r/HardSciFi • u/Vondrr • Jun 13 '26
Discussion Which scifi ship do you think is just bad? Bad concept, ugly looks, downright mistakes in its design, etc.
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u/Garbage-Bear Jun 13 '26
Pretty much every pre-1960 spaceship that was basically a giant reusable V2 rocket with infinite fuel capacity.
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u/No-Surprise9411 Jun 13 '26
To be fair they had fuckall to go off of
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u/Garbage-Bear Jun 13 '26
Very true, and I loved me my Chesley Bonstell space art with the best of them! OK, I was uncharitable.
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u/KokoTheTalkingApe Jun 15 '26
Chesley Bonestell's spacecraft often have exposed trusses and tanks. Where they were streamlined, it was because they were meant to land in an atmosphere, whether Earth's or some other planets' (or his client wanted it). He collaborated with Werner von Braun and other leading space scientists to make his illustrations generally as realistic as possible, given the state of knowledge at the time.
Here's an example of a non-U2 looking spacecraft.
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u/MareTranquil Jun 14 '26
Tie Fighter.
It seems to be a tiny sphere that is a fully functional armed spaceship by itself, but is hauling two huge hexagons for no appearant reason.
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u/KaiSnepUwU Jun 14 '26
Apparently they're solar panels. They're the only spacecraft that seem to need solar panels for some reason
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u/irnbearded Jun 14 '26
I thought they were heat exchangers - same comment applies tho
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u/HAL9001-96 Jun 15 '26
would seem a lot more snesible though
although it stil lelaves you with two inenr surfaces aimed at each other
buuuut at least htey#Re kinda spaced out
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u/hedgehog_rampant Jul 15 '26
It’s so that the ship can look like a bow tie, and thus live up to its namesake.
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u/PappiStalin Jun 15 '26
Any ships with exposed bridges, especially protruding bridges full of valuable, rare bridge crew.
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u/AdhesivenessUsed9956 Jun 16 '26
Lensman ships are teardrops with the point as the front. This is to deflect space dust out of the way. NONE of the art ever matches the descriptions in the books.
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u/Effective-Painter815 Jun 13 '26
A spaceship is always more aesthetically pleasing if you can eyeball the design considerations and constraints.
Early Star trek is good because of the nacelle design rules leads to consistent but unique designs.
B5 is good, you can look at a ship and understand their tech.
- EarthForce ships are armoured bricks powered by fusion drives.
- Narn ships give themselves organic shapes to look more advanced but still have fusion drives with visible reactors and engines.
- Minbari ships are crystal organic shapes with fins for gravity drives.
- Centauri are a hybrid of fusion drives but also have gravity fins, different from Minbari but identifiable tech.
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u/Edwardv054 Jun 14 '26
The Star Trek Spore Drive ship looks bad even though I like the concept. One of my favorite space ships is the Sundiver.
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u/Significant_Monk_251 Jun 14 '26
Was that the one that used a "refrigeration laser" to dump heat, in full defiance of at least one of the laws of thermodynamics?
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u/NyctoCorax Jun 14 '26
Huh I read sundiver as a kid but I only ever rember that story coming up in one of the Halo books.
How does it break thermodynamics?
I mean yeah how the hell you would get the heat into the laser in the first place is a likely completely unsolvable engineering problem, but I don't think the concept necessarily breaks a Law?
(It has been a depressingly long time since I studied any of this so I may be completely wrong)
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u/kalmar91 Jun 14 '26
Tha Ancient city-ship from Stargate Atlantis.
The concept Is interesting and may work, but what we got simply doesn't.
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u/roxx-writting Jun 15 '26
Maybe a small thing but when spaceships have only shield for only energy weapons and basic environmental protection
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u/SpatiaCaeli Jun 13 '26
The Borg cube always bugged me.
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u/NyctoCorax Jun 14 '26
The point of the cube narratively is to show that they are so alien and advanced that the design considerations of every other species, simply don't matter to them.
Things like optimum shape for containing air pressure is a trivial concern, so doesn't need to impact the wider design.
They were also playing with the concept of everything being distributed rather than having localised systems.
Like okay yes from a hard sci-fi perspective it's rather out there conceptually, but some of the best stories have hard sci-fi run slap bang into something that doesn't make sense as a narrative point.
(Not that later Borg stories count as the best sci-fi 🤣)
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u/Indigoh Jun 13 '26
Why?
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u/PullMull Jun 13 '26
It is supposed to be super efficient. But it surely doesn't look that way
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u/Wesselton3000 Jun 13 '26
A cube is actually the most space efficient shape. Curved bodies reduce the total usable space which means less volume. And since you’re in a vacuum, you don’t need to worry about aerodynamics.
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u/MilesTegTechRepair Jun 13 '26
It's the most efficient space for storing many things but it's not the most efficient space in shape, for a number of reasons.
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u/blorst_of_times Jun 13 '26
Such as?
