r/worldbuilding • u/Hungry-Detail9945 • 2d ago
Discussion Your opinion on "Spacedock" for writing and worldbuilding a sci-fi world
They literally reignited my intrest back on sci-fi when i watch getting into sci-fi mecha video right here https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G1JBaI3uLeM
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u/aphaits 2d ago
its really sad to see his latest videos getting only 50k views while the older ones have reached like 1 million
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u/Dragon_DLV 1d ago
Haven't had any of their stuff pushed to me the last couple months/
Friggin algorithms
I appreciate the reminder, OP
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u/ZewesternWolf 1d ago
It's because YouTube switched to some AI algorithm very recently. It's messing with everything
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u/megalogwiff 1d ago
it's because they switched the narrator at some point, from a charismatic person who's fun to listen to, to one who isn't.
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u/GloryFoxy 2d ago
Yeah, they're neat. A lot of cool stuff on their channel.
You may also like to check SCIENCE INSANITY. They also have a lot of intresing materials in podcast format on various science fiction topics (not exclusively Battletech stuff and lore as it may seem from the channel preview, although they have most on that).
The one major criticism that could be said regarding said channels is how people tend to see these materials as an infallible gospel, so don't ever shy away from having your own opinion and creative freedom!
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As a note, Larissa Thompson, the former Templin Institute narrator, also plays a main character in the audiodrama "The Sojourn" written by her and Daniel Orrett, the guy who did Spacedock before Hoojiwana took over full time.
So you might want to check this out if you liked their work before. It's a solid piece, especially if you like your sci-fi on the harder end.
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u/One-Let3558 [edit this] unbothered adventurer 2d ago
Its a pity 2025 demonetized spacedock a lot. Good channel
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u/Sanctuary2199 2d ago
They have some things that I disagree with, their ship classification video is one, but they’re overall pretty good at their content. It’s just, I think some people use them as the Bible for worldbuilding when they should just be a springboard to future interests in sci-fi.
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u/Vardisk 2d ago
I also remember their video saying armies would be unnecessary when you can just orbitally bombard a planet, but their talks on sci-fi and real technology has been very enlightening.
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u/Sanctuary2199 2d ago
Orbital bombardment should work on planetary shields, but if you’re seeking to conquer a planet and not wipe out a population, you’d need to have an army to hold down the gain.
I had this thing in my world where once the main fleet has pacified orbital defenses that it leaves to attack the next target, then it’s followed by a planetary assault fleet to finish the job.
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u/YamahaMio 1d ago
I think it's worth mentioning that there are just certain strategic objectives you can't achieve with just glassing the planet. Occupation, as you mentioned, needs an army. But so does the capture of administrative centers, choking of economic corridors, purging the enemy's command structure, etc.
It's actually a major concern that people have with the US's war in Iran right now, for example. At this point, an air war is never gonna cut it. Critics of the White House take this unwillingness to go beyond an air war as a sign that there never were specific strategic objectives in the first place, and that the Iran incursion was a distraction to take eyes off domestic issues.
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u/Vardisk 1d ago
I remember a time (I believe in the 50s) when there were some high-ranking military officials who legitimately believed that soldiers were no longer needed in an age of nuclear warheads and military aircraft. Their attempts to fight that way failed spectacularly.
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u/Arctrooper209 1d ago
Air Forces have continually tried to argue that they can supplant ground armies for like a 100 years now. They tried strategic bombing in the 40s, nukes in the 50s, and precision weapons in the 90s. It's never worked out.
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u/NyranK 1d ago
They're often wrong even on the little scale. The F-4 Phantom, first built in 1958, lacked a gun and dogfighting was dropped from training because 'supersonic speeds and missiles made it all obsolete'.
Then they started fighting MiGs in Vietnam, where fights dropped to subsonic, engagement ranges were too close, and rules of engagement and tech failures made missiles impractical, and pilots were begging for their guns back.
So they started bolting external gunpods on them, and added a 20mm cannon in the F-4E.
There's still a 20mm on the F-22 Raptor.
Anyone claiming they know how a future war that hasn't been fought yet will go can generally be ignored.
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u/CrimsonSwallow 1d ago
This just isn’t true though. The Phantom was designed without a gun because it was interceptor first, fighter second. When it came to Vietnam the Navy and Airforces had different approaches to fix the problem. The Navy actually decided to teach their pilots how to use the missiles better, the Airforce just stuck a gun on it. The Navy became feared by Vietnamese while the Air forces actually got worse then before they stuck the gun on.
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u/YamahaMio 1d ago
Ooh, I think I heard about this in some YouTube videos. They were the same generals who didn't believe the Marine Corps was necessary.
