One reason that the Millennium Falcon looked so cool was its circular shape. It looked like a flying saucer! But with a cockpit and guns and a radar dish! In other words, it looked familiar. A Klingon Bird of Prey looks like a pterodactyl.
The incredibly awesome Swordfish II (Spike's ship) in Cowboy Bebop looks like a drag racer.
The original Enterprise didn't look cool at the time, because of its completely unfamiliar shape and layout. Newer NCC-1701 designs do look cool, because we're now familiar with the design. They all echo that comfortable original design, which we've all grown up with.
Let's go back to the Millennium Falcon. More than its familiarity, the incredible amount of detail on that ship, from the burn marks to the pockets to the mish-mash of design elements, implied adventurous background. It told you of vicious battles and nail-biting escapes.
Build Your Own Starship
Added : 10th May 2009
This is a guest article by Brent P. Newhall (click here for Brent's website)
Many sci-fi settings involve the liberal and exciting use and abuse of starships; you board 'em, you fight with 'em, and you fight in 'em. You'll probably be creating new starships, either as player character vehicles or as
environments.
So, how to make a starship that rivals the Millennium Falcon? Read on.
1. Function
What will your ship be used for in the game world? Hauling cargo? Ferrying passengers? If it's for combat, is it more of an aircraft carrier with lots of space for vehicles, or a destroyer mostly devoted to guns?
Start with the ship's primary function, and figure out how it'll be used. For a carrier-style ship, obviously it needs to store and launch sleek starfighters. This means the fighters must be kept near some kind of exit. For a cargo
ship, the cargo containers should be easy for the cigar-chewing crews to reach.
Also think about crew size. This is partly a function of the technology level of your setting. In Star Wars, droids and computers don't do much, but in other settings there might be greater automation. Will the ship need human (or alien) gunners, for example? A ship with a large crew will need quarters for them, plus a galley, toilet facilities, probably a rec room, etc.
Is your ship capable of atmospheric entry? If not, it can have a very weird shape, since it needn't be aerodynamic. As long as the ship's bulk is properly aligned to its thrusters, you've got a valid design. You can't have just one thruster on the bottom of the ship's design with the bulk at the top; it would spin.
Also remember that a space-only ship won't necessarily have a specific "up" or "down." You can even spin part of the ship to create artificial gravity, if your setting doesn't have gravity generators. Remember the ship from 2001?
Let's have a practical example: we'll design a cargo ship.
The cargo containers need to be easy to access, so we'll imagine two rows of hexagonal cargo containers, one on each side of the ship. A long corridor connects the two rows.
The engines and thrusters sit in the back of the ship, while a roughly pyramid-shaped cockpit is at the front. The containers can be accessed from space, or from doors inside the central corridor. Various air supply systems, fuel lines, computers, etc. run along the top and bottom of the central corridor.
For long flights, the crew - maximum of two - will need a place to sleep, eat, etc., so let's also place a small square room with fold-down beds and such between the cockpit and the central corridor.
2. Gameplay Use
Unfortunately, nobody will actually be jumping through hyperspace in the ship you design. You're designing a ship for a role-playing game, so how will it be used within that game?
Will there be hand-to-hand combat inside the ship? If so, keep that in mind during ship design. Spatial design is tricky; starships tend to be fairly cramped, but if you want half a dozen characters all fighting in the same room, it needs to be relatively large.
Let's say the players in our game are Star Patrol officers relegated to an out-of-the-way planet, and this ship rockets through the system suspiciously. According to protocol, the players must inspect this ship for contraband.
The pilot is smuggling lethal, banned weapons and attack drones. When the players board the ship, he runs into a container, grabs a weapon, and opens fire. After a few moments, he activates a couple of attack drones. Thus begins a wild corridor shoot-out.
This implies a few design decisions. How are the container doors locked and unlocked? He'll need some way of doing so quickly, so we'll say he has an ID badge that he can swipe at the door. This offers a hacking opportunity to a PC with appropriate skills.
The ship better not be vulnerable to internal small weapons fire! So we'll add to the ship's design a note that it's heavily shielded inside.
The smuggler also needs to be able to activate the drones. Can he walk up to one and switch it on? Does he need a remote activation switch? Let's say it's the latter, which he keeps with him, and there's a spare in the cockpit if a PC thinks to look for it.
3. Cool Factor
You must think about cool throughout your design process.
Does the ship's design excite the players?
I think it comes down to two factors: familiarity and implied story.
One reason that the Millennium Falcon looked so cool was its circular shape. It looked like a flying saucer! But with a cockpit and guns and a radar dish! In other words, it looked familiar. A Klingon Bird of Prey looks like a pterodactyl.
The incredibly awesome Swordfish II (Spike's ship) in Cowboy Bebop looks like a drag racer.
The original Enterprise didn't look cool at the time, because of its completely unfamiliar shape and layout. Newer NCC-1701 designs do look cool, because we're now familiar with the design. They all echo that comfortable original design, which we've all grown up with.
Let's go back to the Millennium Falcon. More than its familiarity, the incredible amount of detail on that ship, from the burn marks to the pockets to the mish-mash of design elements, implied adventurous background. It told you of vicious battles and nail-biting escapes.
Same with the original Enterprise design, actually. Why would anyone design a starship that looks like a child's drawing of a molecule? That question drove geeks and engineers to write articles and buy official technical manuals for decades.
Let's return to our cargo ship design. We've got two rows of containers, linked by a passage, with a forward cockpit and crew room. That looks like a jet pack to me, so I'd tweak the design elements to enhance that look. I'd change the container rows to be cylinders, ending with cones, and the cockpit would be minimized so that it looks more like the control/fuel lines on a jet pack.
And we've got ourselves a cool starship! Follow these principles - function, gameplay use, and cool factor - when designing your starships, and you'll have a ship that players will talk about for months.