Redesign Star Wars

[tigercat]

Rebel Strike Craft : take P61 Black Widow fuselage stretch out nose and make fuselage  more angular . Add Concorde style wings and tail .

[jcf]

The Stainless Steel Rat book cover mentioned in context of the Imperial "sausage", and the source of the vertical "wings":

[Weaver]

Rebel Strike Craft : take P61 Black Widow fuselage stretch out nose and make fuselage  more angular . Add Concorde style wings and tail .

They pretty much did use the P-61 fuselage for the ARC-170:



That was much later though, so for a 1974 concept it's still good, and your idea of delta wings is very different.

Thinking about the Rebel Strike Craft and it's 633 Squadron inspiration for a moment, I wonder whether a side-by-side cockpit might be appropriate? The result, with twin engines and quite a heavy look, might be a bit like this Avery Frost Orion from the TTA Handbook Spacecraft 2000-2100:



Alternately, if the Smuggler Ship wasn't going to be a 'modified flying saucer', then perhaps the Rebel Strike Craft could be, inwhich case it might look something like this Alphan Manta from the same source:

[Weaver]

Okay, so thinking about the Mosquito, those two TTA ships I just posted, and the wingtip pods on an F-89 Scorpion, how about this? The Rebel Strike Craft is based around a central straight wing with a relatively large combined engine and weapons pod on each end. In the middle is a small saucer-shaped fuselage, with a ring-shaped deflector screen generator around it's edge, a two-seat side-by-side cockpit in the front half and the hyperdrive unit in the rear half. Small, remote-controlled laser turrets would be on the top and bottom of the hyperdrive (NOT in the geometric centre of the disc).

This gives a sense of both engine power and firepower, but it also feels as if it'd be sluggish, at least in roll, because of the large masses on the ends of the wing. It also gives you the dramatic possibilities of a Mosquito-ish cockpit where the crew can actually look at each other, instead of just talking on the intercom.

[jcf]

In reference to the TTA stuff, a number of Peter Elson and Chris Moore's designs would be possibles,
the Dragon's Dream book Parallel Lines on their stuff is a good reference, especially without the,
very often naff, TTA "descriptions" which were larded on after the fact.

[Mossie]

Star Wars aside, I'd be amazed if the craft attacking the pirate ship wasn't an inspiration for Babylon 5.

[rickshaw]

Just to make things more interesting.

All the ships should be spherical in shape.   Spheres contain the greatest volume for the least surface area.  All the ships thus far presented look like badly morphed aircraft - the appear designed to fly in an atmosphere not airless space.   Why bother?   If you have forcefields, you could make the ship more aerodynamic as you like.

[Snowtrooper]

Well, that's what the DropShips (that in addition to planetary landings did most of the space fighting until Gray Death Legion's discovery of Star League memory core) in BattleTech universe look like.

[Old Wombat]

Just to make things more interesting.

All the ships should be spherical in shape.   Spheres contain the greatest volume for the least surface area.  All the ships thus far presented look like badly morphed aircraft - the appear designed to fly in an atmosphere not airless space.   Why bother?   If you have forcefields, you could make the ship more aerodynamic as you like.

Simple, mate; because Average Joe Punter wants a fighter to look like a fighter.


Only a tiny percentage of the population will say "But that's just stupid!", & even some of those will add "... but it still looks cool!".

AJP will just see the flashing "laser bolts" & a suitably "futuristic" (but familiar) design with glowy bits & go "Oooooo!"

[Weaver]

Remember that the point of the exercise was to make a movie with the feel of a Saturday morning adventure serial but with the production values of 2001. The design of the ships is supposed to evoke the WWII dogfights that most of the audience will have grown up on. If we were going for rational technological futurism, I'd have a VERY different take on all this, starting with the logic of having 'fighters' at all.