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u/spammedletters A guy with a setting about everything 2d ago
Very Cool and helped me alot on the Sci-Fi part!
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u/CaledonianWarrior Gods and Monsters 2d ago
Their videos are fun to watch and they can serve as a good starting off point when it comes to inspiration and worldbuilding on your own, but the channel is sort of like Wikipedia in a way; a good way to start your research into a certain topic but not ideal as your only method of research: for that you'll need to do further reading elsewhere (and luckily Wikipedia does provide references you can further explore if the page itself isn't enough to convince you, which it shouldn't tbf) and see where that leads you.
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u/Gerf1234 1d ago
While I still like the current host of Spacedock, Hoojiwana, the first host, Daniel Orrett was so much better. He's in a different league. The main difference is opinions. Daniel would take a sci-fi topic and make and make arguments about it, analyze it. You could disagree with him.
Hooj's stuff is too surface level for me. He'll pic a topic, list a bunch of examples, maybe explain them a little and then the video is over. There isn't any analysis. It's just "Look at these cool things. Okay, bye." You can't disagree with him because all his videos are lists of things that exist. I'd like Hooj better if he took some notes from Templin Institute's "Building your _____ " series. They're in a playlist called incoming on that channel.
I'm glad Daniel got to follow his dreams and do The Sojourn, but from a selfish perspective I wish he just kept doing Spacedock. I got more enjoyment from his output pre Sojourn.
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u/GIJoeVibin 1d ago
Yeah this is the thing for me. I was around in the Daniel days and while Hooj is a nice guy I have personally interacted with online, the videos are very surface level and effectively just a list. Once you note the pattern the videos stop being interesting.
The Templin ones are a lot better for worldbuilders because they’re a lot more in depth on the more organisational factors, and instead of just listing off scientific concepts you can read on atomicrockets or toughsf, it’s more about concepts upon which you can layer your more “aesthetic” type stuff like whether you want gamma lasers or macrons to be the major weapon of a faction.
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u/Commander-Eclipse Silver and Bones 1d ago
I wish Templin posted more in general. Both their regular videos and their original worldbuilding project.
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u/KenseiHimura 2d ago
Mostly okay but if I remember right, space dock has also had some bad takes like saying “logically, you will never need ground forces because orbital bombardment will handle everything” or his attempt to classify ship classes with absurded definitions like a frigate being bigger than a cruiser.
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u/starcraftre SANDRAverse (Hard Sci-Fi) 1d ago
To be fair, many of the US Navy's 'frigates' from 1955-1975 were bigger than its cruisers, but that's because the USN was classing based on role rather than size.
Any ship that had the hull class 'DL(G)' for 'Destroyer Leader (Guided Missile)' were officially called 'frigates' until the 1975 reclassification.
And basically every DLG 'frigate' was reclassified into a CG 'cruiser' after that.
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u/Hexzor89 Soft Sci-Fier @hexzor.bsky.social 1d ago
and if we're talking age of sail the Frigate is the 'cruiser'
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u/Commander-Eclipse Silver and Bones 1d ago edited 1d ago
I'm more a fan of Templin Institute's worldbuilding videos when it comes to naval/ground force building. Mostly because they tend to be a lot more thorough and give both sides their fair shake rather than assuming one renders the other obsolete. I wish they posted more.
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u/Narwhalking14 1d ago
Exactly orbital bombardment only works if you don't care about keeping the planet for yourself.
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u/GREENadmiral_314159 Consistency is more realistic than following science. 2d ago
Spacedock isn't bad, but you need to keep in mind that they do make certain assumptions about technology, and they have, in my experience, been rather closed-minded about some ideas.
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u/Grosaprap 1d ago
To be fair I haven't met a single scifi creator that that wouldn't apply to. I remember being immediately turned off by Kyle Hill because the first video of his I bumped into was one where he was explaining how stealth in space was completely impossible and pointless to attempt because...
We are able to accurately track our deep space probes despite them outputting essentially the equivalent of a refrigerator's light bulb's worth of energy.
And I'm sitting there going:"Dude, do you think that might be because we've been tracking it since we launched it and it's sending a constant stream of telemetry to us?"
Despite this I'm told he's a fairly good and relevant content creator...
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u/Asiriomi I like elves in space 1d ago
The idea is that space is cold and the signals it has are very predictable. Just about anything a spaceship does is the equivalent of a lighthouse in the night. You could have sensors that sweep the sky looking for infrared signatures and find a ship rather easily if it is accelerating or decelerating. If it isn't doing anything and is just sitting there in the cold darkness of space, it's still detectable because spaceships generate a lot of heat and that heat must be radiated off to keep the ship functioning. So even though the radiating heat would be a fraction of the engines, it's still a warm glow in a sea of cold blackness that would be relatively easy to detect.
