Crude Human Starships brainbug

[Balrog]

It seems quite common in scifi settings for human starships to be like blunt instruments - blocky, ugly-looking, and sometimes practical. In response, alien ships are often exotic, sleek, colorful. Are there any universes where the opposite is true, human starships that look more like art pieces then war machines (or better yet, look good while kicking ass)?

[Ryan Thunder]

Star Wars?

[Stark]

I don't actually see this as a bad thing: I think the brainbug is really that alien ships all look fucking retarded.

[Shroom Man 777]

You got those dinky Star Trek ships.

And the Executor from Star Wars, man, it looked great. Very very sharp.

[Balrog]

Star Wars?

I wouldn't exactly describe something like the Falcon as 'graceful', though the early Naboo ships do have that style.

[Junghalli]

I agree with Stark. It's realistic for a starship to look functional and somewhat ungainly. When building any kind of vehicle a smart person is going to care more about how well it performs than how pretty it is. Look at ocean going ships on Earth: with a few exceptions like private yachts and maybe ritzy cruise liners their designs are entirely functional. There's no friction in space so there's no reason for a starship to have clean lines (which is usually what they human eye sees as pretty).

[Argosh]

Are there any universes where the opposite is true, human starships that look more like art pieces then war machines (or better yet, look good while kicking ass)?

Yes, Star Trek. Starfleet vessels vs Borg vessels, art pieces vs war machines.

[Ryan Thunder]

(or better yet, look good while kicking ass)?

I was actually answering this part, specifically.

[Gullible Jones]

I'm going to agree with Stark on this one. It's not like there'd be no room for artsiness in a starship, but seriously, cruisers shaped like swans or fish or exotic tropical fruit? Why? An interstellar cruise liner could work, I guess (if the builder was ignoring safety standards), but White Stars and such are rather ludicrous.

(Not that functionality and looking cool are incompatible. WItness, for example, the SR-71.)

Regarding the OP - in Star Trek, everything looks like it was designed with form in mind before function, except perhaps those boxy shuttles (and I'm not even going to ask if those are supposed to go supersonic). So I guess that counts.

And there's Andromeda. The titular ship is supposed to be very functional, thank you, but it would look more at home sitting in a park on a concrete pedestal than gliding through space.

Anyway, the problem here seems to be that people equate advanced technology with an advanced sense of aesthetics, disregarding that a) in things such as aircraft, submarines, and of course spacecraft, aesthetics take a back seat to actually making the damn thing work properly, with minimal potential for failure; and b) extraterrestrials may have a very different sense beauty than we do.

[Shroom Man 777]

Besides, there are two kinds of "look good" when talking about starships, and more specifically warships.

There's the dinky kind of good looking, like the Frenchman who sips his tea while extending his pinkies. That's Star Trek, Andromeda and all that jazz.

There's the look good as in stuff like an A-10 Warthog, an F-15, or an M1 battle tank. Stuff that looks like it'll kill the shit out of you with explosions, rocket bullets, swordguns, plasma rifles and slaughtercannons. That's Star Wars (particularly Imperial stuff).

[avatarxprime]

The Prowler from Farscape is a pretty looking ship, albeit it is a fighter and only human if you are using the definition loosley, I won't say anymore than that.

[Uraniun235]

Space opera doesn't need to fuck around with worrying about "realism"; what counts most is self-consistency.

[Gullible Jones]

Eh, to an extent. I think there are certain limits to what a person will suspend their disbelief for, even if it's all internally consistent.

[Lord of the Abyss]

There's no friction in space so there's no reason for a starship to have clean lines (which is usually what they human eye sees as pretty).

But that's also one less reason not to make it pretty or even outright bizarre, as long as it's still functional; no need to worry about friction ripping something off. Things like holograms or extremely thin films could make a ship/station look almost anything, without the mass penalties that would make doing so stupid.

The Instrumentality of Mankind used warships shaped to look like gigantic humans; flying statues, basically. They wanted to create terror and awe of the human form, and figured having something that looked like a giant human hovering over your city firing death rays would do the trick.

In Between the Stars, the personal ship Johannes Gutenberg of media/propaganda/special effects expert Chih'-Chin Fu looks like a Chinese lantern of all things. Of course this is a fellow whose pet cat zips around in zero-g wearing a collar that produces a hologram that makes it look like a Chinese dragon.

The Keltic flagship in Patricia Kennealy's Keltiad is built to look like a dragon with outswept wings.

[Molyneux]

The redesigned Qin Shiuhuangdi looks pretty darn much like an art piece, but at the same time intimidating as all hell...that depends on whether something produced by the Martian groupmind still counts as "human", though.

