Its not that, its just ships dont look like ships unless they're long and naval like. Because theyre in a vacuum, its shape wont have any practical use, its just there for looks. Go for mini-cap ships. the caps are what im talking about. minature versions of those...

altrough Shape don't matter in space for movment it do matters when it comes to getting hit by Weapons

lets say you got a space craft made out of a box with a engine it's a LOT more easy to hit it with a target system then a Complex Ship Structure like the Avent Carrier.

HUH??

Believe me, if it was cost effective to have an attack plane sport them curvy lines to look like a friggin dagger with guns, and if it were not for the fact that our primitive radar systems can be fooled by angular surfaces, you would have curvy daggers with guns attached. Humans love that shyte.

Form follows function, yes. Aesthetics have nothing to do with that. Bu aesthetics have everything to do with games, and the units therein, the function of which is also to blow up things, AND to look good while doing it.

Actually, if you observe the history of human design, you'll notice that form does not, at all, follow function. Form follows an almost evolutionary process with numerous different iterations until innovation finally settles on one that pleases the consumer enough that it defines a standard, and then subsequent designs deviate very little from this standard.

Military design most certainly does take aesthetics into consideration, for two reasons. One, the contractor who is developing this weapon has to sell military brass on throwing down some budget money on their creation; military pragmatism notwithstanding, it is easier to sell someone on something that looks as if it will accomplish the task. This means you design a vehicle/weapon what have you with this aforementioned standard in mind; a boat should look like a boat, a jeep a jeep, a rifle a rifle, and so-on. Secondarily, one must consider the psychological impact of seeing this weapon. You don't paint a tank pink and cover it with flowers. You want your enemy to see this thing and quake in fear with unbidden thoughts of impending dismemberment.
These sorts of things are seen most often in infantry equipment (That marine corps K-bar looks menacing for a reason), but it most definitely extends to vehicles design considerations as well.
The history of design, and of military design especially, shows us that aestheticism takes the most primary role when form effects function the least. So, it would seem evident that spacecraft are most definitely going to be designed with aesthetic concepts in mind.

Anyone who mentions convex curves on a space craft as being useless fluff is incredibly wrong. From a design standpoint, anything that reduces angles limits the amount of surface material needed to enclose a given 3-dimensional space. Additionally, convexly curved surfaces provide a greater degree of protection against weapons fire, and a modular, curved superstructure would provide the most protection against decompression. Basically, anybody who designs a blocky spacecraft is either in a hurry, or an idiot. Lets give the TEC the benefit of the doubt and assume that their ships are blocky and angular because their production technology made producing large flat slabs of metal incalculably cheaper and faster than curvy ones.

But, basically, real spacecraft, designed intelligently, are probably going to look very similar to Advent ships: submarines in space. Large, curvaceous, semi-cyllindrical, and very sleek. Also, shiny.

Why? If we develop FTL someday and run into hostile aliens, would you rather militarize space or get exterminated?



Take the example of the recent Joint Strike Fighter program that's currently in course to put the new F-35 Lightning 2 stealth fighter into full service by 2012. The two finalists for the contract were Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Boeing had designed the X-32, a hideous bulbous contraption that's probably the ugliest war plane to be designed since the beginning of air war. Lockheed had designed the X-35, a normal curvaceous stealth fighter that, while not looking extremely threatening or anything, looked decent with appearance somewhat similar to the larger F-22 and the old F-16.

Boeing lost. Lockheed took the contract, and the big money that came attached to it. I'm sure looks had some part to play in that, though not all.



Real human spacecraft, as of present day, are absolutely hideous. All our space probes look like boxes with sticks attached to them, and orbiters like the STS Space Shuttle(which is in fact rather sleek) can't really be considered as true spacecraft.

I think real human space warships will look like the Radiance Battleship, as you said - sleek, shiny, symmetrical. But not at all like the other Advent ships. Who actually wants to see their civilization's military being composed of things like the Aeria Drone Host or Iconus Guardian? I also think that they'll be focused mainly on nuclear/antimatter missiles and ion/plasma/electron/antimatter beams as their weaponry, and not guns firing kinetic-energy slugs or simple photon-shooting lasers. Their defenses, in my imagination, would also probably be focused around armor and cloaks/stealth/ECM rather than energy shields.

Any chance to have a new Kodiak release soon ?? Please?

Heh, funny all this talk about realism. Its a game people. RPGs have long been filled with unplausibly-shaped ships, no one's cared about it when they looked cool.
Though I personally find the Kodiak ugly, as well as the Advent Drone Host. As for the Garda Flak Frigate, I find it kind of cool Sure, it doesnt make much sense, but it has a baddass vibe.

edit: To be honest, its not so much that the Kodiak is ugly, its that its so utterly non-intimidating & generic looking for a ship that comes so late down the tech-tree and who's supposed to herald a new age in ass-kicking. I remember the first time I researched it, thinking "Oh, this is gonna be great, it'll kick so much ass! Whaa? A vaguely-tank shaped brick? Not exactly what I envisioned tip of my spear to look like."

So far no one's passed through interstellar space... at least no one we know of yet.

While a civilization may come to peace with itself over time, having become the dominant sentient species on it's own home planet, no one can tell how they'll behave upon meeting alien species who have also expanded into space. They may be xenophobes, they may have a different system of logic and emotions. There is no telling what may happen with aliens until we meet them.

