Why are there windows on a spaceship?
https://youtu.be/C-qEmmpGYvA?t=36s Seems to be human nature.
Was that a historically accurate representation of the spacecraft designer's German accents, or was the movie gratuitously racist?
Spaceship Generator
71–80 of 132 posts
Re: Spaceship Generator
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really. The problem with procedurally generated content is making interesting iterations. Sure, you can have a million space ships just as easy as one, but will anyone care about them? It is a different sort of work, but of equal effort, to "just" modeling the content.
Even most landscapes on Earth (reality is "procedurally generated" by the laws of physics) are pretty boring. Spectacular documentaries must travel far to reach the interesting ones. Interesting procedural generation may require strong AI, because it must model how it is interpreted by us .
> Even most landscapes on Earth (reality is "procedurally generated" by the laws of physics) are pretty boring.
Strongly disagree! I truly feel sorry for you if you can't see beauty and spectacle everywhere you look in nature.
Re: Spaceship Generator
#73I love that the ships look more like "skyscrapers in space" then airplane like spaceships we usually see in tv shows/movies. This is most likely (according to multiple hard scifi authors) a much more realistic depiction of how spaceships are going to look like. Example given: The Expanse - "Flip and Burn" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4EiW1bHwsQ
For some reason I completely missed that show, it looks great. Thanks!
Re: Spaceship Generator
#74Very cute, although the ships look samish (would probably be interesting to start with different base templates etc. Still, it's only a few steps away from "random British 1970s SF book cover".
Do you have a link to the book cover generator? Or is that a metaphor?
It's a joke — most British SF novels (and UK editions of US SF novels) seemed to get published with covers featuring some kind of giant spaceship whether there was one in the story or not. Chris Foss is, per another reply, the most well known artist of the genre.
Re: Spaceship Generator
#75My physics knowledge is pretty weak. Wouldn't you want a space ship to be closer to something like an oblate spheroid? Less surface area volume ratio builds cheaper, lighter space ships presumably? The primary thing I'm unsure of is steering, but how much of a problem can that be?
Re: Spaceship Generator
#76Sadly it doesn't seem to generate UVs for the models. But using the cube projection in Blender seems to do an OK job. Add a skybox and a couple of simple particle effects in PlayCanvas. And we have some WebGL spaceships :-) https://playcanv.as/p/kZtPZpnH/
Very cool -- what about sliders to feed parameters for new ship generation :)
Re: Spaceship Generator
#77Someone should be working on spaceship guidance software with UI interfaces for humans. We're going to need it.
Re: Spaceship Generator
#78My physics knowledge is pretty weak. Wouldn't you want a space ship to be closer to something like an oblate spheroid? Less surface area volume ratio builds cheaper, lighter space ships presumably? The primary thing I'm unsure of is steering, but how much of a problem can that be?
Pure speculation, but I think heat dissipation is probably the more important bottleneck of spaceship design -- no convective cooling, so you potentially want more surface area to increase radiation.
I think aerodynamics (both lift to weight and streamlining) are the reason for the compact design of aircraft and submarines (also perhaps reducing the profile for military vehicles).
Weight maybe an issue for maneuvering in combat, but there's tons of structural material literally floating around in space, so I'd wager that base material cost would not a limiting constraint.
Re: Spaceship Generator
#79The selected examples got me thinking: Those eight are presumably examples the author felt turned out particularly well. Could one build a neural network trained on generated ships that "turned out well" to automatically generate better-looking random ships?
Could this sort of process be used in games where procedural generation might otherwise be rejected because it looks "too random"?
Re: Spaceship Generator
#80I love that the ships look more like "skyscrapers in space" then airplane like spaceships we usually see in tv shows/movies. This is most likely (according to multiple hard scifi authors) a much more realistic depiction of how spaceships are going to look like. Example given: The Expanse - "Flip and Burn" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4EiW1bHwsQ
It'd be more realistic as well! As space is a vacuum we don't need to apply aerodynamics to the ships and they can be any which design!