@@michaelpettersson4919 Could have been budget or time constraints as well, or the animators could have forgot/overlooked that detail, the latter feels more likely.
If you look at 4:30 it actually kind of look like the domes are attached to the ring via giant hinges, and are supposed to swing outwards while the ship is under thrust to be in line with the rest of the gravity. That hinge mechanism would also explain why they are only attached on one side. My guess is that this ship is a typical case where the the designers put in a lot of thought to make sure everything makes sense and gravity is consistent throughout the ship, and then the show runners just either forgot about it, or deliberately ignored it because because they thought the ship looks cooler with the domes folded in and spinning.
@@SacredCowShipyards yeup, and this is why am going to write a sci-fi novel that actually does shit right, because apparently am one of the few that damn well can, even go into the pitfalls as well, cause, even if you where to make the perfect warship, you will have bullship to deal with
Still put the domes on the back of the ship and add some kind of protection so that random bits of debris don't take out the the entire food production
@@agravemisunderstanding9668 probably if you don't have sci-fi forcefields, any shielding is futile and it's much wiser to use a "self-healing" material (say, a sticky liquid caked between two layers of organic glass, that will solidify shortly after it's exposed to vacuum), And just accept any micrometeorites flying right through, and causing some relatively easy to repair damage.
Funny thing, the first ship that came to my mind, when you criticize Nightflyer at first, with actual functional design was Argo from "Battletech" and moment later you brought it yourself!
@@SacredCowShipyards Hello, this is Comstar. We would like to apologise for the misjump, the diversion of your jumpship and the jamming of your comms... etc... See "Why Tex should not write video games"
Except in 40k the solution is usually to tell techpriest "no, we can't make someone sacrifice their live to glory of Omnissiah, find another solution"... at which point techpriest would sigh and reveal that he has remote control of the reset and can do it at will\/(-_-)\/
@@TheArklyte 40K warp reactors are refueled by teams essentially sent to their death. Staggered of course, so that as folks melt from the reactor output the next poor sods are still slowly managing to push the fuel closer to the reactor. It’s functionally pretty similar to having a reset button inside a reactor. Lutein has a grim video about it.
@@Wildbarley let me guess, another example of new lore going for retroactive grimderping? Yeah, I kind of stopped caring about GW's "official" take around 2014-2016;)
@@TheArklyte Star of Damocles was written in 2007 my dude. I read back on release. And it’s consistent with rogue trader lore from 90’s white dwarf issues.
My problem with the design was that having flat habitats on a centrifuge will lead to a sloping gravity effect inside each dome, where it actually feels like being on a hill.
It honestly would not be that much of an issue if the ring was larger but with a ring this small you'd have what feels like a 20 or 30° slope on two sides of the domes. Additionally I think that ring is way too small anyways. The speed you have to spin to reach 1g is too high, so the crew would likely experience cognitive and other physical problems when inside the domes.
7:50 "How big is your engineering crew and how good is their life insurance?" If servicing the engines is fatal to the crew, the only crew you will get will be those with weird psychological disorders. That could make for an interesting plot.
They're clearly hinged, so my guess is that the animators didn't get the memo from the concept artist/ship designer, the writers didn't want to work gravity changes into the script, or some executive didn't like how it looked and vetoed it. Given the described plot contrivances, my money is on the writers fucking things up.
For something F-ed up check O'Neill space stations. In Gundam they were used extensively. They even showed what happened when they were punctured during battles.
@@xhagast Sorry man, O'Neill space stations are fine. That windstorm mess sucking people out into space is pure Hollywood lies. Even with a fairly huge hole it would take months or longer for one of those suckers to decompress to dangerous levels.
It actually looks like the design document has them tilted at 45 degrees when under thrust and 90 degrees inward when coasting and they never stop rotating the ring they are mounted on - rather than having the bass of the domes facing rearwards and the glass facing forwards and NOT rotating when under thrust... the 45 degree thing would work and but it would require almost as much annoyance to people in the domes when they change thrust state - moving the domes angle when they change course might be useful too. but that sure is a lot of moving parts. I suppose a giant armoured umbrella cold have been mounted on the front to protect the domes from radiation and such too. It looks like SeaQuest DSV and an Argo ship had a baby to me.
@@rogernummerdor The only instance of a colony collapsing due to combat that I can recall was Heliopolis in SEED (a bad series) and even then it was kinda due to idiots blasting the central support structure with anti-ship weaponry until it catastrophically failed. In all other instances a hole means that people near it do get sucked out but otherwise it's just a declared emergency and everyone shelters because of ya know, the giant robots shooting eachother INSIDE the colony. Colonies themselves in UC timeline at least are so sturdy that they get used as improvised orbital impactors.
I mean, tbf, if they _did_ have the greenhouses in the stern... with the Drives... that would take a _Helluva_ boom, even _without_ considering reactor placement, so...
