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{{trope}}
[[File:bebop03-2.jpg|link=Cowboy Bebop|
{{quote|''"After the Earth was used up, we found a new solar system and hundreds of new Earths were terraformed and colonized [...] Out here, people struggled to get by with the most basic technologies. A ship would bring you work. A gun would help you keep it."''|'''Shepherd Book''', ''[[Firefly]]''}}
Some [[Speculative Fiction Series]] focus on a [[Cool Starship]] or two that's [[Shiny
Shows on the other end of the [[Sliding Scale of Shiny Versus Gritty]] treat the future as a place where real people live, and where [[Stanley Steamer Spaceship|spaceships look dirty, dingy, and used, like heavy equipment that one might find at a lonely truck stop in the middle of the night right now]]. The ships are old junk heaps run on a shoestring by hard-bitten characters on the edge, seemingly held together with two pieces of string, chewing gum, and the will of the Holy
Sometimes, there will be [[Shiny
The original ''[[Star Wars]]'' [[Trope Codifier|popularised the concept]] (although arguably ''Moon Zero Two'' (1969), ''[[Silent Running]]'' (1972), and ''[[Dark Star]]'' (1974) [[Trope Maker|led the way]].) For contrast, the prequels, set in a more civilized time, [[Crystal Spires and Togas|are correspondingly shinier]]. (''Star Wars'' is a rare example on the "idealism" end of the above-mentioned scale.)
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Interestingly, portraying this in CG effects is actually more difficult, but sometimes the audience won't accept things [[Dirt Forcefield|not looking dirty enough]]. Which can be ironic because spaceship exteriors are actually perpetually shiny in real life (due to the scarcity of dirt, grime and oxidizing agents in space)--unless they have to endure high-velocity atmospheric reentry.
Actually justified, if ships use a layered-ablative-standoff-armor setup like the [
Contrast [[Shiny
{{See
Usually a [[Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness|Hard Science Fiction]] trope.
{{examples
== Anime & Manga ==
* ''[[Vandread]]'' mostly has [[Shiny
* While we are mostly given a worm's-eye-view of the ''[[VOTOMS]]'' universe, this does apply, when the fact that a century-long galaxy-wide conflict has just ended.
* The only ships that appear pristine in the ''[[Cowboy Bebop]]'' world are, cynically, those belonging to the bad guys. The ''Bebop'', as well as the characters' personal ships, are all rendered with realistic levels of rust, grime and plenty of wingdings from daily usage.
** Not to mention Jet's Hammerhead is just a futuristic tow-truck and Spike's much-prided ''Swordfish'' is some sort of out-of-date ([[Invincible Classic Car|classic?]]) personalized space race car so neither of them are meant to be shot at. The ''Bebop'' itself is converted fishing trawler with an excusably large outer deck.
* The vehicle in ''[[Outlaw Star]]'' deteriorates gradually from [[Shiny
* ''[[Patlabor]]'', with giant robots replacing spaceships.
* ''[[Planetes]]'' focuses entirely on the blue collar workers whose job it is to clean up space junk that endangers flights.
* ''[[Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team]]'' has a bunch of Gundam Ground Types that are basically a pile of spare-parts for the original Gundam that are put together and armed with a couple of large rifles. Maintenance is done quite frequently, to the extent that when a Gundam isn't being piloted, someone is doing maintenance on it, to make sure they work. In fact, the main character arrives at the EFF-base, while his Gundam is being tuned. Most repairs are done simply by taking functional parts from other Mobile Suits and stuffing them on the Gundams, which results in one of the 08th MS Team pilots being referred to as "GM-head" because her Gundam's head gets replaced by that of a mass-produced GM's head after the original head was shot off. On the Zeon side, we got to see a single Zaku Tank, which is basically a Zaku torso with arms and head, stuffed on top of a Magella-class attack tank. We never saw it in action, but one can only assume it was a make-shift repair to a Zaku II that had lost its legs in battle.
