Picked up a Doctor Who comic today and saw a nice hat-tip to (or composite ship design plagiarism of) Aliens.
The Colonial Marines ship “Sulaco”, from Aliens, 1986:
The Scavengers ship, from the Doctor Who Spam Filtered story, 2011:
Such a great ship. Not even remotely made to look aerodynamic.
And to make this almost related to Ubuntu and Debian, here was my command line to remove exif data from the image I took with my phone:
mogrify -strip spam-filtered.jpg
© 2011 – 2015, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
Interesting, I hadn’t seen either of those images before, but it looks like the Mass Effect 2 Collector ship might borrow from that idea as well.
http://images4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20100918091019/masseffect/images/8/86/Collector_Ship_With_Normandys_and_Cruisers.png
(It’s the big one on the left. The front of the ship is toward the bottom of the image.
Comment by tgm4883 — July 11, 2011 @ 8:20 pm
Aerodynamic is no use when there is no *aero* around you! :)
Comment by Jordi — July 12, 2011 @ 12:07 am
Why would someone need for aerodynamic spaceships? There is not so much air in the space, and with advanced engines, even in the atmosphere of a planet it does not need to be that, as it’s OK to slowly land on a planet, it’s just our current technology that we need major acceleration to gain enough speed before leaving the atmosphere where aerodynamic shape can be a major win :)
Comment by LGB — July 12, 2011 @ 4:57 am
A space ship doesn’t need to be aerodynamic, does it?
Comment by Jonathan Carter — July 12, 2011 @ 6:03 am
Alien… what a great bunch of movies!
And this song too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L93-7vRfxNs
And the Sulaco does not need to be aerodynamic, because the lack of air in the outer-space.
But… you need “aerodynamicity” again if you plan to use solar winds, like in Star Wars EP3 (¿or 2?) and Tron Legacy.
Comment by Fran — July 13, 2011 @ 11:46 am
Right, I meant I was happy that the Sulaco was designed without air in mind. So many space crafts get needlessly designed with some kind of areodynamic reference in mind since that’s what people are comfortable seeing due to jets, boats, etc. I think the Borg cube might be the greatest of all. It’s a brick in space. Heh.
Comment by kees — July 13, 2011 @ 11:54 am
I designed the SULACO for James Cameron’s ALIENS as a heavily armored supply ship (read ‘freighter) relative to the script…surprised? “…a forest of antennae enters from frame left followed by a huge mass…” That’s how you design for film, the script, the director’s approval of the design that is vizualising his pictorial interpretation of the story. The ship was designed to be massive, mechanically intricate in terms of surface detail and accommodating various story parameters. The face that other media formats copied the essential ‘look’ is almost a compliment. When creative imagination lacks, at least copy something really cool.
Comment by SYD MEAD — May 12, 2015 @ 12:09 pm