Spaceship

"SPACESHIP!"

– Benny, the Lego Movie, chaneling a primal urge in anyone even remotely interested in Sci-Fi

A Spaceship is a fully reusable manned vehicle capable of traveling through space. A Spaceship which can cross interstellar distances is a Starship. A Staple of Science Fiction since the days of Jules Verne.

The Resources Development Administration's Interstellar Vehicle (ISV) Venture Star from everyone's favorite SF film series

History of Spaceflight

Serious speculation of manned spacecraft began in the 19th century. Initially, the ideas were with launching people into space in shells by means of a giant cannon. But that would have the disadvantage of turning anyone aboard the projectile into anchovy paste after firing, to say nothing of deceleration.

On October 8th, 1957 the Soviet Union launched the first man-made object into space, on April 12th 1961 they followed this up by sending Yuri Gagarin into space on Vostok 1. This sparked a Space Race between the US and USSR and culminating in the Apollo 11 landing on the moon.

Nowadays, most spacecraft are unmanned satellites for scientific or economic purposes like the Hubble Space Telescope, GPS, or the ISS. More recent interest has been kicked off in the private sector or newly industrialized countries seeking to make their mark in history. Interests currently range from resource mining on the Moon or asteroid belt, space tourism for the uber wealthy, and/or drone missions to other planets in hopes of someday sending astronauts to them.

So you want to build a Spaceship

Lets say you have the means to get into space and you want to build a vehicle to get around in (barring any simulation experiments like the Kerbal Space Program). Well it's going to need a few things, at least for human and most species' ships. A few alien ships can do without some of these if the species is sufficiently...well...alien, compared to humans.

Things your spaceship needs

• Propulsion: You want some means of propulsion to get from Point A to Point B. Some variety of rocket is the usual way of doing this, but other options include solar and laser sails. There might be other options as well such as ion engines or nuclear ignited hydrogen. Note that sails and ion thrusters only work in the vacuum of space; if your ship will be doing any travel to or from a planet surface, you'll need to use something else. If FTL is involved then the non-FTL component is usually referred to as the "sublight" propulsion.
  • Maneuvering Thrusters: To turn your spaceship around, you need systems. Almost always the thing sci-fi ship designers forget to put. Another is reaction wheels (basically glorified gyroscopes to keep the craft pointed steady instead of tumbling end over end with no structure in sight to manually correct it)
• Superstructure: the chassis that keeps everything together. Usually you'd want this to be as light as possible, as every kilogram you can spare is one less to spend fuel moving about.
• Life Support: Space is not a kind place to carbon based life-forms such as yourself. If you want to get around in your spaceship, you'll need some consideration towards maintaining a habitable environment for your crew. This can be as simple as spacesuit, but you'd probably want something a bit more substantial. If you want a habitable compartment where someone can survive without a spacesuit want some oxygen tanks, CO2 scrubbers and some means of regulating the temperature.
• Cooling: Since there is no air in space you can't remove heat by convection and need to radiate it. Less advanced spaceships will require large extensible radiators. More advanced ones can either use very high-capacity heat sinks or some new hull alloy that's both very resistant and very good at radiating heat.
• Power System: Something needs to keep the lights on. Spaceships today can't afford to carry large amounts of fuel that isn't used in propulsion, so either they use Solar as a means to keep the batteries topped off if they're in range of Mars, or they may use more exotic long-term solutions like an RTG (Radioisotope thermoelectric generator) if they're beyond the asteroid belt. Sci-Fi spaceships may be large enough to house something like a fusion reactor, which can harvest space-borne hydrogen and use it for both power generation and thrust.
• Hull: With space being a completely empty vacuum, you'll need a hull for your spacecraft that's strong enough to resist damage from stray meteorites or debris (which can travel at the speed of a bullet) from without and to ensure no atmosphere leaks out or causes the craft to explode outward from within. It's even harder than pressurizing a jetliner cabin and could require a double hull like submarines and bulkheads to seal off damaged sections if shit hits the fan. The hull is also very useful for protection against cosmic radiation, which is a danger to both your squishy organic crews and to your electronics (you reeeeeally don't want your navigation computers to flip a bit when making the all-important vector calculations).