The ship itself is from the completed comic A Miracle of Science. What's most impressive to me is that it's not a warship, not the flagship of some vast fleet...It's just a police cruiser. An artificially intelligent, vastly powerful police cruiser, but a giant black-and-white nonetheless.[/url]

[The Dark]

Some of it would depend on the fictional science of the setting, a well. B5 EarthForce ships are blocky because they're relatively simple, carry armor, and don't have any reason to be smooth or symmetrical. A universe with shields that project out from the hull would probably have smoother vessels to avoid blasts reflecting between shield areas. SW Imperial ships are designed to maximize forward firepower, whereas the more "graceful" Mon Cal cruisers are converted passenger liners. The eventual justification for warp nacelles was warp field efficiency. It may sometimes take retconning, but most universes will eventually have a reason for their ships' shapes.

[Teleros]

There's the look good as in stuff like an A-10 Warthog, an F-15, or an M1 battle tank. Stuff that looks like it'll kill the shit out of you with explosions, rocket bullets, swordguns, plasma rifles and slaughtercannons. That's Star Wars (particularly Imperial stuff).

40k Imperial warships perhaps? They definitely look good, and pack a hell of a lot of firepower too.

[Peptuck]

Are there any universes where the opposite is true, human starships that look more like art pieces then war machines (or better yet, look good while kicking ass)?

While not terribly sleek, 40k's Imperium ships look very artistic; I mean, they're more or less giant flying cathedrals. Tau ships look a little bit more practical, at least from the illustrations in Battlefleet Gothic, and Ork ships are possibly the crudest space-faring vessels imaginable.

[[R_H]]

Are IoM ships garish out of the shipyard, or does the ornementation accumulate over the centuries/millenia?

[NecronLord]

Are IoM ships garish out of the shipyard, or does the ornementation accumulate over the centuries/millenia?

Depends. The ones currently being built are built like that. However, we know that the Mechanicus (and possibly Battlefleet Mars) use somewhat less ornamented ships.

Battleship
Cruiser
Light Cruiser

[Psychic_Sandwich]

Are IoM ships garish out of the shipyard, or does the ornementation accumulate over the centuries/millenia?

The Horus Heresy books suggest that the Imperium has always favoured rather heavily ornamented ships; they're described as being covered in frescoes, murals, carvings and statues, at least on the inside.

[speaker-to-trolls]

Human ships are usually ugly, or at least not actually pretty, but get the job done, like the military vehicles we have now, it's what we're familiar with. But alien ships generally look strange so that we understand that they're aliens and different from us.

[Shroom Man 777]

There's the look good as in stuff like an A-10 Warthog, an F-15, or an M1 battle tank. Stuff that looks like it'll kill the shit out of you with explosions, rocket bullets, swordguns, plasma rifles and slaughtercannons. That's Star Wars (particularly Imperial stuff).

40k Imperial warships perhaps? They definitely look good, and pack a hell of a lot of firepower too.

They combine the first type of good look, the artsy good look, with the second type of good look.

The resulting planet-scourging vessel adorned with screaming gargoyles whose unholy orifices are actually slaughtercannons that shoot out missile-swords and spike-bullets, with once-gleaming spires now encrusted by millennia of pre-Cambrian rock staining the basilika's Imperial Sigil upon that great window of tainted glass...well, it scares the living shit out of me.

It's all the purgation and retribution of the freakiest gothic cathedral inhabited by deformed hunchbacks, and all the sci-fi kickassery of the Death Star, combined into one through some obscene hateful copulation.

The result is something that blows your planet up and condemns you to hell (or the horrors of the Warp).

[Bob the Gunslinger]

Are IoM ships garish out of the shipyard, or does the ornementation accumulate over the centuries/millenia?

The images in the Horus Heresy Art Book are much sleeker and cleaner looking than the "modern" ships, so I would expect that they are heavily decorated over the millennia. Also, some of the novels mention that the decorations depict actual events that the ship participated in, so it couldn't have all been there from the beginning.

As for Blocky Human Ships, I don't really think it's a brainbug. In fact, I'd say elegant, delicate-looking ships are the brainbug. Almost any ship builders would want to increase the volume of the vessel while minimizing the surface area, which leads to blocky or cyllindrical ship designs. The fact that alien ships often look graceful or outlandish has more to do with dramatic "necessity," the need to make them recognizably alien, than any meme of graceful aliens vs clumsy human tech. Unless that idea is part of the story, like in the Mote in God's Eye, or Babylon 5.

[NecronLord]

The images in the Horus Heresy Art Book are much sleeker and cleaner looking than the "modern" ships,

Well. Some of them. I think it depends on taste. If you turn to page 195 of the hardback (assuming you have it) which I just opened the book on, there's a whole variety of them that are extremely elaborate. They're less gothic, howeve,r and more 'shiny' looking. But there's lots of spires and such all over them in various directions. They look like cacti.