== Comic Books ==
* Graphic novel example: anything drawn by Jean Girard, aka [[Moebius]], will usually incorporate elements of both Used Future and [[Shiny
▲* Graphic novel example: anything drawn by Jean Girard, aka [[Moebius]], will usually incorporate elements of both Used Future and [[Shiny Looking Spaceships]].
* ''[[Ignition City]]'' by [[Warren Ellis]]. The titular city is a spaceport constructed from rusted spaceships that has a lot of expies of classic sci-fi heroes as its residents.
* In ''Fear Agent'' it is hard to keep your ship and jetpack shiny when you are the last survivor of monster-hunting group from Texas with alcohol problems.
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== Film ==
* Of course ''[[Star Wars]]'' more or less defines this trope, where every ship is covered with dings and scratches and epitomized by the ''Millennium Falcon'', which looks like it is almost [[What a Piece of Junk!|ready to fall apart]]. This extends to the [[Space Is Noisy|sound design]] as well, apparently [[George Lucas]]' instructions were that he wanted to hear every loose bolt in the engines. This said, the ships used by the Empire often look a bit more swish. It helps that the Rebel ships are held together with space duct tape and prayers, while the Galactic Empire has the full might of...[[Captain Obvious|a galactic empire]] behind its military.
* The ''Nostromo'' in Ridley Scott's ''[[Alien]]'' set the benchmark for all
** It's worth noting that Scott [[Word of God|specifically cites]] the used future look of ''Star Wars'' as the major influence for the look of ''Alien'', so [[George Lucas]] really is the granddaddy of this trope.
* ''[[Blade Runner]]'' is the [[Trope Codifier]]. Decorators just overdid their aversion of [[Shiny
* The Terry Gilliam film ''[[Brazil (
* The real world in ''[[The Matrix]]'', where humans have astounding technology but (having lost the [[Robot War]]) must scrounge a living in a cramped, dirty underground city among [[Absurdly Spacious Sewer
* ''[[Outland (
* In ''[[The American Astronaut]]'', the space is pretty much dominated by roughnecks and manual laborers.
* Given the genre it's parodying, it's probably not surprising that this trope gets a [[Lampshade]] hung on it in ''[[
{{quote|
* While the ''Discovery'' itself is [[Shiny
** It's interesting to note that the Leonov is brand
* Every future sequence in the ''[[The Terminator|Terminator]]'' franchise, with ''Salvation'' being an entire movie of this. Of course, it helps that the future the movies feature is [[After the End|set after a major nuclear holocaust]].
* In a weird example of people expecting spaceships to look like this, the visual effects people who made Apollo13 said they had to make the Saturn V rocket look dirtier than it actually was at liftoff, just because people [[The Coconut Effect|wanted it that way]].
* ''[[Kin
* [[The City of Ember]] portrayed a city driven by a huge dilapidated generator that was well beyond its expected life and the impending failure of the generator drives the events of the plot.
== Literature ==
* ''[[
* Before anything listed, [[Robert A. Heinlein|Robert Heinlein]] had already led the way with
** ''The Man Who Sold The Moon'', 1951
** ''Citizen Of The Galaxy'', 1957
** ''Farnham's Freehold'', 1965
** ''[[The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress]]'', 1966
** ''[[I Will Fear No Evil]]'', 1970
** Even ''[[The Rolling Stones (
* [[Older Than Radio]]: Long before Heinlein, E. M. Forster had written a science fiction short story called ''The Machine Stops'' about a future civilization that has grown dependent upon automation. (When the titular machine deteriorates and dies, so does the civilization.) The story itself was published in ''1909''.
* The ''Revelation Space'' universe from [[Alastair Reynolds]]. The first ship described is about 3-4 kilometers long and has ''5 people'' running it. Vast swathes of it are described as "flooded with coolant...others were infested with rogue janitor-rats...patrolled by defence drogues which had gone berserk...filled with toxic gas, or vacuum, or too much high-rad." Amazingly, ''it gets worse''.
