Ships and planes in space.

[seadude]

Just out of curiosity as well as for general discussion, what ships and/or planes would you whif for outer space?
What ships (Destroyers, Aircraft Carriers, etc., etc.) would you whif a la similar to the Yamato in Space Battleship Yamato?
What fighter aircraft (F-14, Harrier, A-10, etc., etc.) would you whif into space based type fighters if you could?

Discuss weapons, engines, electronics, share designs, etc.

[zenrat]

Harrier immediately springs to mind as with the attitude control gubbins  it already has the basis of the thrusters it would need to manoeuvre in a vacuum.
For some reason I'm also getting a mental image of a C130 with Shuttle wings.
As in space there is no up and down maybe combine 2 or 3 fighter fuselages so as to get all round vision?

[Old Wombat]

I have several builds utilising ship's hulls for the base shape, but not necessarily in their original layout, which have been sitting in various stages of incompletion for ... um ... some ... er ... harrumph ... years, now.

Maybe I need to pause & collect my thoughts, plan a strategy & actually get back to the more extreme realms of sci-fi (I consider what-if's to be a less extreme, but often equally radical, variation on the theme).

Yeah, right!

[Weaver]

One thing that occured to me was to make Star Trekish shuttlecraft out of LCM-style landing craft. Either use one hul upside down on a flat plasticard base, or stick two hulls together top-to-top. In either case, the ramp is replaced by a sheet of clear plastic and becomes the main window.

You could do something similar with two larger, more conventional ship hull: stick them together deck-to-deck to make an "organic" spacecraft shape.

Plane-wise, well the Starfighter has always been an SF favorite, and there's a lot you could do with the SR-71, F-19 Stealth Fighter (the curvy pre-reveal one) and the MiG-37 Ferret. The old whiff-in-a-box tandem-seat Ka-32 "Hokum" kit that Italeri put out is also a gold-mine, since it has the sort of helo gunship cockpit beloved of SF film directors, but it isn't instantly identifiable as any real helicopter part would be.

This was an idea I came up with for a sci-fi version of a Skyray:

[Old Wombat]

The Skyray is almost purpose-built for sci-fi-bashing.

Which may be why there seem to be so few of them built as such - it's too easy!

[Weaver]

Flying saucer carrier:



The original idea for this was that it was still a conventional naval vessel, but adapted to operate flying saucers instead of normal aircraft. However, you could easily give it a few propulsion nozzles and ventral fins and make it space-going too.


Two variations on a Fuso class battleship hacked around to make space-battleship type things. I picked the Fuso because it's superstructure shape is pretty surreal to start with:



This one has the hull split and a double row of the casemate secondary guns fitted in between.




This one has main battery guns fitted in the hull gap instead.

[Weaver]

The dire Wing Commander film used scrapped Lightning fuselages as it's "Rapier" space fighters, with huge "gatling gun" style weapons fitted in the nose intake. You could do this to just about any nose-intake jet fighter:






The same movie also use a Canberra B.2 cockpit section for it's "Broadsword" bomber. Again, this is good choice, partuclarly for retro-style ships: the tubular fuselage and bubble canopy are very reminiscent of 1940s/1950s sci-fi illustration:

[martinbayer]

Instead of a jet fighter, I'd use the X-15 as a point of departure.

Martin

[scooter]

I can remember a long time ago seeing somewhere a submarine that had the tower way aft and was square with rounded edges in it's hull cross section that I thought would be a good basis for a spaceship. I don't know much about subs and I don't know where I had seen it so I have no idea if it's a real sub or something fictional in a movie or book.

Typhoon?

[pyro-manic]

The dire Wing Commander film used scrapped Lightning fuselages as it's "Rapier" space fighters, with huge "gatling gun" style weapons fitted in the nose intake. You could do this to just about any nose-intake jet fighter:

That is..... hideous, frankly!

IIRC the A-Wings from Return of the Jedi were two F-14 fuselages bashed together, with other greeblies added on.

My favourite space fighters (probably because I spent vast amounts of time playing the games as a teenager) are from the Freespace games that came out in 1998/99. Particularly the Hercules heavy fighter, which features in both games. A big, ugly, slow beast of a machine with heavy armour and serious firepower:



And the Perseus, from the second game, which takes place 32 years later. This design incorporates some alien influences and looks quite different as a result. Much sleeker, faster and more manoeuvrable than the Hercules, it can't carry anything like as much weaponry and is much more fragile.



These are more what I think of when I imagine space fighters. They don't need wings, so they have big engines, big weapons bays, and a cockpit.

Perhaps take something like an F-15, remove (or severely reduce) the wings, and add big weapons bays?

[steelpillow]

That Skyray is fabulous! 

I guess the Avrocar or the Mueller Volantor would be cheating, it'd be like sending them home.

I'd start with the NASA lifting bodies, turn them into huge invasion ships like the WWII military gliders.

Somewhere I once saw a rendering of an old three-masted windjammer in full sail, seen in perspective from below with the stars all around. Very eerie.

[Weaver]

That is..... hideous, frankly!

Couldn't agree more, but my point was simply to show one way of spacifying an air intake. "Space" fighters with air intakes and multi-petal exhaust nozzles but no aerodynamics really bug me: if it's got air-breathing engines, it should have an air-flying shape!

Perhaps take something like an F-15, remove (or severely reduce) the wings, and add big weapons bays?

Or perhaps you could modify a swing-wing type (a Tornado would be ideal) to make it's wings completely retract so that it takes up as little space as possible in a mother ship/carrier, but it can still enter an atmosphere. The tailplanes would be in the way, but Barnes Wallis' original swing-wing plans envisaged a tailless type. It was NASA who added the tailplanes (for good reasons), but what if you could get the original concept to work?

[scooter]

Couldn't agree more, but my point was simply to show one way of spacifying an air intake. "Space" fighters with air intakes and multi-petal exhaust nozzles but no aerodynamics really bug me: if it's got air-breathing engines, it should have an air-flying shape!

That's one thing that I like about Macross-

[Weaver]

That's one thing that I like about Macross-

Yeah, but they introduce my other pet hate: walking machines....

[PR19_Kit]

Real.

See here :- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon-class_submarine