss Carrier from Starcraft.
5. Other...

Other: Missile boat. Think boomer in space.

Alternatively 40K. The Rule is Cool.

Space warship designs are, at least in pop culture, pretty universally wholly inappropriate to what interstellar vessels would likely look like.

More to the point, any vessel capable sporting the kinds of devices often claimed is going to be orders of magnitude more powerful than what is portrayed and function along entirely different paradigms. A vessel with a fusion reactor capable of traversing star systems as sublight speed is at the bottom of the barrel for most scifi settings, but any such vessel in real life, regardless of purpose, would be capable of sporting firepower that would put any visual scifi portrayal any spaceships that I can recall to shame, simply because such portrayal makes for really bad TV/Movie stuff and doesn't fit most people's headspace.

I think the Expanse has done the best job of portraying likely space warship design in some respects of any setting I can recall.

Ultimately I suspect that a space warship is going to look a whole lot like a giant reactor covered in armor of some sort, point defense weaponry that could be akin to nuclear machineguns and gigawatt lasers, and docking points/hangars/production facilities, surrounded by a huge swarm of networked drone weapons (think railguns or giant lasers or missile bays with their own thrusters and engines) of various sizes and purposes spread out over tens of thousands of kilometers backed up by extensive AI and electronic warfare apparatuses, or something similarly nonsequitur to our current visualization of spaceships.

http://www.adastragames.com/products?category=Miniatures

Look at the renders for the "Attack Vector" minis. I followed the conversations around this gakme's design on the sf-consim-world Yahoo! group, and from what I could tell, it had the most effort put into it to portray "realism" in space combat. The main areas of "fantasy" were imagining laser weapons and engine thrusts several orders of magnitude higher than they "should" be.

The spiky thing at the end of the ships is the nuclear rocket engine and its radiators - kept away from the inhabited section to reduce radiation levels. The spherical and cylindrical shapes are both trade-offs in various areas of performance, but I can't quite remember what those tradeoffs are right now; I think the sphere is more manoeuvrable, but the cylinder provides more useful internal volume and a smaller cross-section from the front.

Not visible are the radiators - they're unfurled like wings to get rid of the waste heat, but since they drop the ship's max acceleration from a few g to a few milli-g, running out the radiators effectively renders a ship non-combat effective and in combat is treated as a sign of surrender.

The weapons are lasers, electromagnetic coilguns firing semi-guided projectiles and missiles.

The time frame is, IIRC, a couple of centuries in the future.

There's also the 'rule of cool' to consider.

Star Wars works because Starfighters are so deadly. That allows the Rebel Alliance to have an actual edge.

Sure, in relative power a Star Destroyer is king. But as we repeatedly see in canon media, Starfighters can take them out, due to pinpoint attacks on vital systems (or indeed, just stacking it into the main bridge, allowing gravity to do the rest).

That all allows for literally cinematic battles. You get to feel the thrill of being a fighter pilot dogfighting similar ships, whilst taking out the big boys. It translates well into computer games too - if not actual tabletop.

Trying to imagine a future space warship I had the idea of a wide square flat plate, quite thin in comparison to its width.

The idea is that with no drag, it can move with its wide face forwards as easily as its narrow edge. The weapons could be mounted in an array across the face, allow for better resolution when targetting.

The ship could turn its narrow side to the enemy to minimise its target profile, while if hit from the front (flat face) lots of attacks would smash through easily and do relaively little damage to the ship as a whole.

If you're going by practicality, then once you're outside gravity/air shape is irrelevant but in 3D space the toughest shape in a sphere - anything but a direct hit will be glancing or against sloping armor.

If you're confident you can't be surrounded and can face an opponent, then a wedge or zeppelin is best.

So you're really looking at either a Death Star or a Star Destroyer from a practical point of view.

A sphere has the disadvantage that it offers the least surface area to volume for heat dissipatio.

Also, any attack which penetrates the armour will cause maximum additional damage by secondary projective effects within the hull.

There is no such thing as armor on a realistic space warship. The amount of mass required to have any meaningful level of protection would be far higher than just taking redundant systems and would put the ship badly into the death spiral of increasing reaction mass needs. Once you start talking about armor in space you're well into "a space wizard did it" territory, and you might as well use whatever you think looks cool.

 Peregrine wrote:
There is no such thing as armor on a realistic space warship. The amount of mass required to have any meaningful level of protection would be far higher than just taking redundant systems and would put the ship badly into the death spiral of increasing reaction mass needs. Once you start talking about armor in space you're well into "a space wizard did it" territory, and you might as well use whatever you think looks cool.

Against solid objects there is still room for armor, even when something might have a relative KPH in the 6 figures.