** A few stories take place during the earlier "Belle Epoque" age when everything was shiny, back when the Rust Belt around Yellowstone was known as the Glitter Band. Then a nanotech virus called [[Body Horror|The Melding Plague]] arrived and ruined everything.
* Everything Peter Watts ever wrote. ''Everything''. Well, no, that's not strictly true; some of his stories are set in futures [[After the End|so used they've fallen apart]]; but the rest of them are [[Just Before the End|just severely used]]. The prime example of this trope is, of course, the [[Rifters Trilogy]], particularly Lenie Clarke's cross-country tour-o-death in ''Maelstrom''.
* Philip K. Dick's "[[Do Androids Dream?]]" has "kipple" - the accumulation of society's junk and litter, which seems to grow spontaneously whenever you're not looking. The Earth of the story had been largely abandoned in favor of space colonies, leaving many empty and unmaintained sections of the city to rot and accumulate random garbage.
* Asimov's ''Foundation'' series. After the fall of the Galactic Empire, various factions use the remnants of the technology to live as best they can. This ranges from wealthy technicians maintaining machines they can no longer understand to agrarian societies who mine the vast abandoned cities for ready-made steel.
* ''The Book of the New Sun'' [[Word of God|describes the future where humanity just sits at home and waits for the money to run out.]] The central character grows up in the hulk of a former starship which still has a couple of operating devices, if you can round up enough apprentices to hand-crank them. Miners dig up old machines rather than raw materials, which were exhausted a long time ago (indeed one of their measures of time, the "age," starts when one resource is exhausted and ends when the next runs out.) The very rich have access to advanced technology, which they appear to get by trading slaves to aliens.
* ''Tales of Pirx the Pilot'' by [[Stanislaw Lem]].
* This trope is pretty much a requirement for any [[Cyberpunk]] story.
* In [[Michael Flynn]]'s ''[[Spiral Arm
== Live-Action TV ==
* Almost all the ships in ''[[Andromeda]]'', except the ''Andromeda Ascendant'' herself, which was a time-shifted relic of a bygone era of cleanliness. The series is really about injecting old-fashioned heroics into the
* ''[[
** Not to mention homeless people and illegal drugs.
** Somewhat subverted later in the series when shiny new white starships captained by kick-ass Rangers become the last hope for defeating the Big Bad's ships. Subverted to a truly unfortunate degree in the spin-off "Crusade."
* ''[[Battlestar Galactica]]'', both versions. The ''Galactica'' is even called "The Old Bucket" by its crew.
** The Battlestar ''Pegasus'' is included in the series pretty much just to show how a Battlestar actually fit for battle is supposed to look like.
** Just to rub in how much more advanced the Cylons are, once we get episodes set inside a Basestar in the second season we find out they're tastefully and futuristically decorated with curved, minimalist passageways with lights set in square sconces, [[Unusual User Interface|flowing streams of water serving as user interfaces]], bands of [[Cyber Cyclops|cyclopic red]], [[Matrix Raining Code]] holograms in the bridge, and ''Victorian furniture''.<ref>And that's ignoring the gooey [[Living Ship]] hanger bays and [[Instant Oracle, Just Add Water]] main computer</ref>
* In the ''[[CSI]]'' episode about ''Star Trek''
* The new ''[[
** The TARDIS is practically the embodiment of this trope. It's a clapped out old relic locked into one appearance, the last of a model which was junked by its creators centuries ago, and which is in places held together with paper clips and hope. Nevertheless, it still manages to be the most powerful ship in the universe.
*** Inside, maybe. On the outside it remains as pristine as the shiniest of [[Shiny
* ''[[Firefly]]'', though there is a deliberate contrast between the [[Shiny
** Even Lampshaded in the episode "Heart of Gold", where the rich guy who runs the world is deliberately keeping the world rustic so he can "play cowboy."
* Used in the shortlived ''[[Homeboys in Outer Space]]''.
