Arlo said:
Jimmy_C said:
Simpler, but still grebble-looking even thought everything has a purpose. The more complicated the spacecraft, the more uneven it looks. It seems the Star Destroyers actually seem more like an extrapolation than the 1701, when you look at it that way.
That's all fine, but my point, such that it was, is a spaceship doesn't need to look overly complex, which is what some quarters think is the reason the Ole Grey Lady doesn't look "realistic".
I also think that as complexity scales, exteriors do simplify. A Babbage difference engine "looks" more complex than an iMac, but which is more powerful?
All very good points.
In our own lives, we tend to think that things that are smooth, polished, externally simple... those things are MORE complex and more advanced.
Look at the aforementioned IMac... then look at a row of racks with vacuum tubes making up a simple logical multiplier. Fill a whole WAREHOUSE with that sort of "details showing" stuff. NOBODY will think that the latter is more advanced than the former.
ONLY in sci-fi do we assume that "more details visible means more complex." It's completely opposite of what we see in real life.
As I said before, it's really unreasonable to apply too much of the NASA style to ships that will be flying from star system to star system someday in our future. Right now, we're basically on rafts, barely off the shore of our little island here. We have virtually NO experience, and precious little INFRASTRUCTURE for that matter, to draw upon to reflect what we may someday have as an advanced spacefaring culture (as I'm convinced we will someday... LONG after all of us are dead... will be the case).
We're basically tieing sticks together to make rafts. OF COURSE they look crude. If you ask anyone at NASA (I know a few of those folks... some of you do too, I know, and at least one of the frequent posters here actually works FOR NASA), they'll tell you that the techniques we use to make our ships today is far from optimal... but it's the best we've been able to do so far. NOBODY imagines that we'll still be building things the same way in 300 years or so as we do today.
The one thing that Trek establishes, clearly, is that HUMANITY ITSELF is pretty much unchanged from today. We have better technology in that future, but we're still just human (see Khan for specific quotes). People don't have brain implants... people haven't genetically modified themselves to be able to endure exposure to vacuums... we're still just people.
The other thing that's retained is that the humans remain in control of their technology, not vice-versa (as happens so often in Sci-fi). If something breaks, someone has to fix it... the ship isn't an organic, self-healing entity that doesn't really NEED the crew (ala "Moya").
Is the ship made mostly of metal (as I think) or is it some sort of complex ceramic composite (as Andrew Probert tends to believe) or is it something else entirely? Nobody REALLY knows, of course. But one thing we DO know... it's not made of trusswork and boost-to-orbit snap-together modules... it's built as a complete whole. As it SHOULD BE... the truss frames and snap-together modules are a "cheat" that we're FORCED to use today because there's no other way to get the structures into place. You can't build this stuff on the ground, intact, then lift the whole thing up at once. And, SO FAR, we have no way to construct things in space.
But we will. Solar smelters, asteroid mining, lunar mining (which has the advantage of making boosting of raw materials from the surface to free space MUCH less expensive), and so forth are probably going to be realities within the next century, albeit on a limited basis. By two centuries from now, the early infrastructure we're talking about will have been used to build a much more permanent, expansive infrastructure. And ship construction in space, rather than ship or station construction through modular building methods and spacelifting of components, will be the standard constructio methodology.
One reason that most spacecraft we see today looks as it does is because it's UNBELIEVABLY EXPENSIVE to life even an ounce of material from surface to orbit. So, every little bit counts, and what we see are the absolute bare minimum structures. They're amazinging delicate, fragile... really they ARE engineering masterpieces, because everything is balanced on the knife's edge of being JUST strong enough or thick enough or so forth, with pretty much no margin for error.
Change that... make orbital construction (without the need for earth-to-orbit spacelift and its costs) a practical reality. One of the first things you'd do is start providing for a margin of safety in your designs again. You could also try to be more complex in your construction methodology ("snap-together" inherently limits you in MANY MANY ways).
200 years from now, you'll see spaceships being built in orbit or in deep space that will have as little to do with current spacecraft designs as a modern cruise liner has to do with the raft Tom Hanks made in "Cast Away."
It's a mistake to draw too many conclusions based upon where we are now. Other than to state that most everything will be in very light colors... ideally pure white... and that there will be radiator elements to disperse waste heat, with those being very dark... ideally pure black... which can either be rotated or "shuttered off" (depending on which way the spacecraft is facing). Those are "laws of physics" things that are unlikely to be changed anytime soon. Any other conclusions as to what real spacecraft will look like, based upon extrapolation from where we are today, is unlikely to be very accurate.
There is always a "but" with me, huh? I'm possibly way off base here, and one poster in particular has laid into me in the past more than once for bringing this up, but I believe it is more than coincidence that Jefferies was so very intent on rings-as-mega-propulsion-devices for so much of the design process. The problem is, I've never found anyone that hinted that anything like the later idea of negative energy enveloping the ship as a means of maintaining a space warp was bandied about the Paramount lot in 1964. I believe that instead, Jefferies somewhere, somehow was given speculations based on the work of British theorist Sir Hermann Bondi and his 1957 paper predicting that a negative gravitational mass would produce a repulsive gravitational field. Unfortunately, that paper didn't deal with propulsion. Possibly one of the more-informed consultants provided speculation in this area -- of the same kind that resulted in "black stars" before "black holes" found their way into scientific literature. Speculation on negative energy propulsion that didn't get formalized by anyone until several decades later by Robert Forward.