Humanity is slowly, very slowly coming to peace with itself - the frequency of wars has been much lower since WW2 than before it, and the Cold War, that at times looked poised to destroy civilization, never happened. Wars in various parts of the world were just about constantly happening in the middle ages, but not now. And the rate of rate of technological development has increased over the last few hundred years - since Newton, tech has moved much faster than it did over the past 50000 years, with the fields of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics only coming into being in the last century.

While the technology to move faster-than-light, based on the Alcubierre Metric, is probably not more than a millennium away provided we can get that negative-mass problem solved, the technology to colonize worlds is the problem. Still, with significant effort, it would be possible to turn places like Titan, Mars and equivalents in other star systems into somewhat habitable places.



True. The Skarovas Enforcer and Destra Crusader both look intimidating compared to the rest of the Vasari/Advent ships, with their designs being focused around their huge imposing front-mounted weapons. The Kodiak, on the other hand, is a tankish brick with those stupid metal slabs on either side and a turret tacked on and jammed into the forward-facing position.

After all, the Kodiak doesn't herald a new age of ass-kicking. Instead, it's a mining ship whose original job was to break big asteroids into smaller pieces so that they could be melted and processed into raw metal more easily. Since it had some big guns already, the TEC decided to bolt on some huge slabs of armor and put it into combat. It's appearance at Military Tier 5 is only a game-balancing act, it's actually a no-tech ship.

Really? You'd treat everyone else the same way you treat yourself? That's a very one-dimensional statement.



With a different sentient species, you can't tell.



There is no way of exterminating human flaws like greed, arrogance, fanaticism, stupidity, etc. Nationalism, territorialism, religious divisions and other human nature will constantly hold us back. The great majority of people don't see humanity as humanity, they lack the perspective to see beyond their village/town/city/state/country. Riots, disputes, skirmishes, crime and terrorism are indeed constantly going on which your shielded western societies usually don't see and are rarely affected by.

But it isn't necessary that utopia is required for expanding into space. In fact, the near perilous times of Cold War saw more human space exploration than the relative stagnation afterwards. Competition and/or collaboration brings out the best in humanity, but it may be channeled towards destruction or progress. As long as the destructive aspect remains unused, and tensions don't escalate beyond a point, humanity progresses. By your logic, humanity should kill itself and not expand into the stars beyond this pale blue dot that is Earth, just because we haven't achieved utopia.



You forgot missile weapons. Once launched, they have their own propulsion systems and can potentially go much faster than kinetic slugs, and carry explosive payloads like fusion/antimatter warheads. If the FTL propulsion system can be miniaturized and made to work in the missiles, then you have weapons that are even faster than lasers. They'd not have the range of lasers, but they'd have accuracy, and more firepower.

Plasma would not be totally unviable if it were to be generated afresh for each shot to minimize the confinement time. It would be a very short-ranged weapon because it will cool down more the farther it goes, and it's accuracy would be nothing special. Antimatter plasma would be hellishly damaging, but generating it would be much harder and confinement would be riskier.

I heard that 5 grams of antimatter + matter = 15 kilotons of destructive energy

1 gram of antimatter + 1 gram of matter = 1.8 x 10^14 Joules = 43 kilotons of TNT
1 kilogram of antimatter + 1 kilogram of matter = 1.8 x 10^17 Joules = 43 megatons of TNT

http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3x.html

I'm not sure how much energy from matter/antimatter reaction is lost through neutrinos and other particles, but it'd make bang.

Before I say anything I just want to say that I am an undergraduate student in aerospace engineering



As a soon to be engineer in the defence bussines i can assure you that aesthetics comes to the bottom of the list when it comes to designing weapon systems, the so called "psychological impact" does not exist since trained soldiers don't fear weapon systems, they fear from the effectiveness of said weapon system and from the enemy (if the enemy is good enough).



The X-32 lost because when it hovered near to the ground hot air from the exhaust circulated back to the main engine, which causes the thrust to weaken and the engine to overheat, thus making it riskier to land and takeoff in VTOL mod, tht was the major consideration in picking the X-35 over the X-32.



You are making alot of assumptions based on (IMHO) on fanciful thinking, now don't get me wrong, fanciful thinking is all you can use when thinking about spaceships in the far future OTOH assume is making an ass out of u and me, so lets not get into the fight of how will spaceships look in the distance future since most probably each and every one of us will be wrong...
OTGH (on the gripping hand) we can look at existing space craft and technologies to picture the spacecrafts of the close future like this one:












Technological levels required to effectivly rule an entire continent are hundreds, if not thouusands of times higher than what we had 1000 years ago and yet even though we do have the ability to incinerate our entire civilization we still fight each other like they fought 1000, 2000 and even 5000 years ago.
Technology is not magic, there is no threshold that if you pass it people will magically become enlighted ,peaceloving and benevolent, technology is a tool to do things more efficently thats all.



I'd like to see an harmonious and peaceful society that survived to this very day...
and i'll sure like to take a look at your math...

As for space weapons and other niffty stuff....
Take a look in here (since I have a test tommorow and I need to go study):
WWW Link and go to the space war section.

Hiem's extended theory (theory of everything): Space flight and tak a look here for further articals: HPCC-Space GmbH

And, if you really want to know how space combat with close to today technology might be, tryout Attack Vector Tactical

Warder