Let's start today with a quick quiz. Out of the following spaceships (all from Star Wars for now), which is the odd one out:
1. X-Wing Fighter
2. Star Destroyer
3. Millennium Falcon
4. Slave 1
5. Snow Speeder
Answer... It's the millennium Falcon. And the reason is to do with symmetry. It's the only ship in the whole of the Star Wars universe that displays basic asymmetry. I know there are various others with smaller differences between right and left (eg the TIE-Bomber), but with the MF's little cabin, sticking out on the from right hand side, it loses a lot of aesthetics, to my mind at least.
This may not just be an aesthetic issue - Since the Falcon is powered by some kind of engine which propels it centrally from behind, then its builders must have put some kind of counterweight in the left side - otherwise its centre of gravity would be over to the right and as it moved forward, it would start to rotate. This would not be a useful trait for a spaceship.
It's not just ships in Star Wars that have a central line of symmetry. When I think of any other ships from any other film or TV series, I'm having real trouble thinking of non-symmetric ones. Anything from Star Trek, B5 or Blakes 7, The Nostromo or even the Space Shuttle. All symmetric. It's just the Falcon that is on its own, annoying me.
Not sure where I was going with this.
Anyway, a while back I'd been talking about getting a Lego Star Destroyer. I'm now glad I didn't because I've found a picture which demonstrates how big it is better than the photo on the Lego website.
Here it is. I'm fairly sure there is nowhere in the flat it could sensibly go! This shows the importance of doing good research before making a purchase.
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The engines could be set up so as not to thrust uniformly. Or, since (IIRC, and you know my opinion of Star Wars) it was a cargo ship, that's where the counterweight could have come in.
Here's a few, not all from TV/films :
The inter-station transfer ship (can't remember the name of it) - Islands in the Sky (Arthur C Clarke)
At least one of the First Ones' ships in B5 (episode 4x06, the one that looks like a stone mushroom)
The Borg's Unamatrix One
That should do you for now. There's another one that's really bugging me, that I really ought to know - think it's from a book rather than TV or film.
Fictional spaceships are designed around asthetics and not science or function. The Falcon was supposed to look like an old rustbucket of a smuggling ship, so it was deliberately mishapen and ugly. The X-Wing was the height of spacefighter design so it was sleek and aerodynamic (so it looked like what we'd identify as a fighter - there is no reason for a ship primarily designed to be launched and flown in space to be aerodynamic. It's "wings" are badly placed and too small to give any planetary lift anyhow).
Most fictional spaceships are designed like big Apollo launchers, with bits added. Long and thin with a big engine on one end, and a bridge at the other. Because this is what we think of as "spaceship". It's actually pretty impractical. Turn it through 90 and run the engines down the length to give maximum area to generate thrust - after all, if you're running on pushing power in space, you'd better have a lot of push if you want to get anywhere before you die of old age. If you're not using push, but are cleverly manipulating space itself, you don't need any shape at all, build yourself a cube (or better, sphere) to get the best volume inside your ship for the amount of materials you've put into it.
'Course, a film where everything had nice logical and scientific backing over looking cool would be boring.
It's worth bearing in mind that one reason that the engines are often at the back end of a long thin design is for safety reasons. They tend to give off odd radiation/fields/smells and it's better for the crew to be as far away from these as possible.
So it's ok for Scottie to get cancer and die, providing Jim and Spock don't?
Right I may be wrong here, but...
Scotty and the rest (and indeed engineers in subsequent Enterprises) were reasonably safe. All the actual dangerous warp drive stuff was in the two Nacelles (the sticky out bits back left and back right) safely away from all the humans. I think Engineering was in the bottom section of the ship. This is where the Warp Core lived, but that was actually reasonably safe to be around.
Now clearly the warp core would blow up from time to time, but that is a different issue and it wouldn't make much difference where in the ship you were if this happened.
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