Designing Space Ships – Important Questions

Whether you’re writing a novel, designing a role-playing setting or planning another science fiction project: Spaceships are usually part of it. The most important questions as to how these should look and function concern not only the ships themselves, but above all the cultural and technological developments that must exist as prerequisites for space travel. […]

Building a Star Empire (Part 1)

The heart of every Space Opera novel or setting is a star empire – or better: several of them. But what exactly is a star empire? On Earth we have seen the evolution of many nations and alliances of nations from the Roman Empire to the European Union. Assuming that mankind (or any other intelligent […]

Jovian Chronicles Engineering Rules Part 1

Revisiting one of my favourite RPGs of all time I stumbled over the Mechanical Design or Engineering rules provided in the books again. They are complicated and pretty hard to understand (at least for me), so I tried to build a spreadsheet out of the formulas and options given, to double-check vehicle data sheets found […]

Sci-fi tv tropes – Ship Designs

When I look at spaceship designs from movies, tv series, comic books, video games and other ressources, I typically find one of the following three archetypes, with Type II being the most common: Type I – NASA/Semi-Realistic Realistic deep space explorer ship by Do Mo These designs look like variations of the space shuttle or […]

Beam Cannons

or Direct Energy Weapons are the second type of the three typically used large scale weapons systems used in space battles (the other two being Kinetic Kill Cannons and Missiles). Laser cannons A long time ago lasers and particle beam cannons were considered to be the weapon system of the future, superior to conventional ballistic […]

The Expanse: Theory on the Ancient Builders

I haven’t seen all episodes of Season 2 yet, so I may be off topic completely here. But I just came up with one, actually two, ideas about the motives of the ancient race that is responsible for creating the protomolecule and the wormhole network spanning space (that I read about internet spoilers already). I […]

Spinning Habitat Rings on Spaceships

Without the help of magical constructions that create artificial gravity aboard spaceships, there are actually only three options to have some sort of gravity in spaceflight: Accelerate by thrusting Make your ship spin (or a section of it) Place a large mass under your ship Option 1 works perfectly as long as you can accelerate […]

Hull Mass

So, I always wanted to create a system of rules or mechanics to design spaceships for roleplaying games. Interesting and yet somewhat realistic spaceships. Not as realistic as a Space Shuttle but also not as wild as a Star Destroyer from Star Wars. So I had to sit down and think about what I expect […]

Interior design

Ships in movies and tv series come in all kind of styles. Especially when you get inside you will find all levels of comfortability, from industrial dark to the shiny white hotel style. What would spaceships really look like on the inside? First of all spaceship interior design has to be functional. Nobody cares if […]