 August 19, 2015 - 9:12pm | Years ago, I reading about how dangerous and pointless portholes are on a spaceship, especially a warship, on Atomic Rockets. Basically, they are a structural weak points on the hull; ship weapons, like lasers and nukes, can blind the crew; view ports are irrelevant to ship's navigation and gunnery (everything is too far apart); and there is nothing really to see but perpetual nighttime (all those colorful imagery of are just UV/IR filters) that could cause the crew to become distressed over time. I then had the idea I got from casinos: Casinos like to mess with their costumer's perception of time by darkening the windows and using a lot of artificial lighting so that costumers would loose all sense of time, thus spend more time gambling. More recently — over a decade now — casinos have been using high-def screens to display videos on exotic locals, to give the illusion of of daytime... Day and night. It was something featured in Back to the Future part II, but was so minor and seen as goofy, that most people forgot about it as a one-off joke (you pay to watch outdoor scenery). My idea is to have have holovid screens all over a ship, displaying life-like outdoor scenery that give the feel that you are on a planet, while not being used for video intercoms or TV screens. Much like the lighting on a submarine, the imagery can transition between day and night to help keep the crew on a day/night schedule. The ship's life-support can adjust the lighting and temperature, slightly, to reflect day and night conditions. And soft ambient sounds can be used to feed the immersion. Naturally, in emergency and combat situations, the outdoor stuff gets shut-off as an unessential elements. So, what do you guy's think? Do you have your own ideas on living in a spaceship? |
 August 20, 2015 - 4:42am | Agreed. Not much of a direct game use, more of an ambiance thing. But I would use it to tell the players something about an area they're investigating. -stray bullet damages the computer causing it to lock the system in night cycle allowing players to surmise that whatever happened did so at night. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 August 20, 2015 - 6:36am | Downtime. There will be a lot of that, and the interior should reflect this to keep the crew from becoming eternally bored. |
August 20, 2015 - 8:14am | Since holograph tech is so advanced I would think ships would have 1980s style arcade booths for immersivegaming experience. Also doubles as a shooting trainer I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
August 20, 2015 - 5:15pm | Holographic theaters, holographic games, holo-books, exercise equipment, and even a physical tabletop game would not be out of place. |
 August 21, 2015 - 12:56am | Opinion can differ on the use of portholes on spacecraft. Some US astronauts wanted less, some Soviet astronauts wanted more, and there are varieties of need either way. They're also, by the same logic, largely irrelevant on sea-going military ships for similar reasons, but they exist nonetheless. That said, a holographic version would make more sense in terms of the various threats. Views of the space outside would be another option - some people actually enjoy seeing space. There's also a limit to how much you can fool a brain into thinking it's in one place when it knows it actually isn't, especially over time. |
August 21, 2015 - 3:54am | Yes there is a limit to how far you can go in convincing a mind that its some place it knows its not but I spend a lot of time looking at art and a good landscape can transport you even though you know it's not real or even though the artist did not produce a realistic picture having preceded to work in texture or tones of light and dark. I think there will be animae, impressionistic, even abstract movements in holo art all while realistic holo art remains mainstream. Holographic gaming tables plugged into the main computer where the crew can put themselves against a lvl 5 or 6 robotic brain would be popular. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 August 21, 2015 - 7:24am | I think it was old BSG where one of t the characters would retire to an old observation bubble to see real space because the ship was too confining. The place was isolated from the ship by an airlock. I think that real ports would be common on passenger ships and uncommon on warships. Inside on both would be screens and holographics as mentioned above on all types of ships so that the crew could adjust their mood. I'd think that passenger ships would integrate transparent displays into the cabin portals. -iggy |
August 21, 2015 - 7:33am | There was something I remember reading awhile back for use inside airliners. It was pretty much a long screen on either side of the fuselage interior that would give the feeling of the wall being transparent. It would show a realtime picture of the outide. Last week Samsung announced that they have been working on very thin, flexible screens so I imagine the two ideas may mix one day. For Star Frontiers I imagine a sort of 'big screen' like this would also work for holograms. |
 August 21, 2015 - 12:51pm | I just read a Popular Science article on a simulator for the hyperloop, and it had screens on the inside, instead of windows, too. Re: games on ships, there was a good article in Freelance Traveller about spacer bars having an expensive 3-d holographic flight-sim game-- pilots would have their ships/planes zoom around the room, dogfighting. Each player could buy a chip (like a contemporary thumb drive/memory stick), that would have the characteristics of their favorite ship(s) programmed on it, which they could plug in to play. For a little more money, your stick could be shaped to resemble the desired ship. The article included an NPC, a female human pilot who liked to hustle other pilots by playing ditzy until there was money on the line. Of course, she'd be available to hire onto your ship, too. |