On the subject of spheres, their attraction for space travel is that they're the most efficient pressure vessels for a given mass, but even desperately weight-limited NASA compromises by going to modified cylinders for most of their designs (the ISS modules for example). If you look at the Apollo LM ascent stage with all it's external gubbins stripped off, it's basically a cylindrical pressure vessel with various kinks. Most amateur designers trying to be realistic tend to over-state the importance of pressure vessel shapes anyway. The pressure difference between the inside and outside of a spacecraft is only 14 psi if you're running at a full one atmosphere environment (and you don't need to). That's enough for the right kind of fabric to contain, let alone any rigid aluminium/kevlar/unobtainium shape you care to imagine. Bigelow Aerospace are making an entire business out of inflatable space habitats so that space agencies don't have to launch empty volume into orbit to keep their astronauts sane: there's one attached to the ISS for testing at the moment.

[Old Wombat]

The Pkf.85 Falke "Anti-gravity Armoured Raider" wouldn't be a bad starting point for the fighter, although it came a few years after the time period.


(https://prometheusrising.net/2012/04/02/maschinen-krieger-pkf-85-falke-antigravity-armored-raider-120/)

So one of its parents, the P-38 might be a start point.



Even the Lawn Dart would be a decent base-line for the fighter.



Oops! Not that one!

Let's try this one.

[Mossie]

Thinking on Brian's spheres, but applying them to the "Star Destroyer".  2001 kept close to Arthur Clarke's ideas on ship design, one that crept up a lot was the 'dumbbell'.  A large sphere at both ends, the crew capsule at the head, the propulsion and reactors in the tail and a body holding the payload and keeping the other parts as far from each other as possible.  Discovery is an embodiment of this, with the tail sphere hammered to shape.

This gives a pretty good basis for something a bit more low sci-fi.  The command crew in a traditionally vulnerable "bridge" position for dramatic effect, you could have the cargo bay in front "swallowing"the rebel courier ship.(every making of special will have a talking head pointing out how awesome this was when they saw it first time). The rear sphere gives plenty of room for massive engines  to protrude for the impression of power.  The middle could be filled out as much as you like, bristling with heavy weaponry.  This would also be good for battleship style broadside battles.

[The Wooksta!]

Reading Clarke's "The Lost Worlds of 2001", the Discovery would have had wings as radiators for the reactor coolants.  But someone questioned the reason for a spacecraft to have wings and the idea got dropped. The dumbbell shape was one he'd used for the Earth-Mars liner in "The Sands of Mars".

Star Wars.  Apparently, the rebel blockade runner at the start WAS the original model for the Millenium Falcon, but Lucas felt it looked a bit wrong for what he wanted.

[Weaver]

Reading Clarke's "The Lost Worlds of 2001", the Discovery would have had wings as radiators for the reactor coolants.  But someone questioned the reason for a spacecraft to have wings and the idea got dropped. The dumbbell shape was one he'd used for the Earth-Mars liner in "The Sands of Mars".

Star Wars.  Apparently, the rebel blockade runner at the start WAS the original model for the Millenium Falcon, but Lucas felt it looked a bit wrong for what he wanted.

The original Millennium Falcon model and set was the blockade runner with the final Falcon's 'B-29' cockpit on the front end. The problem wasn't that Lucas fell out of love with it, the problem was that Space 1999 happened. The Falcon as designed was FAR too close in look and style to the Space 1999 Eagle and as soon as Lucas saw the latter, he ordered the Millennium Falcon design changed. Quite where the modified flying saucer shape came from is still a bit of a mystery: it was all done in a great hurry because the hangar bay set had already been built with the wrong ship in it, so nobody was keeping records for posterity and in any case, it mostly happened in conversations rather than memos. There's the apocryphal story that Lucas took a bite out of a hamburger, stuck an olive in the side on a cocktail stick, and told the designers that was the shape he wanted, but it's probably not true. There's also the somewhat more credible suggestion that it was based on the hero ship from the French Valerian comic strip which it's obvious Lucas plundered for all sorts of other elements. The name of the ship may well be a subtle dig at Space 1999: the 'millennium' is the year after 1999 and 'Falcon' is another bird of prey like 'Eagle'...

The original Millennium Falcon model was re-used as the blockade runner by replacing it's cockpit with a new bridge made, IIRC, out of two large paint cups glued together.

[zenrat]

On my bench right now.  The Incom T-25 Clamp Wing...

Su 25 WIP 16-01-18 by Fred Maillardet, on Flickr