Spacescifi

Any shape can be used, but optimal shaped spaceships are more likely to be used than not if engineers in verse care about expense and effort. Sphere: Best at holding air in. No pressure cracks that would occur if you had air pressure inside a blocky shaped ship. Really any streamlining is better than a hard edge when it comes to holding pressure. In that sense, spaceships are really like glorified balloons that house crew that need to live in the balloon. Saucer: It is good for spin gravity. Although you could also do the same with a spaceship shaped like the letter H. Only with a LONG bridge between the sides. Blocky: Pressure cracks at corners will stress hull sooner or later if you put air pressure within the blocky hull. If you ony put air pressure in spherical or cylinderal roons inside the blocky ship you avoid that problem. Thus blocky ships would be great for drones or robot ships that do not need air to breath and thus won't have lots of air inside. Cylinder: You get most of the benefits of the sphere plus it is better for bulk storage of plenty things. Inside the ship: Although the captain and chairs on the bridge is popular, spanning many imitators, it is is really a sub-optimal design. They could likely save the energy they put into gravity generators by simply accelerating up instead of sideways. I know weightlessness is bad, and for times the ship is not accelerating the saucer is optimal for centrifuge spinning for 1g. It would be cheaper even if gravity generators were possible, since anything we already have a. grasp of is not considered very advanced in a scifi setting and should be thus easier to come by if advanced tech like gravity generators are available. Ship purpose: What a spaceship is made to do also has a bearing on optimal designs. Astetoid mining ships, if they do any processing of their own, practically beg for a shape that will allow spin gravity. Since processing and refining ore is easier with gravity than without. For ships that are SSTO's, compact designs have less drag, but if fuel is not a concern because the setting has super tech propulsion, suboptimal designs would have other reasons for existing. Sure the ship creates more drag than it needs to, but if it has antigravity to fall up, then it could reach space in about 2 min just falling upward from earth at 1g. Which is a huge improvement. The ship would still need to use some other propulsion to maintain an orbit, but at least there would be little to no air resistance in LEO, thus increasing fuel efficiency of rockets. And that is if rockets are even used as a main source of sublight propulsion in a scifi setting. They certainly do not have to be, as the only limitations are the ones a writer imposes on their work and self. Personally, I love saucer spaceship design, because antigravity makes it at least practical, and while it may never be as optimal as a cylinder or a sphere for holding pressure, it is optimal for spin gravity at least.

Some form of translocation (moving space past your spaceship without accelerating it) is a useful tool for scifi. Yet I read one work where the warp/translocatio/hyperderive followed a ballistic course. And you would only drop out of warp once you were nearby another star. That means you would have to already have your momentum heading for the place you want to end up. Otherwise you would end flying at warp forever until your vessel runs out of power and is stuck in interstellar space. Inertia drift would matter for a ballistic course, depending on how efficient and how much thrust sublight engines provide, and how fast FTL is. One LY per hour is good, but dealing with hours of inertial drift after dropping out of warp is either solved with high thrust/high efficiency sublight engines OR using the translocation drive to get much closer to the planet of choice without acceleration. I thought it was an interesting concept as it brought back the danger of spaceflight in a setting that was very much space opera. I nearly adapted it for my own work, setting mass lock distances (where ship can drop out of hyperdrive) at whatever the raduis of the destination celestial body times light seconds max or less. So for our sun, you could drop out of warp about 4 light seconds away, which would still make it uncomfortably bright. From there it would take 15 min to spool up the drive to warp again, and then you could do a drop near earth. Since earth's diameter is much less than a light second, you could drop in one earth radius away. Yet I didnt use it since I wanted to justify scifi ship designs where acceleration pulls you back toward the wall. For that I needed ships that would NOT have to use constant acceleration to reach their destination. It is only a matter of 15 min between every jump. Weightlessness is not so bad for such a short time period. Thrust only really would be needed for space rendezvous or landing on planets. Otherwise, you really should have decks on a ship like an office building if you have to rely on constant acceleration to get close enough to your destination to try landing.