* ''[[
** The titular Red Dwarf itself was a mining ship, and other than the command deck, really looked the part. (An early plot point revolves around changing the interior color from ocean grey to military grey.) The exterior as well, until the ship was re-built in the later seasons, looks correspondingly used. Plus the "nothing ever works" aspect applies, many episodes revolve around various malfunctions. (Service robot screwing with the wiring, docking bay doors that don't open, etc.)
* The Traveler ships from ''[[
* Somehow preventing the ''Destiny'' from breaking apart is one of the constant main concerns of the characters in ''[[
* In ''[[Star Trek]]'' it shows that minor races that lack the Federation's technology and resources are filthy. The interiors of Romulan, Cardassian, Dominion, Ferengi, Hirogen, Vulcans, etc are all quite clean, and neither the Borg nor the Klingons care.
** In an interesting reversal, the further they go into the future it depicts even more streamlined Federation ships. The further into the past shows the Federation ships as being fairly rough looking. The 2009 [[Star Trek (
* What we see of the mid 22nd century in ''[[Terra Nova]]'' seems to be this.
== Music ==
* ''Some Kind of Hero'' by Leslie Fish. Arguably, her other songs describe a similar atmosphere, just not with everything quite ready to fall apart.
== Tabletop Games ==
* ''[[Warhammer
** Other alien races avert this, though. The [[Our Elves Are Different|Eldar]]'s equipment and armour are always [[The Aesthetics of Technology|sleek and immaculate]], despite being older than mankind's, while the Tau were [[Animesque|specifically designed]] to avert the trope in contrast to its near-ubiquity among the humans. The Necrons' artifacts have a frightening timeless quality despite belonging to the [[Time Abyss|oldest faction in the setting]], and the [[Mecha
*** Very rarely are the Necrons portrayed as shiny. It is far more common for them to look as ancient as they are.
* ''[[
* ''[[Traveller]]'' has both. There are [[Cool Ship|CoolShips]] which are for instance private yachts or large ships of, The [[Space Navy|Imperial Navy]] or a Megacorporation. And then there are
** In a possible subversion, even Free Traders are major investments. It is [[Your Mileage May Vary|worth a guess]] that even on a small ship, the bridge(if not the hold) will look like a library or an office, rather then like the classic [[Firefly]] or Millenium Falcon style.
* As with the Literature example above, any game with a cyberpunk setting will have this trope in effect by default.
* Evidently there's something about keeping an oversized bastard child of [[The Alleged Car]] from [[Flying Dutchman]] that players (surprisingly often) and GMs ([[Killer Game Master|less]] surprisingly) try to do this in every system that supports generation of custom spaceships - whether for style, or just for the hell of it.
** ''[[Traveller]]'' atrocity: "[http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/12616355/#12618478 The Bucket Of Ever-Seething Rust]".
{{quote|- Which begs the question: [[Shoot the Shaggy Dog|WHY HASN'T SOMEBODY LAUNCHED IT INTO THE NEAREST STAR YET]]?