Yes, real space warships, and space ships in general, will be huge. We're talking almost 40k scale if we are being realistic, simply because traveling in space is an ordeal so when you do travel you want to bring as much stuff with you as possible. If you're going to have a vessel to transport stuff mined in the asteroid belt back to orbit of either Mars or Earth you're going to want to have massive cargo space.

Thats just inter-system ships as well. Any ship that we build to make a journey to another star system would need to be even more massive. It would have to have its own biospheres on board to transport plants and animals, grow crops for the colonists over many generations, etc... Such a vessel would be at minimum several kilometers long and wide.

Micro-asteroids today blow right through our satellites and space craft because we don't armor them and the vessels are extremely tiny. But if you're making a vessel that is several kilometers long you can start putting armor with a thickness measured in meters or tens of meters. Not to mention we will come up with better materials. Stuff that can resist micro-asteroids or incoming railgun slugs.

Just about any form of "viable" space warship (at least, one that results in an interesting game or book about them shooting at each other) relies on magic - usually in the form of the engines.

One description I read about spacecraft combat in the nearish future was something like "opposing cities firing ICBMs at each other and attempting to dodge using continental drift".

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:
There is no such thing as armor on a realistic space warship. The amount of mass required to have any meaningful level of protection would be far higher than just taking redundant systems and would put the ship badly into the death spiral of increasing reaction mass needs. Once you start talking about armor in space you're well into "a space wizard did it" territory, and you might as well use whatever you think looks cool.

Against solid objects there is still room for armor, even when something might have a relative KPH in the 6 figures.

...if we are being realistic...

...make a journey to another star system...

…if you're making a vessel that is several kilometers long you can start putting armor with a thickness measured in meters or tens of meters. Not to mention we will come up with better materials. Stuff that can resist micro-asteroids or incoming railgun slugs.

I'm not sure if those excerpts belong in the same post.

Given the unfeasibility of interstellar travel today, when we can already accelerate railgun projectiles to 6 figure km/h speeds, how much armour are you going to require to defend projectiles at the speeds humans will be capable of firing them at by the time we have the technology to seriously consider building kilometres-long interstellar generation ships (if we every get to that)?

 Kilkrazy wrote:
A sphere has the disadvantage that it offers the least surface area to volume for heat dissipatio.

There would be no reason not to have retractable fins to aid with heat dissipation, or have some kind of heat pump/cooling system to get it around the surface area. I was admittedly thinking more about handling projectile weapons rather than energy weapons.

Assuming there are more lasers than rockets in space, then the best shape would be some kind of fractal spiney thing to dissipate heat and potentially just have disposable fins that can jetison to keep the damage separate from the core ship.

One thing about some starship designs is they reflect the mentality of priorities of the designers.

For instance, the imperial star destroyer gets ragged on constantly because the bridge is waay up above the rest of the ship, looking down on it, and exposed to attack.

Well, that reflects the attitude of the empire that designed it and the realities of that universe.

The empire is a fascistic state and ultra authoritarian. Most of the crew of a ship like a SD is probably conscripted. The officers are generally picked for loyalty and political reliability.

Putting the bridge up above the ship, putting the officers above the "peons", looking down on them, basically is how the empire sees things.

Also, mutinies are probably a real possibility on a ship in the imperial fleet. So you make ALL the vital controls up in the bridge, then have a restricted and controllable access point to it, with choke points, heavy security, etc between it and the rest of the ship.

Sure, it means the ship can be taken out by a good bridge hit, but notice how the main shield generators are right there on the bridge section?

Also, if a ship is lost to a bridge hit, the empire doesn't really care, it just spits out another ship, promotes some good little loyalists to command it and rounds up a few thousand more conscripts to crew it.

That's the empire's attitude.

Now look at the enterprise from TOS. It's design is basically built around saving as much of th crew as possible. The warp engines are powerful, and dangerous, so they're mounted on pylons to let them be jettisoned if they destabilize and become a danger to the ship. Likewise the dangerous scary antimatter is generally kept in the read hull, th engineering hull so if it becomes dangerous the saucer, which at any given time will have the majority of the crew in it, can separate to save as many lives as possible.

That's the federation's ideology for you.

A kilngon battlecruiser has a boom section that can detach to save some people, but just the officers and other VIPs. To hell woith the majority of the crew, they aren't important.

That's the klingon empire for you.

The psychology and attitudes of the polity designing a ship in a high tech universe will affect the final design of the ship.

The bridge is also on the top of most Federation ships as well...

B5's Earthforce ships and BSG had their CICs deep in the hull. Those were fighting ships.

Adama doesn't do push ups. He pushes the Gallactica down. . .

Starship design will be controlled by available technologies.

