Silliest Space Ships.

[Alex]

So a disclaimer before I start this thread. I am aware that all this stuff isn't real and requires suspension of disbelief. What I am asking is more of a "What if this universe was actually real scenario?"

Saw something recently where someone was talking about how stupid the design of the Imperial Star Destroyers were in Star Wars. It got me wondering a bit about what the worst designed ships in sci fi are. After a bit of thought I decided that the worst ones were actually from a show I enjoy whenever I just want something science fictiony that is silly but entertaining.

Star Trek. Now, I am not critiquing the show itself, it is what it is, and when you take it for that, then it is a good show, but just the way the ships are designed. I thrilled to the adventures of James Kirk as a kid, enjoyed the more cerebrel career of Picard and the next generation crew as a teen, and didn't really bother keeping up with DS9, Voyager or Enterprise, although I've watched episodes when they were on and I wasn't doing anything else.

Maybe there is a good reason for the way they look. Certainly from an aesthetic point of view they are fine, but in a practical sense... they are just a mass of weak points and design flaws.

Now, I'll admit as mentioned above that I have never watched every episode of every series of Star Trek, so maybe in one of the ones I've not seen a good reason was put out there for the way they look (and here I am looking at the Federation ships, although by no means are they the only ones that appear to be designed for looks rather than practicality) and later I'll even suggest a possible reason for the shape. Perhaps they even use their extraordinary (and I will get back to this later) control over gravity to get over the immense strain their ship designs would be under every time they were manoveuring with any gravity excerting force (and even if they operating in a 0 gee environment you are still going to get stress on joints while under high speed or turning). Eventually that big saucer mounted on the top and those warp nacelles are going to be a mass of stress fractures and fall off without constant inspections and a good repair schedule.

During battles the ships are continually having major systems disabled and the crew are only able to win by jury rigging some weapon or device* (and from my techincal experience I can tell you that jury rigging something to get something else working means years of investigation to find out what effects this can have on a system. Now you could argue that this would be much speeded up by more advanced technology and diagnostic systems, which I'd like to agree on, but I've several times seen new equipment go wrong in unexpected ways on Trek, so clearly their diagnostic systems aren't quite up to the task yet. The design that is so vulnerable to gravitational issues has the same weakspots for a fight. An enemy who has never encountered a Federation vessel before could quickly would out where to concentrate firepower to achieve any desired effect from disabling the ship to destroying it outright.

*And none of these innovations appear to end up as permanent modifications to the vessels as far as I have seen, despite them being battle winning weapons.

Ever noticed how often vital systems fail on Star Trek vessels? Life support, weapons, shields, teleports, engines... all of these seem to fail from just a single volley indicating a curious lack of back up systems, and general robustness. All except one system that seems to operate almost perfectly, regardless of species. Now, remembering again that I haven't seen every episode so there maybe others out there where this one system has indeed failed and I've just not seen it, but their artificial gravity seems to be immune to everything except direct sabotage (which I've only seen happen in one movie). There is never a day when a resister blows, or capacitor shorts out (that I have seen anyway), and everyone ends up floating around or struggling to move under the suddenly increased force of gravity. This control of gravity may extend to allowing them to counter all the issues with stress on the ship frame I mentioned previously, but that would surely add on extra expense to the ship, more demands on its power supply and so on. All issues that could be corrected by a more practical (and most likely cheaper and more effective) design.

The only potentially rational reason I could think of for the impractical designs of ships in this universe would be if somehow they had to be that shape. Perhaps in order to travel at warp speed it is in some way vital, the shape generates a warp bubble around the ship allowing it to travel at whatever speed. Perhaps the engines of Klingon ships are highly toxic and the bridge has a (very vulnerable) long thing neck to keep the captain away from it and alive while lower ranks are exposed to these dangers or something. Perhaps the high technology of the era allows these ships to be more viable (but as mentioned the frequent failures of onboard systems suggest not).

Anyway, what ships do you think are just not viable? Perhaps you don't like Battlestar Galactica's launch bays, or you agree with the post I read initially that the Empire has wasted its money on its Imperial Fleet or even any of the shows that have had biological ships (Lexx for example) is just downright out there?

[Svengoolie 3]

The original enterprise design was brilliant and remains so.  It was a very intelligent and logical design.  Start with the warp engines.  Those things are powerful enough to distort space and create a warp field that allows ftl travel. Very powerful,  very dangerous.  So they we're mounted on pylons to separate them from the ship and make it easier to jettison them if they malfunctioned to safe the rest of the ship from being destroyed by them if they  glitched.

The engineering section,  the lower hull,  had the majority of the ship's power  producing systems in it.  Most of the ship's power came from antimatter.  Antimatter is extremely powerful stuff.  Like most things that are very powerful the are very powerful it is very dangerous. Incredibly dangerous.

So they keep it in the rear hull to separate it from the crew section,  the saucer. If antimatter containment fails you can separate the saucer and try to save as many people as possible from a disaster. The main purpose of the design is to make it possible for as may people's possible to survive a disaster as possible.

The saucer is shaped the way it is because it's meant to land on a planet,  once. To serve as an emergency lifeboat and escape system that can land in a habitable planet if one is nearby,  again to save as many of the crew as it can.

The who design is meant to embody very powerful and very dangerous technologies along with a desire to safe as much of the crew as possible in event of a disaster.

