Full steam ahead Mr. Scott
I found it interesting to note that SF ship designs can be seen to range from realistic to fantastic on the basis of their speed. Of course, the required speed is often a function of the plot. If the story requires our characters to simply travel from earth to orbit, the ship doesn't have to depart far from what we are familiar with. Since the trip itself is relatively short, there isn't much need to focus on the ship or the trip any more than say any drama focuses on the trip from Honolulu to LA (unless there are snakes on the plane).When the distances become longer, then the trip needs to be faster. This leads to some inevitable problems with what we currently know about space travel. For one thing, space is really big (see HHGttG). So even a trip to the Moon, let alone Mars is not a minor expedition. With current technologies you need a lot of fuel and supplies, and it will take quite a long bit of time which, dramatically speaking, will be boring. Outside of stories making a point of how incredibly boring this is, one would try to avoid this. It then becomes necessary to push the envelope making the trip faster and way more efficient so we can carry less fuel becoming in a strange way more "realistic" since you don't need a super carrier sized ship to move a dozen people (or less). Eventually as the distances become greater, say from star to star the velocity needs to get up to light speed, or c. At this point the design could be said to race to "fantastic" infinitely fast. This is because theoretically nothing can go faster than light (see any number of detailed discussions on the limit). This puts a real bind when you want to go between multiple star systems fairly quickly. You will need to find loopholes or gimmicks to justify the much higher speeds (and not even mention the nasty bits about time dilation and relative time paradoxes well beyond my scope). Ultimately we may even talk about traveling between galaxies so the ship needs to be truly fantastic. It's neat how in the few stories I've seen about traveling to another universe, you hardly ever need a ship at all.
By the way, I quoted realistic earlier because I think there is also something else operating in the design of SF ships. There is an inherent understanding that in space operas we often want the world to be a lot like our world (SF as metaphor for reality). Quite frankly, your average merchant family doesn't own or operate supertankers and fleet carriers. If you want your freelance space merchant or privateer to go from place to place in her ship, well it's got to appear realistically affordable. As a result many of the ships we see while not apparently fantastical in capabilities should be noted as fantastical in affordability. Just think about how we can barely put together a space station between the wealthiest and most powerful nations on earth right now.
Table of realism
Looking solely at speed as the main factor in fantastic design, I came up with the following graph. |
| Realistic to Fantastical Engineering vs. Portrayed Speed |
Which designs fit where
We can start looking for the most realistic ships being ships that are limited to the immediate future or even a contemporary setting. Ships limited to travel between the earth and the moon and all points in between can follow existing designs very closely. Moving slightly further in capabilities requires a slightly greater technology, but many portrayals of ships that only need a slight increase in capability don't stray too far from what we know.The exploratory ships from Gerry Anderson's "Journey to the Far Side of the Sun" show strong influence of the concurrent designs at NASA for Apollo and lifting body programs. Even the Messiah from "Deep Impact" creates the notion of a current hodgepodge by actually using ISS and shuttle components in its design. Pushing the speed envelope some more, the designs for the spindly Antares from the late Defying Gravity and the Pegasus from the BBC's Voyage to the Planets docu-fiction (on which Defying Gravity was based) contain many very realistic elements.
2001's Discovery command module was designed to be in keeping with ideas about a real inter-planetary ship. The CM was placed far from its reactor, it was equipped with auxiliary engines, and large enough (in theory) to contain a centrifuge to provide artificial gravity, a space pod garage, a substantial computer core, suspended animation systems, and supplies for a minimal crew for several months of travel time.
Reaction drive is the most frequently used mode of propulsion through space. While there is some arguments about the mechanics of these engines (engine bell design, firing times and so forth), we are familiar with how they work and they can be seen in all kinds of designs from realistic to fantastic. Ships such as the Discovery in "2001: a space odyssey" travel using nuclear rockets at speeds that are expected with such engines (travel to gas giants in several months to a year). The show "Salvage 1" had a ship called the Vulture that took into account affordability by being made of recycled materials and using dangerously explosive fuel to preclude a Saturn V sized vehicle. The Eagle from "Space 1999" also uses reaction engines in a way that seemed perfectly normal for a ship whose initial purpose was to act as a shuttle between the moon and low earth orbit, particularly with its non-streamlined, let it all hang out look. The show's need for speed though starts to push the believability as scenes imply capabilities of relativistic speeds for a rather small ship with obviously tiny fuel capacities. Still, the Eagle does recognize the need for control jets for maneuvers; a detail that is often missed.
The usage of more exotic realistic propulsion systems are not always seen in spaceship designs and this is probably because, truth be told, its generally not pertinent to the plot. It's just so much easier to put a lit engine bell on it and leave at that. The starship in Avatar is noted as one of the most accurate portrayals of a possible starship. This is not accidental as a good deal of research went into putting the "Venture Star" together. The single pilot episode of Vituality featured a ship, the Phaeton, which used a nuclear pulse drive like the one originally proposed in the 1960s for Project Orion.
Once FTL travel is required in the story, there are two solutions. One is the loophole, typically a wormhole or mechanism of "jumping" from one point of space to another. Such vessels tend to stay close to current knowledge about space travel, i.e. reaction drives, distances on the order of 100s millions of miles not light years. The shorter "real space" distances allow for observing orbital laws, g-forces and the like in a more realistic fashion. The second method is to have new physics so you can travel faster than light. Anyone designing for this type of mechanism is free to invent more exotic engineering.
The requirements of story telling (and production budgets) often adds some unrealistic elements even to designs that try to follow some of the rules. Not counting the ships of phenomenally advanced races who know a whole lot more about space travel in these stories, You can find ships that use reaction drives of phenomenal efficiencies or have no visible means of fuel capacity or heat dissipation (notable given the energy requirements that one would think they need).
So what about forgetting about the physics already. A classic case are the Irwin Allen productions were the ship was really just a box for the characters (that was frequently tilted from left to right as sparks flew off the computers). Exactly what moves the Jupiter II is a total mystery (as is the number of decks that are really crammed in there). Interestingly this was also important to Gene Rodenberry when he requested that Matt Jefferies design the Enterprise with no traditional propulsive technology. In a sense, he was being very realistic in realizing that the fantastical speeds required for his stories were beyond any capability even conceived of at the time, so why dwell on it.
Some "drive" systems which were really not explained or shown to fit with currently known physics ("the science of..." books not withstanding), which is really just fine. What could be better than to power a time machine with a banana peel?
So why dwell on it?
In some ways there really isn't any reason to do so. If what you are interested in is a good story or something visually interesting it shouldn't matter much at all. Yes it is upsetting to those who know some physics when stuff is blatantly wrong and incredibly refreshing when someone goes through the trouble to get it right. The question remains, however, because I know many people love a good story without letting themselves get bogged down on the engineering of it all.Take for instance a design that I think sits way up in the fantastic stratospheric right of the graph: the Lexx. The ship itself was so foreign and gorgeously rococo, with its bio/mechanical design style. It has no obvious means of propulsion (occasionally it does seem to exhaust propellant, but it has no obvious exhausts) and it goes at whatever speed necessary, from star to star, from galaxy to galaxy, universe to universe. While this puts the Lexx, and pretty much all the space hardware on the show, into the realm of what George Lucas called science fantasy, I wouldn't have allowed myself to let that get in the the way of a good story.
So, if you really need to, there are people figuring out exactly how a Starfury's engines are fueled and books published with cross-sections of X-wings and Tie fighters for you to enjoy. I'm just happy if it can get the hero to the planet on time, and look cool while doing it.
A brief postscript:
...and besides all the high-tech, where is the bathroom anyway?
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