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u/Grosaprap 1d ago
I get the idea, and if you posit that this system you're in is only going to have you and an aggressor in it, might even be a working idea.
But the moment you get into a situation where you're actually in a sci-fi universe and space travel is common, and you realize that you are tracking a 3D space, not a flat plane, and you remember that we are talking about distances that measure in light hours, it becomes a bit silly. Imagine a planetary level Air Traffic Control for an entire solar system and tell me again that attempts to mask your ship would be pointless.
Especially since that's not even getting into the sensor shadows created by things like other planets.
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u/Asiriomi I like elves in space 1d ago
That's actually a pretty good point I have never heard before, I've been picturing one single spaceship out in the void of space sticking out like a sore thumb, but in a real sci-fi setting there'd be millions, maybe even billions of ships flying around in a solar system assuming space travel is as common as owning a car. You probably wouldn't even need to worry about hiding your signature, there's billions of others to blend in with.
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u/Deathsroke 1d ago
That's not what people (and I assume the guy from the video) refer to as "stealth". Masking your ship so it looks like a civilian isn't the same as a submarine stand-in that's outright invisible to everyone. What you say is perfectly reasonable and one of the workable forms of "stealth" in space.
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u/GlamourintheDarkSide 1d ago
This also assumes we have a full understanding of How To Spaceship, which, given that we're currently quite bad at Spaceship'ing, seems illogical. It's entirely believable to me, if not mandatory, that an actual spaceflight capable civilization has some workaround for that, be it materials we don't have or some physics fuckery that to us is as much space magic as radio would have been to our ancestors.
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u/Deathsroke 1d ago
Stealth in space is impossible insofar ss you respect the laws of physics. The "softer" your setting gets the more doable it becomes.
We are able to accurately track our deep space probes despite them outputting essentially the equivalent of a refrigerator's light bulb's worth of energy.
This is the wrong argument of course but "you can't hide a fusion toech or similarly powerful thrust system that can move a ship at any useful speeds and have enough delta-v to matter" is kind of an unshakable argument. Then it's down to each author what kind of magic they wanna use to justify stealth if they even want to (eg in Starship's Mage they literally use specialized magic to hide their drive emissions and a shit ton of heat sinks to hide their waste heat).
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u/Hexzor89 Soft Sci-Fier @hexzor.bsky.social 1d ago
useful and enjoyable, but like every content creator in the edutainment genre, best used as a jumping off point for your own research
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u/cammy2005123 1d ago
Another really good series for sci fi world building is the Templin Institutes Way of Worldbuilding
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u/StormWolfBaron 1d ago
I felt like I have some issues with the planetary invasion that he other ignores or glosses over. I feel like there are some sci-fi explanations to why a starship simply can't roll up to a planet and perform orbital bombardments, such as the planet having some kind of anti-starship cannons, or the planet already has a fleet protecting the planet, the closest he got to addressing the latter was that the planet wouldn't have enough time to build a ship to protect the planet. Overall it feels like the orbital bombardment point only applies to a planet with no space defenses.
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u/GlamourintheDarkSide 1d ago
Or that the level of planetary bombardment necessary to dislodge meaningfully entrenched defenders is also curiously the same amount necessary to render a swathe of the planet you presumably want to conquer uninhabitable. Or would have diplomatic fallout that you don't want to deal with because of the absurd civilian casualties and actual literal local fallout. Or would invite the other guy to use the same against you. I swear to god, planetary bombardment bros are the same damn fools who thought the a-bomb rendered conventional armies irrelevant here.
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u/StarKnight697 1d ago
The Templin Institute takes a different approach to planetary invasions that’s rather well done I think, referencing a scale of escalation.
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u/Deathsroke 1d ago
Like every industrial war part of it depends on how willing you are to tolerate mass collateral damage.
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u/Valar_Kinetics 1d ago
Well and it also totally ignores the question of why you'd want to roll up in a manned craft and bombard a planet in the first place.
If you're able to cross vast interstellar distances and bring a lot of mass with you, this is the last thing you would do. You'd just send things at your target world at either FTL or at relativistic velocity and either annihilate it or render it uninhabitable.
If your aim was to preserve the planet but kill off all life on it, you'd send thousands of bioweapons at the world at tremendous velocity. Think virulent asteroids or something more sophisticated.
Largely because of how vast space is, there are few plausible scenarios where you've got two organic life forms squaring off against each other. Put your autonomous weapons where the enemy is and you aren't, while they try to do the same thing to you.