Things your definitely want on your spaceship

• Computers: Technically you could operate a spaceship with a sextant and a slide rule and a set of valves and switches, as a matter of fact some unfortunate sods in the Apollo program were forced to do it when most power failed. Even so things are a hell of a lot easier with a computer monitoring systems. It also helps streamline the myriad other functions.
• Sensors: You'd want some means of knowing your surrounding. Cameras with telescopes, RADAR, LIDAR and other such mechanism are all pretty useful. While viewports are a low-tech solution for crews to see what's outside, they need to be kept small to avoid becoming a risky hazard waiting to burst.
• Cargo Capacity: There's not much point in traveling the stars if you're not bringing anything with you, whether it be food, equipment, base prefabs, exotic resources, etc.
• Communications: Your probably won't be the only ship out there so you'll want to communicate with others, as well as planets and stations. Less advanced spaceships will probably use traditional radio waves, which are fine for nearby planets but may need hours for anything farther due to lightspeed lag and if you're outside a solar system it's utterly useless. More advanced communications will require either quantum entanglement, fancy particles or whatever FTL principle is used, if any.
• Radiation shielding: Seeing how spacecraft neither have a planetary atmosphere nor a magnetic field to block solar radiation from saturating your vessel (in real life, it's bad enough to the point that satellites and spacecraft carry 3-6 backup computer banks or hardened circuits to keep their code from being scrambled by stray cosmic rays), you'll need either a generous amount of radiation resistant material (such as lead or water) or some alternative method (like an artificial magnetic field) to prevent you from getting terminal cancer or having critical electronics degrade.

Things you'll want on a large spaceship

• Airlocks: A means of getting in and out of the spacecraft without letting all the air get out. Usually two air-tight doors with a chamber between them. Can also serve as bulkheads to seal off damaged sections of a craft if it's a modular design.
• Docking Mechanisms: a prerequisite for linking up with Space Stations or other craft. Modern docking mechanisms have to be very sophisticated in order to get ships/stations to join up without crashing or losing an air seal.
• Toilets: Unless you plan on traveling for at most a few hours a day in your spaceship, you'll need some way to deal with the inevitable fact that living humans need to relieve themselves. Modern spaceship toilets are able to work in zero-g environments, and research is being done to extract moisture from waste; as unpleasant as it sounds, every drop of water counts in the vacuum of space. The downside is cleaning out toxic residue before jettisoning the mass if it's not reused for things like fertilizer.
• Artificial Gravity: Less advanced spaceships can get it via centrifugal force by having rotating sections. More advanced ones don't really need explaining how they do it. It's a big deal as even life on the ISS has shown how microgravity can make the human body suffer weakened cardiovascular systems, brittle bones, and degraded eyesight (called Spaceflight associated Neuro-Ocular Syndrome) from nerves being pinched by bodily fluids normally restrained by gravity. The former two can be mitigated with copious exercise, latter currently has no viable method to counter unless inertial rotation to generate artificial gravity is used.
• Parasites: No, not like that. One or more small ships your big-ship carries around for various purposes. These start with simple EVA sleds for moving stuff around the ship and small drones to escape pods, work craft with articulated arms for repairs, construction or salvage, mining ships to top up on raw materials from asteroids, shuttles to move stuff from ship to ship without having to dock and Dropships for when you want to land on a planet.
• FTL Drive: Even if a ship has enough propulsion to reach light-speed it will still hate a couple of years at best to reach another system because of those pesky things called laws of physics. An FTL drives solves that problem, either bends the laws of physics around the spaceship so it can go faster, takeing the spaceship through another dimension where said laws just don't apply, or creating an artificial wormhole to connect two places. There are a couple of theoretical FTL drives, which sci-fi writers keep using, but since we have nothing concrete with our current science feel free to use any principle that sounds pseudo-scientific. It should be noted that the distance to the closest galaxy is just 20 times the length of our galaxy so any ship that can travel the galaxy in less than a week should have no trouble reaching another galaxy.