- Perhaps they have tried, dearest anon. Perhaps they have even stayed aboard to make sure the ship goes down this time. }}
** /tg/ -run ''[[Only War]]'' adventure "[http://1d4chan.org/wiki/All_Guardsmen_Party All Guardsmen Party]" had the party stuck with an unlucky ship "Occurrence Border", damaged and jury-rigged again and again over time, to the point where it became a mostly-habitable deathtrap maze fused with somewhat spaceflight-capable [[Rube Goldberg Device]]. Then it fell into hands of the Most Holy Inquisition - but things improved little. Except the Gellar Field (after what happened the last time, Inquisition had the old set replaced with fresh and redundant system) and medbay (this ship ''really needs'' to keep it in a good shape, and anyway, "the old medbay was torn apart by [[Haunted Technology|daemonically possessed]] [[Wetware CPU|servitors]], so everything there is brand-new"). Uneven and unstable gravity is the least of its problems, if the most pervasive one. The vessel's colourful history and "little quirks" were summarized as [https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Occurrence_Border_Random_Encounters its own set of "random encounter" tables] - the guide emphasizes that it works best if kept completely random and interpreted creatively, in "anything may happen here" way:
{{quote|For example, if you rolled 52, 2, and 5, for a Major Xeno-Tech Issue you would discover that an Eldar personal defense system needs to be repaired. At first this seems insurmountable (and indeed, you may wish to simply look stony and roll some more dice if you can't think of anything quickly,) but if you have time to prepare in advance, you might decide that an Eldar Harlequin Flip-Belt was, at one point in time or another, incorporated into the [[Artificial Gravity|grav-plating]] in the spinal corridor of the ship as an expedient repair measure. With the Flip Belt in need of repair, however, the original problem is back; the grav-plating is pulling harder and harder gravity at the dorsal spine of the ship, increasing steadily. Eventually, structural members will give out. It may be techno-heresy, but if you don't repair that Flip Belt, Bad Things will be happening to the Border in short order. }}
** [https://archived.moe/tg/thread/61395528/#61400940 This] thread on dysfunctional spaceships. Pick what fits for your setting.
== Videogames ==
* One would be hard-pressed to call the ''USG Ishimura'' of [[Dead Space (
** It doesn't look like it looked much better even before the infection. It's all rugged-edged metal and screeching doors, hence the developers calling it "an oil rig [[Recycled in Space|in space]]".
* The ''[[Doom]]'' games makes use of this. This is especially noticeable in Doom 3's 'mars city' The well maintained sections look pretty rough, the seldom used sections are dilapidated, then [[It Got Worse|the forces of hell turn up...]]
* ''[[
* ''[[Freelancer]]'' has this in spades. The lawful factions mostly have [[Shiny
** Ironically the best ship the player can have is a powerful custom pirate ship.
* ''[[Gears of War]]'' pretty much runs rampant with this, especially the "used" part. Anywhere outside of Jacinto, and even a lot of places inside of it, are battered, damaged, run-down, and barely functional.
** Although it should be noted that most of their earth was [[Kill Sat|KillSated]] by the own government, to attempt to slow down their enemies and rob them of any spoils. Those places also tend not to be inhabited by the only remaining formal government's citizens.
** From the bits seen in Jacinto that were actually in somewhat decent if disheveled shape and the backstory provided in bonus materials it's learned that these locations were at one time exceptionally pretty and opulant but after ninety seven years of total war on a planetary scale first between various human nations and then against the locust shortly after what upkeep there has been where it's been had was obviously only aimed at maintaining function. Scrubbing away the grimeor mowing the grass just isn't as high a priority as fending off the hulking xenocidal alien monsters.
** [[It Got Worse|It gets worse]] by the time of ''Gears of War 3'' where humanity has lost all of its cities and all humans exist a self-defending tribes. Everything has predictably become dirtier and more desperate.
* ''[[Infinity the Quest For Earth]]'' has the [[Star Fold]] Confederacy, who are essentially a breakaway faction of industrialists and super-capitalists who don't care about the aesthetics of their ships.
* The ''[[Jak and Daxter]]'' series as of the second game takes place in a [[Crapsack World]] [[Twenty Minutes Into the Future]].
* ''[[Mass Effect]]'' both averts and plays the trope straight. [[The Federation|The Council]] (including humanity) invariably have [[Shiny
* [[Twenty Minutes Into the Future]] ''[[
* ''[[Sins of a Solar Empire]]'' makes some use of this trope for many of the TEC's craft, understandable given that the bulk of them are repurposed civilian vessels. They by and large go for the utilitarian look, but aren't all wrecked up. They do feel a lot like this trope compared to the Vasari, or especially the Advent, where ''everything'' is shiny, ironic because they're the rebel-like faction.