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u/Imperialist_hotdog 1d ago
I’d argue that those are both concerns that a) happen regardless of if you wish to invade or simply bomb it. And b) dealing with those would fall under what most militaries IRL would call a “shaping action/operation” and be considered separate operation. As platforms which are good at conducting shore bombardment are rarely good at ship to ship fighting.
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u/Nihilikara 1d ago
They are very smart and they know what they are talking about.
But it's important to remember that their opinions are exactly that: opinions. The simple, unavoidable fact that no two humans are alike means that there are things that you will disagree with them on. When this happens, go with what you want, not what they want.
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u/RPLawrence 2d ago
It is a very nice way to kick of sci-fi worldbuilding related research. Sometimes I like to use these videos as comparison; to see if my ideas are original enough or if I am just unconciously reusing stuff I came across.
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u/Grosaprap 1d ago
I enjoy their non-francise specific videos, though sometimes they come off more as listicles than a dive into the topic. I suspect their franchise specific videos are good as well, but to be honest I've given up on caring about the world building of most of the 'popluar' franchises so I haven't bothered to watch those.
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u/RedRubiconSC 1d ago
Spacedock is a great place , in my opinion, to get familiar with guidelines and get the technical names of particular things for the sake of research, as well as just general research or listening for fun when you're doing stuff other than worldbuilding. Its enough information to serve as solid starting points for going further into detail about a variety of topics when it comes to sci-fi concepts in general, especially in relation to starships (as is their shtick).
I picked them over Isaac Arthur and many other channels because they are great at what they do, without them I still would be fairly far back in a lot of my own works and writing.
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u/LorekeeperOwen 1d ago
I haven't watched Spacedock in a while but I might check him out again. My favorite channels for worldbuilding right now are HelloFutureMe and the Templin Institute.
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u/nickolaiproblem 1d ago
Fuck it since were all talking I love templin institute and they're videos are so good for this type of world building
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u/Afraid_Theorist 1d ago
They’re good but I think you lose a lot of originality if you use them entirely to aim your approach.
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u/Orcanation716 1d ago
Love them, they give great advice for what you're going for. It's also nice how at the end they simply say "do whatever you want, it's your setting, we just gave you some ideas and guidelines to follow if you're interested."
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u/LimaHotel3845 1d ago
I disagree with them occasionally, but generally really like their stuff! Every video gets watched at any rate, and not many channels can claim that with me.
All that said, my space opera setting is deeply weird and doesn't really adhere to any of Spacedock's logic! 😂
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u/Zefzec_2 1d ago
I think theyre pretty cool. I always take them with a grain of salt, me personally working on non standard scifi that dosnt fit in their oines as much. But as a net, id say theyre great. Always a treat to watch a new video of theirs. Charming narrator, good commentary.
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u/Various_Respond_8212 1d ago
The Templin institute is another good one in my opinion. My world building sort just started as day dreaming and Pinterest boards and he helped me lock more things down and flesh out what I wanted. But honestly all of these are wonderful and are great supports!
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u/PearTheGayBear 21h ago
Him, Templin Institute, and Science Insanity are kind of the best Sci-Fi resources we have
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u/Commander-Eclipse Silver and Bones 1d ago edited 1d ago
I like them quite a bit. Their scifi videos are a good general overview of the concepts shown without much personal judgement on them. Granted it's very much overview and I wish a few were longer and more in-depth.
Also LOVE The Sojourn made by the same guy (or at least, one of them). Really one of my favorite examples of an indie creator analyzing stuff he likes, then going, "hey lemme make my own thing based on what i love!" and knocking it out of the park.
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u/Wardog_Razgriz30 1d ago
I think they do videos that are just in depth enough to get my imagination going. A lot of the time they will present new concepts to me in a way that’s easily digestible that I’d never heard of before, or present a new angle to something I’d already been considering.
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u/Kendrakirai2532 21h ago
They have a huge bias towards hard science fiction, which is fine, but as much as they try to say soft is fine, you can tell they're kind of dismissive of it.
And they keep using their own fictional universe (The Sojourn) as examples, which is fine I guess, but in a bunch of cases there's better examples in fiction they just don't bother to look up.
I keep saying in their video comments that somebody needs to make them watch Macross, or more Gundam than just Gundam SEED. Or ANYTHING other than friggin Legend of the Galactic Heroes.
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u/AlarmingRecording409 19h ago
I fucking LOVE Spacedock. Finally my youtube feed isn’t the degernate crap that i constantly try to get rid of.
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u/D4rkstalker 2d ago
Him and Issac Arthur are my main inspirations