[Alex]

The original enterprise design was brilliant and remains so.  It was a very intelligent and logical design.  Start with the warp engines.  Those things are powerful enough to distort space and create a warp field that allows ftl travel. Very powerful,  very dangerous.  So they we're mounted on pylons to separate them from the ship and make it easier to jettison them if they malfunctioned to safe the rest of the ship from being destroyed by them if they  glitched.

The engineering section,  the lower hull,  had the majority of the ship's power  producing systems in it.  Most of the ship's power came from antimatter.  Antimatter is extremely powerful stuff.  Like most things that are very powerful the are very powerful it is very dangerous. Incredibly dangerous.

So they keep it in the rear hull to separate it from the crew section,  the saucer. If antimatter containment fails you can separate the saucer and try to save as many people as possible from a disaster. The main purpose of the design is to make it possible for as may people's possible to survive a disaster as possible.

The saucer is shaped the way it is because it's meant to land on a planet,  once. To serve as an emergency lifeboat and escape system that can land in a habitable planet if one is nearby,  again to save as many of the crew as it can.

The who design is meant to embody very powerful and very dangerous technologies along with a desire to safe as much of the crew as possible in event of a disaster.

You seem to have misunderstood the topic, I was asking which designs people find silly. After I wrote this my wife (who is a much bigger Trek fan than I) told me there is a documentry out there where the people involved actually talk about how badly the ships were designed and how hard the models were to stop from falling to pieces, as well as comments from NASA engineers on their impractical nature. I'll ask her later if it is available online and if available I'll put up a link. I am going away for a long weekend though so it may be a few days before I we can look for it.

The points about having dangerous equipment easily jetisonable is valid, however could this not also have been achieved by a more compact body with jetisonable modules attached, allowing for a much more structurally sound and logical design (not to mention the warp core could still be put in the rear and be easily ejectable still)? Given the regularity that the engines and power system put the crew and ship in danger I can certainly see why they would want to have these as far away from the main body of the ship, but could this not have been done in a much more sound structurally sound fashion, and one that did not have so many problems dealing with force (and I mean pressures put on structures here, not Star Wars). For practical examples of this check out how explosives and fuel are carried on most modern fighter aircraft. They are added in such a way that increases stability in flight, but are still easily dumpable, even though these contain powerful explosives, substances toxic to human life, highly radioactive elements and so on, all from a blended series of priorities rather than one overriding design philosophy as seems to be the case in Trek.

You could argue for advanced construction techniques (but as noted above there is ample evidence throughout the shows that they are deeply flawed there), but that is like saying it was all done by wizards.

When I mention a blended design earlier what I mean it that the ship has to be designed to cope with a number of environmental factors and threats to its existance. Space is not a medium conductive to human life. You have to consider floating strings, micrometeorites, gravitational forces, stress on the frame... Not to mention threats we haven't yet encountered or discovered in space and a whole ton of other problems. Now if the single greatest threat to the ships existance is its own engines and power system, then yes having them out on these impractical pylons as far from the ship as possible is indeed smart and logical, although if they are that dangerous to your crew you should possibly be reconsidering the whole space travel thing. However you have focused your entire design on dealing with this one situation to the exclussion of all others. I find this about as far from a good design as one can get however given the diverse nature of the threats the Enterprise alone faced, never mind having the rest of the fleet designed all along the same single minded criterea of protect the crew from their own ship.

Plenty of other designs (I can think of many structurally sound ones) would allow the crew habit to seperate from the rest of the ship without leaving the vessel so vulnerable to its own components.

Anyway, this is all a digression.

[Trevor]

The space ship Event Horizon wasn't silly but it did scare the heck out of me. 

[ER]

The legendary Klingon D-7. That long neck that separated the main body of the vessel from the protruding outer extension? One good phaser hit could chop through there like an actual* through a limb.

* Should have read "ax". Stupid auto-correct.

[Svengoolie 3]

Well, ER,  the design of the D7 from TOS was meant to reflect a lot of things.  First off,  the design was meant to represent violence and aggression. The D7 looked a lot like a phallic symbol,  the design was totally phallic,  representing aggression.  The klingon insignia was all very violent and phallic. 

Also it was an angry design,  the boom and command pod looked like a clenched fist at the end of an arm.

Lastly the idea was that the command crew,  the officers,  were separated from the crew in a detachable escape section that was reserved for the elite only as opposed to the federation's saucer escape section which was meant to carry the whole crew.

As to the vulnerability you cite,  maybe true bur remember a premise of the series was ships had shields. The shields protected the ship and if down the whole ship was vulnerable, like when an unshielded klingon vessel was obliterated by a single blast of phaser fire in "day of the dove".

The design was meant to represent the psychology and ideology on the klingon,  violence and aggression.
 

[ER]

Well, ER,  the design of the D7 from TOS was meant to reflect a lot of things.  First off,  the design was meant to represent violence and aggression. The D7 looked a lot like a phallic symbol,  the design was totally phallic,  representing aggression.  The klingon insignia was all very violent and phallic. 

Also it was an angry design,  the boom and command pod looked like a clenched fist at the end of an arm.

Lastly the idea was that the command crew,  the officers,  were separated from the crew in a detachable escape section that was reserved for the elite only as opposed to the federation's saucer escape section which was meant to carry the whole crew.

As to the vulnerability you cite,  maybe true bur remember a premise of the series was ships had shields. The shields protected the ship and if down the whole ship was vulnerable, like when an unshielded klingon vessel was obliterated by a single blast of phaser fire in "day of the dove".

The design was meant to represent the psychology and ideology on the klingon,  violence and aggression.
 

Well take me to the woodshed and call me Dolly, Sven has a satirical side after all.