** The pirates ARE this trope. There are spikes on their spaceships. Why? Because [[Rule of Cool|heck yea]]!
* The Terrans from ''[[
* ''[[Wing Commander (
** The sleeping chamber from Wing Commander I even has water dripping from the ceiling into a metal bucket standing in the metal-plated floor.
* The Teladi ships in ''[[X (
* ''[[Metroid]]'' loves this. Most of the games consists of tracking through [[Scenery Gorn|partially ruined]] technology of all kinds of aesthetics, with rusty crashed spaceships and half-ruined bases mixed with wilderness. Then again, the technology levels range from [[Organic Technology]] to [[Magitek]].
* ''[[Vega Strike]]'' firmly stands here. Humans use both cheap fairly good fighters and "shinier" ships at 10-20 times their cost made by an elitist faction, cargo is hauled by [[Space Trucker
* ''[[Tachyon the Fringe]]'', both played straight and averted: the rebels use large, heavy fighters that look like they've been put together with pieces of several ships and haphazardly patched up many times, while the [[Gal Span]] corporation has nimble, sleek fighters that look like they've just come out of the factory.
* ''[[
* Naturally, the [[Fallout]] series' future is used, broken, jury-rigged back together, and then used some more. Particularly egregious examples are the [[Alleged Car|Highwayman]] of ''Fallout 2'', with its lack of hood or trunk cover (and don't even think about paint), the tragically damaged AI M.A.R.Go.T. (who states herself to be operating at 14% capacity), and the duct-tape-heavy skins of the Hunting Rifle in every last game.
* ''[[Marathon
* Both ''[[Portal (
* The ''[[Half Life]]'' games showed a bit of this in the old, abandoned segments of Black Mesa but really cranked this trope up in the second game which simply screams [[Cyberpunk]] and [[Dystopia]]. Every lab belonging to the Resistance is full of visibly old mainframes and CRT monitors, despite the fact that the second game is supposed to take place somewhere in the 2020s. Justified in that there's a [[Vichy Earth]] situation going on so there's no way to get your hands on shiny, brand-new technology without stealing it from the [[The Empire|Combine]].
** One of the best in-game examples for this trope is the Gravity Gun: it's the wet dream of every physicist, yet it looks rusted and ready to fall apart at a moment's notice.
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== Webcomics ==
* ''[[
* ''[[Vexxarr]]'' had Carl [http://www.vexxarr.com/archive.php?seldate=022515 explain] just how old and obsolete their ship is.
== Web Originals ==
* ''[[AH Dot Com the Series]]'', thanks to the ship being a battered old ex-battleship kept running by a fraction of its proper crew.
== Western Animation ==
* ''[[Titan
* ''[[WALL-E]]'' pretty much embodies this trope, especially when WALL-E is compared to the sleek, shiny, futuristic EVE.
* ''[[Futurama]]'' if taken as its own universe rather than pure parody presents a very lived-in future where things do go wrong and break down.
** Particularly notable is the part of the opening sequence where two [[Zeerust]] rocket ships get into a fender-bender.
*** Not to mention the third one which smashes into a billboard at the end of the intro.
* The Harry Canyon segment of the film ''[[Heavy Metal (
* [[The Venture Brothers]] is very fond of juxtaposing the dreams of the 50's and 60's (especially the projects of Jonas Venture Sr.) with the ruins that they became in the present.
== Real Life ==
* While technically not the future the Space Shuttle is still a very high tech and futuristic looking vehicle even by 2011 standards. Despite this however the Space Shuttles have apparently [https://web.archive.org/web/20121104101641/http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39872790/ns/technology_and_science-space/ gotten quite dirty and banged up over the past few years].
** And a credit to NASA's engineers as well. Most equipment built ''now'' wouldn't survive half of what those babies can.
* Compare what people in the 1950's [[I Want My Jetpack|thought today would look like to what actually exists]]... It's a lot dirtier and less planned than they thought, not to mention the lack of flying cars and the like.
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[[Category:Spectacle]]
[[Category:Punk Punk]]
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