Things you'll want on a slow spaceship

• Food Production: People gotta eat and you'll often be far away from any resupply. Besides, eating nothing but canned food gets real old real quick while nutritional balance can be thrown off. Some solutions are a hydroponics bay to grow plants or algae and space-efficient farms like fish tanks for shellfish and seafood is viable (case & point with tilapia, catfish, clams, and crawfish being adaptable anywhere). Hydroponics can double as a natural CO2 Scrubber that you don't need to replace as well since the plants are doing what nature made them for. Humorously, synthetic protein grown in a petri dish can be viable if it can be scaled up.
• Fabrication systems: anything that you don't take with you, you'll have to make do with what you have or else make it yourself. The last thing you want happening is something critical breaking and you don't have spare parts on hand. Being able to make what you need from raw material helps alleviate such concerns, especially if the goal is to eventually colonize another world. NASA has invested a lot in 3D printers for this purpose. And space mining and fabrication in the form of smelters and orbital foundries are a possiblity.
• Cryo-Sleep Chambers: depending on how far you're traveling and how long it will take (or other factors such as traveling through literal Hell), it may be best to spend the majority of the trip in suspended animation and let the computers do the boring task of piloting a giant hunk of metal through the vast expanse of space. Cryo-Sleep is typically not required if the ship in question is a Generation Ship (where people are expected to be born and die on the ship before it reaches its destination), or if FTL is sufficiently advanced that journeys can be made in less than a year.

Things you might want on a spaceship

• Landing Gear: If you want to land on a planet's surface, you need gear to do so. Otherwise you're going to need shuttles or space stations to disembark your cargo and passengers. For terrestrial planets (akin to Terra, Mars, or Mercury), you'll need a robust hydraulics and spring-based system to cushion the impact while gaseous planets (like the Gas giants and Venus' cloud layers) may require an balloon inflation system or sophisticated docking system to latch onto colonies. All will require a lot of robust and reliable sensors to ensure you don't crash and burn.
• Weapon Systems: In the event that your ship is attacked by pirates/hostile aliens/spaceborn predators, you'll need something to defend yourself. That's assuming of course that such threats are present along your route; space is mostly empty after all, and if you're just making a jump from safe harbor to safe harbor it may not be so necessary. These can range from simple point-defense turrets, to various energy weapons and missile pods, to so-called "spinal guns" that are basically massive ballistic weapons that make up part of the ship's superstructure.

Spaceships in Science Fiction

Right now there are few things as iconic of Sci-Fi than Spaceships, from Steampunk ballistic shells to pulp era rockets, UFOs, mechanisms inspired by NASA and the recent wave of machines inspired by Big-Tech companies like SpaceX.

Spacecraft in Warhammer 40,000

Unlike most other sci-fi spacecraft, Imperial ships in the WH40K universe have some special requirements. Instead of traveling faster than the speed of light, they enter an alternate dimension known as the Warp where the laws of physics are altered, and serves as the basis for most FTL travel in the setting. Because the Warp is basically hell and is full of daemons that want to eat your soul, ships also carry Gellar Field generators to keep the ship safe inside a bubble of realspace. The liberal use of religious iconography also helps to ward off unwelcome visitors. In addition, Imperial ships make use of a Navigator, a special strain of mutant that uses his psychic abilities to locate the Astronomicon found on Earth, and use its location to plot a course to their destination.

All that being said, the Warp is still quite treacherous and unpredictable, and a single accident can cause a ship to become irrevocably lost. Sometimes however, a ship returns to realspace as part of a Space Hulk, which can house all manner of nasty threats to nearby planets. Other factions thus sometimes use slower but more reliable means of travel, such as the Ether Drives of the Tau which merely dip into the Warp. A phenomenon called “Warp Storms” can make large swaths of space closed off to space travel, as the storm creates an impassable barrier (generally speaking; sometimes a route through the storm may exist such as the Cadian Gate, making it a frequent target for chaos attacks). The most famous example is the Eye of Terror.

For other means of travel that do not rely on the Warp, when they don't use Dolmen Gates, Necron ships use Inertialess Drives which removes all inertia from a ship. The Tyranid don't make use of the Warp at all to travel, though their ships are not individually capable of FTL. Instead, they have a specialized bio-ship called a Narvhal, which senses distant systems and warps spacetime to create tunnels toward them for their fleets, similar to a wormhole. The tunnels break down in the presence of strong gravity wells, however, forcing the fleet to slow down as they approach their target and reach planets through more conventional means.