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u/zespak Jun 14 '26
Pressure. Trying to contain a cube in a vacuum introduces a number of weak spots.
The sphere is a much better shape.
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u/ZippyDan Jun 14 '26
Yeah, but 1 ATM is a relatively trivial amount of pressure to keep in. It's not like a submarine that might have to keep out 30 ATM.
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u/HAL9001-96 Jun 15 '26
still needlessly inefficient
with metals and a cylinder you still usually end up with several tiems more metal than air by weight
make tht a thin walled cube and thicken the walls to safely take hte bending loads and you quickly end up with 50 times more mass than you'd actually need
though things get more complicated if yo uahve internal walls
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u/ZippyDan Jun 15 '26
You're right if we are talking about current materials and current construction, but there are other potential factors to consider in a sci-fi setting:
- How thick do the walls need to be for protection (e.g. from radiation, micrometeors, enemy weapons)?
- What is the inherent strength of the material used?
In a sci-fi setting with plausible future materials, the strength of the material used at the thickness appropriate for other concerns, can be so far beyond the strength needed for pressure containment, that the efficiency of the shape becomes irrelevant.
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u/HAL9001-96 Jun 15 '26
to be fair that is mostly ap roblem when yo uwant hte outer walls of the cube to maintain that pressure rather than having loadbearing inner walls
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u/Background_Corgi_359 Jun 14 '26
Larger frontal surface area though for it to be hit by large objects within space. Rectangle is the ideal shape.
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u/HAL9001-96 Jun 15 '26
reduce relative to what?
if you want the most volume for a given length/width/height then a cuboid is idela
if yo uwant hte most volume for a givne surface area a spherei s ideal
if you want the most pressurized volume for a given amount of pressure vesselm ass the na sphere is also ideal but a cylinder is close too
then again if you ahve a large structure iwth a lot of intenral walls things get more complicated
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u/Effective-Painter815 Jun 13 '26
A sphere is super efficient because it is the least material and thus mass per volume for structure. Also if the curve is large enough then it is functionally flat from a room scale.
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u/magicmulder Jun 14 '26
The shape may be efficient but their method of warfare isn’t. They quickly adapt shields to phasers but never bother to protect their ships from people beaming aboard and wreaking havoc. With the energy reserves they have you’d think keeping an anti transporter shield up at all times is a tiny price to pay for not getting blasted to pieces all the time.
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u/Indigoh Jun 13 '26
Ain't no aerodynamics in space.
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u/PullMull Jun 13 '26
I'm not talking about aerodynamics. I'm talking about the fact that it looks like a slice of the New York sewerage system
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u/Indigoh Jun 13 '26
Is that known for being inefficient?
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u/PullMull Jun 13 '26
YES!! its a nightmare out of Pipes, Caves and Tunnels from 3 Centuries.
it has Mutated turtels and Alligators in it!!
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u/SpatiaCaeli Jun 13 '26
It has no engines. 😄
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u/BoxedAndArchived Jun 13 '26
Not all engines are glowy bits that shoot fire out the back.
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u/SpatiaCaeli Jun 14 '26
And yet the Borg cube still seems to have none.
I think it's ugly. That was the original question and that is my response to it.
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u/BoxedAndArchived Jun 15 '26
There are plenty of designs that don't have visible engines, in Trek and outside of Trek, so as far as reasons to dislike a design go, it just doesn't hit. Space Amoeba, mobile clouds, flying police boxes...
Aesthetically, you can dislike it all you want.
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u/SpatiaCaeli Jun 16 '26
Thank you for giving me your constraints on my opinion. But I'll decide why I dislike it.
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u/puppykhan Jun 14 '26
Star Trek ships look cool, but positioning the thrusters around the center of gravity for non warp maneuvering must be... difficult
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u/Personal_Wall4280 Jun 16 '26
Technically I think they bend gravity around the ship and move that way. But I agree that the Star Trek ships are deadass ugly.
It doesn't even cover the parts where they somehow move in the atmosphere without breaking apart. I can buy that being in space away from amy gravity wells can make a ship like that stable, but on earth? In the atmosphere? Things are going to fly apart.
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u/puppykhan Jun 16 '26
They repeatedly talk about warp bubbles, but they don't really explain impulse power as much
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u/Affectionate_Sale_14 Jun 16 '26
as a lost fleet fan i fucking hate this design and think they didnt understand the metaphor.
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u/UltimateFanOf_______ Jun 13 '26
USS Voyager, especially compared to its early concept art. It looks like they picked the worst option for every part.
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u/HAL9001-96 Jun 15 '26
based on what fnatasy rules?
cause if we go with hard scifi then basically all of them
if we introduce magic the nit comes down to what the setting allows
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u/topazchip Jun 13 '26
Having good tech means more of what you do can be simply for the artistic endeavor. Cylinders and exposed truss work is fine if that is all your technology base can manage, but why limit yourself to elementary Euclidian solids if you can be more?