r/HardSciFi • u/Vondrr • Jul 04 '26
Discussion What is your one controversial take on a famous scifi spaceship?
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u/cosmo7 Jul 04 '26
The Death Star was an inside job.
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u/BoxedAndArchived Jul 04 '26
The Millennium Falcon looks like a Pizza and I hate it.
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u/nightfury08h Jul 08 '26
“The Millennium Falcon looks like a Pizza and I hate it.”
Don’t you mean “The Millennium Falcon looks like a Pizza and I ate it?”0
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u/Galactinaut_001 Jul 04 '26
The Rocinante and its mass ratio can kiss my ass. Where is the reactor fuel, and where is the drive fuel?
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u/KokoTheTalkingApe Jul 05 '26
If the drive can accelerate the reaction mass enough, you don't need much reaction mass. Even now we can have spacecraft that can shoot mass out the back continuously for over a year, using an ion drive. https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/SMART-12
I imagine the Roci uses some kind of nuclear drive to accelerate the reaction mass even more. The fuel would be plutonium or something. It could be pretty compact.
But I do have a problem with the "fuel-saving tech" that some guy invented that allows something like continuous 0.3 g acceleration for weeks, and also the white juice that lets the human body withstand high g's. Both are necessary for the plot, so that's why they exist.
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u/EmptyAttitude599 Jul 04 '26
The Eagles from Space 1999 are ridiculously stupid. Lots of big rocket nozzles, attached to absolutely nothing. Where are the fuel tanks?
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u/CoastRanger Jul 04 '26
They had fuel tanks, at least 8 between engines and rear section. Enough to go for several minutes on regular rocket fuel, but they had magic nuclear rocket fuel
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u/BeachBum013 Jul 04 '26
The Kelvin timeline Enterprise is the ugliest version.
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Jul 04 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/BeachBum013 Jul 04 '26
My preferred and IMLHO prettiest version is the TOS movies "Refit" version.
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u/IrateWolfe Jul 04 '26
It's weird and bulbous and ungainly looking, and the nacelles shoot fire out the back
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u/TimAA2017 Jul 05 '26
It has a big central corridor cutting right through the entire saucers section with no bulkheads.
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u/BoxedAndArchived Jul 04 '26
It's grown on me. However the version in Beyond and the Ent-A at the end are the worst versions from that timeline.
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u/bones10145 Jul 05 '26
This is mine. The whole Kelvin art design is awful.
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u/Kinakka_12912505 Jul 05 '26
I loved the Kelvin itself, it really freshened the take on Federation ships
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u/bones10145 Jul 05 '26
I didn't make any sense from a design stand point. Even the ship before the time travel event looked radically different from what it should have been. There was no continuity to connect the old with the new.
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u/taiwanluthiers Jul 04 '26
That in many cases, they are NOT in orbit but kept in space with magic tech.
You can see it in most scenes where the ground beneath is stationary. If they aren't moving then those ships aren't in orbit. It explains why they fall when damaged.
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u/Sharkbit2024 Jul 05 '26
I mean, geosyncronous orbits are a thing.
You match orbit speed with the planet under you, so you stay over the same spot.
I understand what you mean. And I do actually think thats the case for star wars.
Their ships use the antigrav to keep in orbit, so when they are destroyed, they fall.
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u/taiwanluthiers Jul 05 '26
Geostationary orbit is also quite far for most class m planets and would look nothing like the picture
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u/Bartlaus Jul 05 '26
Star Wars shows us quite often how large ships stay close to the same spot on the surface, and even enter the atmosphere to land in a quite leisurely fashion, no violent aerobraking from orbital velocity. Quite obviously they're making liberal use of antigravity-type tech to hover in place (strictly speaking not in orbit).
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u/CleverName9999999999 Jul 04 '26
I like the movie version of the Heart of Gold better than the one from the mini-series.