In a setting with no FTL, interstellar craft will have huge ablative baffles in the front to absorb interstellar medium at percentages of light speed. They'll also have massive available power for energy weaponry - also to deal with interstellar medium, but they'll work on other starships just fine.

In a setting where heat management is a thing (Battletech comes to mind), you should have massive heat radiating fins on space craft. These also serve as good places for maneuvering thrusters, so the complex geometry ships a lot of anime shows could be practical in that regard.

In a setting where close range engagements actually happen (as opposed to light-seconds away), turrets and broadsides are reasonable options. When close ranges means light seconds away, spinal mounted weaponry makes a lot more sense.

Other things like 'deflector shields', 'jump drives' and so forth will further dictate ship design. If your jump drive is required to be 10km long, your ships are by default 10km long.

 Grey Templar wrote:
But if you're making a vessel that is several kilometers long you can start putting armor with a thickness measured in meters or tens of meters.

You really can't, at least not if you want to build a mobile warship and not a static space station. All that armor adds obscene amounts of mass, which means more reaction mass required to get the same delta-V, and that means more reaction mass to compensate for the additional mass, and more reaction mass to compensate for that mass, and on and on in an exponential death spiral. There's a reason real spacecraft are designed to be as light as possible and engineers will spend huge amounts of money to figure out how to make even small mass reductions. The last thing anyone is going to do is add a whole bunch of dead weight to a design to have a small chance of surviving a hit.

Now, if you want to talk about engines with enough efficiency that this isn't a problem then sure, you can have armor. But at that point you're deep into "a space wizard did it" and there's no point in talking about what makes sense from a realism point of view. Just make whatever looks cool and be done with it.

Under known physics, armour is indeed absolutely pointless unless your ships are Space Shuttles with WW2 era cannon. And it just gets worse the more tech you add in.

From a point of absolute ignorance....

Would that not depend upon the type of armour and type of weapons?

I mean, sheet steel is pretty pointless. But, some kind of ceramic type stuff might prove effective against energy weapons and that?

 Peregrine wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
But if you're making a vessel that is several kilometers long you can start putting armor with a thickness measured in meters or tens of meters.

You really can't, at least not if you want to build a mobile warship and not a static space station. All that armor adds obscene amounts of mass, which means more reaction mass required to get the same delta-V, and that means more reaction mass to compensate for the additional mass, and more reaction mass to compensate for that mass, and on and on in an exponential death spiral. There's a reason real spacecraft are designed to be as light as possible and engineers will spend huge amounts of money to figure out how to make even small mass reductions. The last thing anyone is going to do is add a whole bunch of dead weight to a design to have a small chance of surviving a hit.

Now, if you want to talk about engines with enough efficiency that this isn't a problem then sure, you can have armor. But at that point you're deep into "a space wizard did it" and there's no point in talking about what makes sense from a realism point of view. Just make whatever looks cool and be done with it.

Presumably the weight saving is mostly to offset the energy needed to escape gravity, rather than to do with maneuvering in the vacuum of space?

Herzlos wrote:
Presumably the weight saving is mostly to offset the energy needed to escape gravity, rather than to do with maneuvering in the vacuum of space?

A freight train doesn't need a bigger engine than a Roomba because of air friction.

Even without gravity you still have inertia. Mass will always be relevant unless your power/propulsion system gets space-magic levels of good. Or you resign yourself to very slow turns/acceleration.

Herzlos wrote:
Presumably the weight saving is mostly to offset the energy needed to escape gravity, rather than to do with maneuvering in the vacuum of space?

Having a vacuum doesn't change anything about mass. Air resistance is about shape, not mass, and you still have to apply significant amounts of energy to get anywhere in space. For example, if you want to go from low earth orbit to lunar orbit you need ~4.8km/s of delta-V, with the total energy depending on the mass of the spacecraft. Higher mass, higher energy required to get the same change in velocity. Higher energy required, greater reaction mass spent. And of course needing more reaction mass means that the total mass of the spacecraft is higher, including the mass of additional fuel tanks to hold that reaction mass, leading to needing more reaction mass to haul the first additional reaction mass. And then you've added more mass to the spacecraft, requiring more reaction mass. And so on in an exponential death spiral. Adding immense mass in armor plating is the kind of thing that turns your spacecraft into a stationary fortress because you no longer have sufficient delta-V to go anywhere.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Nevelon wrote:
Even without gravity you still have inertia. Mass will always be relevant unless your power/propulsion system gets space-magic levels of good. Or you resign yourself to very slow turns/acceleration.

And note that you still have a lot of gravity to deal with, from both the planetary and solar gravity wells. What we call "zero g" in orbit is just the point where the apparent gravity is zero because the orbiting spacecraft is constantly falling at 1-g acceleration. It's still very much under the effects of gravity.