Spacecraft in BattleTech

More grounded in hard science fiction (outside the KF drive and HPG communication network), BattleTech Spacecraft (both as transports and as combat assets) are modestly explored in the universe. The downside is they tend to take a backseat compared to other BattleTech like BattleMechs. Don’t dismiss them completely though as any Aerospace Fighter or Assault DropShip will wreck your Mech if you underestimate them. More detail can be found in the page linked above.

Spacecraft in Star Wars

Ships in Star Wars typically come with an FTL system called "Hyperdrive," usually rated for different speeds; the smaller the number, the faster the engine. The main hyperdrive is rated at 3 for civilian ships, and 2 or 1 for military ships, and most ships will carry a backup drive rated in the double-digits so that a damaged ship can limp to the nearest system for repairs. A class rating of less than 1 is possible but rare; the Millennium Falcon was modified to have a rating of 0.5, but this drive was prone to malfunction. It's possible to pull a ship out of hyperspace with an artificial gravity well, triggering the failsafe on a hyperdrive to immediately stop its jump and thereby blocking a ship from leaving.

In addition, starships require sophisticated computers to perform navigation calculations before every jump, to avoid slamming into any celestial bodies in transit. This is why ships tend to stick to well-plotted "hyperspace routes," where the pathway is known to be clear of obstacles and can accept a high volume of traffic. Much lesser-known routes tend to be closely guarded secrets for strategic purposes (clandestine smuggling, top secret building projects, a shortcut to important hub worlds, etc). Being able to guard a hyperspace route effectively from outsiders, or else discovering a new route to land your forces right on top of your enemy's capital, can make a huge difference in an interstellar war. That said, you can cross the galaxy in at most a matter of days.

Space craft in Star Trek

Spaceships in Star Trek use antimatter reactors called "warp cores", meaning that any breach from battle damage will destroy the ship as antimatter and matter get along worse than pretty much everything in existence. Weapons are also very immensely powerful, in the TOS era a single ship being able to destroy a planet with enough time and by the time of the TNG era an entire fleet is able to do it in a few seconds. Because of this every time you hear the shields fail completely means the ship will be destroyed within the next 2 hits or so. Star Trek created the trope of consoles exploding during battles, as hearing "shields down to 60%" alone just doesn't show tension well.

While small shuttles exist and were used for combat a few times, you almost never see a dogfight. Gene Roddenberry asked his NASA advisor about space fighters and was told the boring truth - that there's nothing a space fighter can do that a guided missile (Torpedo in Star Trek's case) can't do.

Spacecraft in Halo

Like in 40k, both Human and Covenant ships enter an alternate dimension for FTL travel, here called Slipspace, an 11-dimensional space that is thankfully absent of demons (the demons just stick to normal space, unfortunately). Human ships traditionally are much slower than Covenant ships, clocking in at 2.625 light years per day vs 1,368 light years per day. The reason for this discrepancy is that humans have only scratched the surface of Slipspace’s potential, and can only really skim through it (so like the Tau). In addition, human-made FTL tech is also less precise, so jumps are only made to locations just outside of a system and then use sublight drives to reach their destination. Forerunner tech, meanwhile, is so advanced that they can cross the galaxy in a matter of hours, and so precise that they can easily do point-to-point jumps on a local level. Forerunner gates likewise can send entire ships from one point to another, such as the gate connecting Mombassa, Africa to the Ark located outside the galaxy. All that being said, the whole process is still dangerous; an improperly installed or damaged drive can rip the ship apart, high radiation levels and static electricity need to be shielded against, and sometimes ships can just straight-up disappear.

Spaceships in Dune

One of the granddaddies of Sci-Fi, Dune is where the concept of the Navigator is shamelessly ripped off from. In this setting, Navigators are humans of the Spacing Guild, who have been sufficiently mutated by a drug called Spice that they cease to be human at all; their consciousness has been expanded to such a degree that they now have limited precognition, and use it to determine the vector for their destination. They then fold spacetime to be able to cross the galaxy faster than the speed of light. While it is possible to build a computer that can also navigate across space, such computers have been forbidden since the Butlerian Jihad against thinking machines.

Spaceships in Fantasy

Needless to say, Spaceships are far less common in Fantasy than in Sci-Fi. The best you’ll find are magically powered Arks or so that carry exiled civilizations from one world to another. Not much thought is put into how they can be used beyond transportation or habitation.

That said there is the occasional exception, such as Spelljammer.

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