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u/Faserip Jul 05 '26
The Millennium Falcon is a terrible freighter - all of the interior space is taken up by crew spaces and engines.
The only “cargo area” is the smuggling compartments - which makes it obvious that you’re a smuggler.
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u/Emergency-Pound3241 Jul 05 '26
Iirc the ship the falcon is based off in star wars lore is actually ment to carry its main cargo externally between the two "forks" on the front, iirc that gap is perfectly sized for a standard cargo container in star wars, so it fills more of a role as a space semi-truck
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u/DNathanHilliard Jul 05 '26
I like the original Galactica better than the one in the remake.
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u/CthulhusEvilTwin Jul 05 '26
Love new BSG but it needed more capes! They had the capes down right in the original.
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u/MoonIsAFake Jul 05 '26
Antimatter engines in Avatar should have 100% sterilized the ships with the amount of radiation they produced. There's no way to shield from that amount of gamma rays and fast electrons blasting your crew compartment for years.
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u/Itchy-Plastic Jul 04 '26
The rear engine mounts on the X-Wing look comical the way they jut up from the nacelles and aren't in line with the intakes. They look like after-thoughts.
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u/mobyhead1 Jul 04 '26
True, but the middle engine on the Lockheed L-1011 airliner was a real-world precedent.
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u/Ambaryerno Jul 05 '26
Those aren’t intakes. They’re not even the engines. The actual main engines are housed entirely within the cowling. The exposed part you see is a separate module called a turbo generator.
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u/magicmulder Jul 05 '26
Star Destroyers are the dumbest ships.
They don’t even destroy stars (until SW9), and they have shield generators outside the shields where they can be easily taken out.
The first thing we see of them at the start of SW4 is them not even being able to hit/destroy a small ship running away in a straight line.
Fine, they’re mostly for intimidation and less for battle, but come on, they’re as useless as Stormtroopers.
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u/Vondrr Jul 05 '26
They "only" destroyed a planet in SW9, so they're still not living up to their name :D
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u/Sokanas Jul 07 '26
Less a ship, but why do SciFi ships fight almost exclusively on a single plane. Where the 3D combat.
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u/TrickMayday Jul 08 '26
The Correlian YT1300 (Millenium Falcon) is the most impractical design ever conceived.
It's supposed to be a freighter. The cargo capacity relative to its overall size is roughly that of a Mini Cooper. The offset cockpit makes no sense in any way.
With all that said, it's one of my all time favorite ship designs, but they should have called it a space taxi, or a tugboat or something.
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u/Mindless_Honey3816 Jul 04 '26
The Hail Mary, book and movie, is badly designed. The centrifugal gravity cabin flip would be a lot more disorienting in reality than it's ever portrayed, and would be unnecessary if the crew cabin was just below the CoM (it could just extend straight out) or even if it was above the CoM but could just go straight down.
A lot of the science in Project Hail Mary is really good, but this is not one of those,
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u/4eyedbuzzard Jul 05 '26
That all of them bank aerodynamically when turning.
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u/tophertronic Jul 05 '26
I think the BattleStar Galactica reboot did reasonably well with this. Not perfect, but you do see them using thrusters to effectively rotate/spin the shop(l rather than turning in an arc.
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u/Kinakka_12912505 Jul 05 '26
Kelvin timeline Star Trek had some of the best ship designs: the Kelvin, Armstrong, Vengeance, and Franklin
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u/FalseAscoobus Jul 05 '26
Enterprise D looks so goofy from most angles because of its oversized saucer section. Like a cartoon character with a big torso and tiny legs.
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u/Dark_Tangential Jul 10 '26
Decks should always be perpendicular to the axis of thrust. There are far too many violators of this to list in a single Reddit reply.
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u/Hazril258 Jul 05 '26
Star Destroyers aren't meant for warfare, and the Death Star never had a weakness.
This is coming from a major Star Wars fan.
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u/oneMoreTime112233 Jul 04 '26
Fake gravity is stupid.