Vertical ships

[mrinku]

I envy you that. Sure, you had to live under the shadow of nuclear annihilation, but you got to live in the era when space was still a shining future instead of a brief, yellowing past.

It's not been too bad since then. Robotic exploration and astronomy have been progressing nicely, and the shuttle era was fun.

Back on topic:

There are a bunch of solid engineering reasons that no one fighting spaceship design is best. It's cheaper to make rectilinear modules, they tessellate along three axes and are good spaces to operate in under acceleration (from spin, thrust or artifical gravity). On the other hand, spheres are best from a pressure hull perspective (boxes are rubbish at pressurisation...) and use of material to enclose a volume. But they are the worst shape to tessellate. Cylinders are a reasonable compromise between these two extremes and are widely used for that reason (it's NOT simply because of streamlining rockets. Pressurised gas is kept in cylinders with rounded ends and submarines are built around that shape for much the same reason). Triangles have the best rigidity; hexagons tessellate as well as squares in two dimensions.

But it's not all about enclosing spaces. The whole thing needs to hold up under load, resist weapon fire, perform weapons fire, deal with whatever engineering requirements come with its FTL and real-space drives, detect stuff, minimise or disguise its signature and keep the crew alive. And probably a bunch of other stuff contingent on tech and the species involved. If it has to land on a planet as well or carry shuttles to do so, we get into a whole new set of requirements, too!

Also, fins on rockets are cool.

So at the end of the day, it's pretty arrogant to say "this is the best shape".

Edit: But I'm arrogant enough to assert that THIS is the best shape:

 

[Pandoricus]

I personally think that coaxial ships are the way to go and they got it correct in the anime show 'Legend of Galactic Heroes.' (Heh, no bias here given my avatar.)

All weapons are mounted at the bow, and the rest of the ship 'hides' behind them. This way, the cross-sectional area avaialble for enemy long-range bombardment to score a hit is minimized, and the deflector shield power can be concentrated in a small area.

Downside is that if the enemy succeeds in maneuvering to your broadside or forces you to fight with your broadside exposed towards them, your cross-section grows enormously, and your fleet suffers a disproportionate casuality rate. In fact, outcome of many battles in the show is determined by successful fleet maneuvers to land bombardment on enemy's broadsides.

This being the reality, conormal ships (horizontal and vertical) would not do well in combat.

(There are things that this show gets completely wrong too - melee combat, lack of mobile communication.)

Heartily agree Kaiser!