Spaceship

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.

So you want to build a Spaceship

Lets say have the means to get into space and you want to build a vehicle to get around in. Well it's going to need a few things.

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.
  • Maneuvering Thrusters: To turn your spaceship around, you need systems. Almost always the thing sci-fi ship designers forget to put.
• Superstructure: what keeps everything together. Usually you'd want this to be as light as possible, as every kilogram you can spare is one less to move.
• 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.
• 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, or they may use more exotic long-term solutions like an RTG (Radioisotope thermoelectric generator). 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.

Things your definitely want on your spaceship

• Sensors: You'd want some means of knowing your surrounding. Cameras with telescopes, RADAR, LIDAR and other such mechanism are all pretty useful.
• 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 without computers. Even so things are a hell of a lot easier with a computer monitoring systems. It also helps streamline the myriad other functions.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Toilets: Unless you plan on traveling for at most a few hours a day in your spaceship at most, you'll need some way to deal with the inevitable fact that living humans tend need to relieve themselves. Modern spaceship toilets are able to extract and recycle moisture for reuse; as unpleasant as it sounds, every drop of water counts in the vacuum of space.
• Communications: Comes in handy for coordinating landings/dockings, but also veeeeeeery useful in an emergency situation. But if you're using traditional radio waves, it can take minutes or even hours for your messages to reach the nearest inhabitable planet in the same system as you due to lightspeed lag. Even longer when you're in deep space.

Things you might want to have on a Spaceship

• Artificial Gravity: Less advanced spaceships can get it 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 from nerves being pinched by expanded capillaries (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.
• 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 to prevent you from getting cancer or having electronics degrade.
• 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. A hydroponics bay to grow plants is one solution, space-efficient farms like fish tanks may also be a consideration. Hydroponics can double as a natural CO2 Scrubber that you don't need to replace, as well.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

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.

Spaceships in Fantasy

Needless to say, Spaceships are far less common in Fantasy than in Sci-Fi.

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