The Ultimate Spaceship

[ShachonianX]

What would the ultimate spaceship be like? This is what I think. Also, this is meant to be mostly realistic, so it won't be massive.

Size: Space Shuttle size

Maximum Crew: 8

Weapons: 8 missiles, 2 lasers, electrical charge blast

Other Devices: 4 Comm. hacker satellites, robotic arm, 4 2-man escape pods, 2 2-man breaching pods, 1 2-man mining lander

Engines: 10 nuclear engines

Armor: Titanium outer shell, steel inner shell

[EatThePath]

Ultimate... for what? What is it built for? Context is important.

[ShachonianX]

Ultimate... for what? What is it built for? Context is important.

Battles. tencharacters

[Holo]

Get a Project Orion NPP and when you are near your target, detonate the entire fuel tank.

[Kryten]

How exactly is something the size of a space shuttle going to be able to carry nuclear engines (never mind all the other stuff) and still have room for essentially any fuel? And what the heck is an 'electrical charge blast'?

[Jokurr]

Why is a ship designed for war "the ultimate"?

[Capt.Joseph Kerbertson]

Battles. tencharacters

Against whom? We have no enemies in space. Right now, even our earthbound enemies are allies in space.

My version of the ultimate space ship is either a generational super ship or a large storage vessel (I'll break it down)

Generational supership: Would house 100 or so families, several areas for growing food, purifying water etc., Since we cannot overcome the laws of physics yet, our next bet is to send groups out into space. Their 8th or 9th great grand children would be the ones stepping foot on a new world. The Journey would take 100 or 200 years, the entire time, each generation would grow up learning how to do the job of their parent. Experimentation, cultivation, preservation. They would then pass this on to their off spring and so on. By the time the mission actually takes place, the colony won't be 100 strong, it would be more like 10,000 making it worth the journey.

As far as the large storage vessel. This is weird. We are in the midst of mapping out the human brain. One day we will be able to perfectly copy a humans entire brain, thoughts, memories... everything. We store said brain scans onto a large database on an essentially empty vessel, but it's not empty. The vessel contains cloning vats and the blueprints for each explorer scanned plus all equipment needed. Once the vessel is within 30 years of it's destination (really it's however long it takes to grow a clone) A clone is grown and the brain scan is imprinted. The new human is awoken with all knowledge of his/her mission, no o2 or food was wasted, no psychological problems due to emptiness of space. To them, they just got a brain scan, went to sleep and woke up near a new world (they knew it was going to happen) Time would no longer be an issue for these guys, just maintain a proper scan.

[nyrath]

The ultimate space ship would be a method of traveling through space from point A to point B in no time at all.

In other words it would be a StarGate.

[falofonos]

Some sort of ring around a star with magnetic manipulation magic to drive the solar wind perpendicular to the ring.

Put walls along the inside edges of the ring, Cover the ring with mud, plants and stuff, top up with air.

Fly wherever you want for a few billion years.

[ShachonianX]

I was watching videos of FTL (that indie video game), and then came up with this. The electrical charge blast would be, well, a blast of electricity that would probably electrocute people in an enemy ship and mess up electrical devices on it. Also, the nuclear engines aren't Project Orion ones. They are your standard NERVAs (NASA uses these for going to Mars).

[hugix]

It definitely should have a pool.

And a library!

[3_bit]

Why would you need so many weapons? Cyberwarfare would be your best tactic. I think compressed-gas bullets would be your best friend, as they are lightweight and plentiful, as well as being fired rapidly and at high speeds. Missiles would be very slow as they must maneuver to their target carefully unlike conventional ones.

[9911MU51C]

Here's an idea to fight heavy orbiting ships-

Why try blow up a heavy armored ship, when you could send 50 or so small rockets that could latch onto it and fire off thrusters retro-gade, dropping the ship into the atmoshpere? It'd only work in low orbits and they enemy would need to have slow, low TWR, and no way of shooting off the thrusters, but hey it's an idea

[Kerbface]

Ultimate? Realistic? What? There's no ship here.... it's just a list of vaguely "cool" ideas and most of them don't make a lot of sense, especially when you put some research into what space battles would actually be like.

To me the ultimate spaceship could be either one that is just really efficient and practical and gets you where you need to be in the shortest time (or does whatever it's supposed to do really well) or one that looks really cool and has a neat design. Or a combination of the two.

[Thaniel]

Ship for battle? Ok, I'll bite:

unnmanned, huge longrange laser, RCS and gyro controlls for attitude, deployable solar panels.

and no lifes wasted if it's taken out.

[Sof]

Small hard nosecone with a reactionless mass drive. Unmanned and mass produced. A small fleet would be capable of threatening most life in the galaxy by instantly accelerating to the speed of light and ploughing into inhabited planets.

[Nibb31]

Why would you want weapons in a spaceship. There are no enemies in space.

Or maybe you are talking science fiction. In that case, you might as well have magic engines, magic weapons, and magic enemies. And you will always win because you are the hero.

This is supposed to be the Science Lab forum, not Fantasy Land.

Edited May 25, 2013 by Nibb31

[maltesh]

Why would you need so many weapons? Cyberwarfare would be your best tactic. I think compressed-gas bullets would be your best friend, as they are lightweight and plentiful, as well as being fired rapidly and at high speeds. Missiles would be very slow as they must maneuver to their target carefully unlike conventional ones.

Hacking into a hostile target in the throes of combat is going to be both very difficult and very unreliable.

Compressed-gas bullets are going to be both slow and expensive compared to electrically propelled bullets, both because of the vacuum-sealing problem, and the fact that you have to store this compressed gas somewhere.

And bullets themselves are going to be of limited usefulness at range in space. Their primary utility is going to be against things that either don't know you're planning to shoot at them, or things that are unable to dodge. Several of the nice things about using a guided missile:

1. It's presumably a lot more maenuverable than both you and its target, so can respond to the evasive attempts your target is going to make.

2. It can get a lot closer to your target than you necessarily want to bring your spacecraft.

3. You don't have to hit the target with the missile, the missile can use its own weapons. Possibly things that you don't want mounted on your spacecraft's hull, such as single-shot railguns, or bomb-pumped x-ray lasers.