For the Star Destroyer, at least, I can see parts of the design that have been forced to make way for the main reactor, which bulges out of the bottom of the ship (but my heavens, the decision was made to deform the primary armor around the reactor, rather than simply designing the ship from the ground-up to put such an important thing entirely internal to the spaceframe?). What strikes me as off about these designs are their silhouettes – or rather, what they imply, which is that they have been designed around a shape rather than around a function. Or even the venerable Imperial Star Destroyer (in this case, an Imperial I, because yes, I am that kind of nerd – you can tell from the communications tower): And in the design, with the guns off – can you even tell where they go? This isn’t a dedicated carrier, at least according to its wiki article.Ī ‘Damnation’ Command Battlecruiser from EVE Online I had one of these back when I used to play, tanked to high heaven.įor this post, what is particularly notable is that this image of the ship is unfitted – there are no guns installed – but it took me a minute to even tell – and I flew this damned thing. Though the engines also strike me as surprisingly small for a fast warship, what gets me about this design is that I have no idea where the primary armaments are. What I often see in sci-fi settings are space warships that look like this: Via Wookiepedia (weren’t expecting that, were you!) the Raddus, an MC85 Star cruiser. I wanted to expand on this idea and trace it historically. Looking across naval design over the centuries from oars to sails to nuclear reactors, one of the few constants is that the overall shape and profile of the ships are dictated by propulsion and armament (with crew facilities essentially jammed in ‘wherever they fit’). Specifically, I want to expand a bit on this statement: This week is going to serve as a bit of an addendum to Where Does My Main Battery Go and a bit more silly sci-fi fun to round out the year. This week’s post will be a bit shorter, as the holidays are now upon us and the year is winding down (but don’t worry – I have a humdinger of a series planned for January – no, not that one one you did not expect).
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