August 22, 2015 - 12:27am | With looking outside, I would make exceptions to observations domes. I like to keep forward observation domes as backup astrogation tools in case the nav-computer goes down — this would require hours of calculations and ship re-alignment (I allow nav-computers to make quick calculations to make jumps on established trade routs). Secondary observation domes would be used for luxury liners to give the space tourists a taste of space. When it comes to seeing outside the spaceship, the crew (and Spacers in general) prefer video feeds, over windows or viewports. Talk about video, I made this not too long ago. Although its hard to display on two-dimensional maps, I really like the layout from the USS Discovery form 2001: A Space Odyssey. Basically, an omni-dimensional labyrinth of zero-gee rooms and corridors with some hamster wheels for normal gravity. With that, there was a neat bridge from Orphans of the Sky, where it was in a spherical hull, attached to the ship — an O'Neill cylinder — to the forward hub by a strut. The bridge is a large round empty chamber with a gangway spanning its radius — used for climbing up and down, and is were the seats are mounted. The wall of the chamber can be used as an omni-dimensional view screen. At the forward end, is a door that leads to the forward observation dome, that is covered in a protective aperture — finding out that there was more to the ship that the inside was a huge reveal to the main protagonist. I like the idea of sort of layout on a slow ship that pulls little gravity form inertia. The bridge crew climbs along a gangway (similar to those three-way ladders seen in classic Star Trek) to their seats, and they see everything going round their ship with the massive view screen that surrounds them. This type of bridge needs not be on an external hull — it could be buried in the main hull. |
August 22, 2015 - 5:57pm | The only thing about screens on aircraft is that if they malfunction then your are flying blind I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
August 23, 2015 - 2:31am | The only thing about screens on aircraft is that if they malfunction then your are flying blind
A vast majority of flying is done solely by instruments. While VFR does have its place, IFR can be done without any visual references. The same can not be said with VFR. |
 August 20, 2016 - 8:16pm | I think it was old BSG where one of t the characters would retire to an old observation bubble to see real space because the ship was too confining. The place was isolated from the ship by an airlock. You're thinking of the epidsode "Hand of God" (not to be confused by the episode of the same name from the remake series). The facility was called a "celestial dome", and it was actually part of the Galactica's original navigation system. Navigators would use one or more of these domes to manually double-check the readouts of the computerized navigation system. Over the centuries they fell out of use and most of them were either destroyed or removed. The one in the episode was said to the the last remaining one on the ship. Apollo found it while doing a little "urban exploring", restored it to full functionality, and would (as you said) use it to get away from the rest of the ship and get some psychological fresh air. Depending on the level of "realism" you're shooting for in game, you can make portholes and windows either: common (Hollywood), virtually absent except when absolutely necessary (NASA) or you could compromise to some degree. Perhaps portholes have armored covers to protect them that can be closed when outside views are unnecessary but opened while on orbit to permit planetgazing. |
August 20, 2016 - 8:27pm | The only thing about screens on aircraft is that if they malfunction then your are flying blind
A vast majority of flying is done solely by instruments. While VFR does have its place, IFR can be done without any visual references. The same can not be said with VFR. Jedion does raise a good issue. As aircraft become more and more computerized, a new phenomenon called "glass cockpit blackout" is rearing it's ugly head. Essentially, it's a design flaw (IMO) where all flight instruments are channelled through a few CRTs/touch screens. In the event of a computer system failure, the flight crew loses most of its operational awareness of the state of the aircraft. There are a few basic instruments (compass, altimiter, etc) on the instrument panel for backup, but just the "bare bones" to maintain flight. I've heard no few complaints off and on over the recent years about this state of affairs. Some pilots complain that besides the "blackout" issue, the glass cockpit is difficult to use because it requires the crew to constantly flip between screeens while doing instrument readout checks, which is distracting It also serves no real purpose because an experienced pilot could read his instruments at a glance knowing instinctively when a given gage was showing an abnormal result. |
August 21, 2016 - 5:13am | KHs seems to endorse the "celestial dome" with the upper most decks of the large & small freighters and the assault scout. Not sure why or what the thinking was. If the roof above the one chair is in deed a "glass" dome then it better be armored as its going to take a beating. The glass dome also turned up in the farce Dark Star. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
August 21, 2016 - 9:06am | Well, I'm guessing it's probably something more like transparent aluminum or a "correllated metal". And you'll notice that the dome does have retractable armor covers.  |
 August 21, 2016 - 1:29pm | In my opinion those retractable covers are not thick enough to be armor. They do look good enough to be micro-meteorite covers for when the dome is not in use. I give them props for thinking of that. Sounds like a great job but where did you say we had to go? |
