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ISO Standard Human Spaceship: Difference between revisions
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** Ships in anime may be painted blue instead.
** Or olive-drab if the creator's American.
#While not required, visibly being constructed from riveted metal plates is encouraged, as is [[Star Trek|Borg cube]]-like details called [
#Since [[Our Weapons Will Be Boxy in The Future]], larger spaceships must be angular too; the standard human spaceship will be mostly rectangular with engines on one end and weapons on the other.
#[[Space Fighter|Space Fighters]] and other small craft will be [[Old School Dogfighting|built around a cockpit and wings to look like airplanes]], but may have some style.
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Existing spacecraft have so far had a mixed record: modern rockets and atmospheric landers tend to be white and aerodynamic, but blockier than sci-fi space fighters and only sometimes winged. Craft designed solely for vacuum are totally unaerodynamic, but extremely spidery and jumbled, covered in reflective foil (for heat management) and held together by networks of pipes and struts, looking much less solid than sci-fi capships.
On the other hand, the products of the emerging private spaceflight industry often feature curvilinear quasi-retro stylings which bear a close resemblance to [[Retro Rocket|early sci-fi rockets]] of the zeerust school. Contrast the lines of the Scaled Composites SpaceShip series with those of the Soyuz capsules, or even with the Space Shuttle. (Mind you, the SpaceShip series are just pop-up suborbitals, and reentry from Mach 3 (SpaceShipOne) or 4 (SpaceShipTwo) is between 40 and 70 times less energetic (and thus easier) than reentry from orbital velocity. SpaceX's [http://www.spacex.com/dragon.php Dragon] is orbital, and quite chunky-looking. On the other hand, an [
Also, some of these designs actually make some sense. For example, after the first two missions [[NASA]] decided to leave the external tank of the Space Shuttle un-painted because of the extra weight that pretty white veneer added (to give you an idea, the paint on a 747 jetliner weighs hundreds of pounds), not to mention the fact that it all burned up when it fell into the atmosphere anyway. For deep probes our designs are pretty non-blocky only because they are not meant for any kind of combat. Wings may be used on craft [[Space Plane|intended to work in atmosphere as well]] (like [[Battlestar Galactica|BSGs]] Vipers), even though it wouldn't probably be very practical to make a dual-purpose craft like that given the hugely different conditions, especially when considering the different atmospheres and gravities of alien worlds. Unpainted metal or reflective exteriors may also be justified if the ship is intended to fly near stars: this would reflect the light assist the ship in [[Space Is Cold|staying cool,]] similar to the way that skyscrapers in the southern USA and other hot places tend to be designed with reflective glass exteriors.
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Note that fictional vessels tend to use enormous amounts of energy yet typically lack [http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3au.html thermal radiators] to shed waste heat (no air-cooling in space). Although that ''could'' explain all the so-called wings...
Space wings are also often used in fiction as places to put extra weapons (like [[Macross Missile Massacre|missiles]]), and to store things (extra electronic equipment or fuel) inside them, although putting those things on or in the main hull makes more sense for a nonatmospheric [[Space Fighter]], as spreading out the ship's mass makes little sense for a vessel designed to maneuver in vacuum in three dimensions-- better to keep it compact, to conserve angular momentum. You ''can'' increase maneuverability by putting thrusters on the tips of them a la ''[[Babylon Five]]'' Starfuries, using the wing as essentially a big lever to rotate the ship faster, but a simple pole (especially a retractable one) would do the same job just as well and with greater shear strength (again, compactness helps here), making it less likely to bend or break off during high-thrust maneuvers whose direction is perpendicular to the broad planar surface of the wing. Internal gyroscopic flywheeels could do the same thing ''and'' be less visibly obvious tells to the enemy (no signal lights before a turn). Only [[Space Fighter]] craft [[Space Plane|designed to go both ways]] (atmosphere and deep space) actually need wings-- and [
See also [[Standard Sci
{{examples}}
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* ''[[Babylon Five]]'' : Humorously lampshaded in “Legend of the Rangers” with the human design of the [http://babylon5.wikia.com/wiki/Valen_(ship) Valen] looking like “a flying brick.” ([[Flying Brick|No relation]].) The later [http://babylon5.wikia.com/wiki/Valen_class_cruiser Valen] class was made by the Minbari, further reinforcing the trope.
{{quote| '''Ranger Dulann''': ''If human military designers had their way every colour of the spectrum would be removed except for grey, green and black and we would all live in windowless boxes.''}}
** Averted with ''[[
*** You can see both design philosophies incorporated in it. You have the Minbari traditional triple-fin hull structure, but it's also dark grey similar to the ''Omega''-class destroyers. Interestingly, the human ''Hyperion''-class heavy cruisers are brightly-colored with white and blue. However, those (as mentioned in the fluff) were designed by a different military contractor than the ''Nova''e and the ''Omega''s.
* ''[[Firefly (TV)|Firefly]]'' mostly averts this trope, with the majority of ships seen having either a large cylindrical design or a smaller, more agile (but still not blocky) design, such as with Serenity herself. However, the ships do tend to have very metallic appearances, and several of the ships briefly shown do fit the trope better than the larger Alliance vessels and Serenity.
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[[Category:Spacecraft]]
[[Category:ISO Standard Human Spaceship]]
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