I’ve never seen the show but I’ve read to story by George R Martin and I thought you enjoy a few details from the story that may not been covered in the show. The ship was custom designed by that crazy lady who infected the ai of the ship. Maybe this explains some of the nonsense features. The person leading the expedition to meet the new race was considered kinda a cook if I remember correctly and did not have a lot of funding which was why this weirdo ship was chosen! Thanks for the amazing content! Keep up the great work
Epic fails are many. They are afraid of dark matter but have no problem cruising through the corona of a star at full speed. They can slow down enough to land on a planet and speed up again, but needed a star for a gravity assisted speed boost.
IF , big if , the Domes could gimbal outwards , like a Daisy Wheel , and the Rotation reduce , the system could work . Reset Button INSIDE the Engine . Obviously designed by a Shiny Arse , rather than an Engineer . L O L !
If the ship was shrunk down and the domes replaced with cutting heads I might see the design as an asteroid mining ship but even then it wouldn't be a very good one.
I kinda remember this series. Yeah, it sucked. What really killed it for me was when that probe came back full of flesh and started bleeding all over the place. After that I had to be falling-over drunk to finish it and see where it crashed.
Something, something. Ghost mother's personality steals a body, the flesh probe is genetically the weird scientist guy's flesh, the ship almost explodes once or twice, mother tries to escape, scientist guy takes the pod instead and travels into the alien thing and winds up back home with his family (or my headcannon is he's in a coma because he hit his head or something). It was dumb and trope-y.
This is even worse than you think, that spinning section wouldn't just spin by itself. It would impart an opposite motion to the rest of the ship, so you'd have the whole thing counter rotating. Eeeeeven better still, bodies with spinny bits with uneven distributions of mass, in zero-g 'flip'. (video from the ISS showing this funky effect: czcams.com/video/1n-HMSCDYtM/video.html) Suffice to say, the ships design wouldn't make it out of earth orbit. (well perhaps as a debris cloud maybe)
when spinning up the ring, the ship would probably negate its rotation by firing rotational thrusters. But this reminds me of the Avalon (Passengers, 2016): in the film, when power fails, the ring stops rotating (why would he?) and gravity in the ring section drops to zero instead of just dopping slighly because some momentum would go to rotating the shaft of the ship.
The domes are. . . cute. I get the general idea it has been suggested before. Nice clear domes so sunlight comes in for the plants. This would be great if this was a space station in a specific orbit somewhere. Normally I see a video trashing a scifi ship I want to argue. But this sounds like a train wreck. No a train wreck would probably be a more sound design.
I'm just thinking of the structural stress of having combined forces on the supporting arms of those domes. I see them snapping off in a catastrophic way.
Absolutely. This monstrosity should have torn itself into a million pieces the first time they fired up the engines with the domes (and the ring they're attached to) were spinning. (Or thw other way around.) Whether the domes were extended outward or not.
This is yet another fun example of "Design by Committee", and whats worse judging by the cameras, AI issues, and so on that Committee consisted entirely of Hollywood Executives and one Art Student Intern. O.o
What it reminds me of is the *_Valley Forge_* from *_Silent Running,_* one of the few SF spacecraft which is more *_BADLY_* designed than the *_Nightflyer._*
Good centrifuge designs in Dream Pod 9's "Jovian Chronicles" where they are gimballed to reorient while under thrust [and rotation is stopped for that]
1. Mummy please make the bad ship go away. 2. The captain in the tube reminds me of the 'Ship that Sang' books not a bad read. 3. Holy mummy issues Batman what's this Evangelion
Regarding the front of ship, absorbing kinetic energy is highly likely to be majorly developed by the time we are exploring space with ships like that. Still though I agree, we'd still want a craft to be as robust as possible under all seen and unforseen conditions. It's almost a certainly we'd be aware of other species in space by then too... Some would argue we already know. The odds are not all other species will react friendly.
"It looks cool" For a TV show, that's all is needed, it doesn't have to make sense. The only exceptions I can think of, are the ships from "2001, 2010, and the Expanse". In novels, the reference should be the Rama series from master Clarke. By the way, suscribed. I love to be witness of a good rant, and some time has passed from the "Star Disney" movies... Oh, the rages! The hate! The betrayed feelings!...Good times.
Knowing Nothing about this Show. Just looking at the ship, visually it reminds me of Valley Forge from "Silent Running". With the domes inverted. I wonder if the design is an homage. Hmmh, that one might be worth tearing into at some point. I assume Valley Forge had some kind of space magic gravity generation...
too be fair the domes in some shoes look like there supposed to be able to fold out from the spinning ring at the attaching point so they could stop spinning it to switch to thrust G but they would be incon vient as hell
Supposedly, the artist who designed the Omega-class destroyer copied the Leonov's rotating section as a joke expecting someone to notice it, have a chuckle and change it, but no one did.
Well, it could be a Nuclear Salt Water Rocket (NSWR), as they do have combustion chambers after a fashion. However, while I have never heard of this series until now, I very much doubt it.
Oh, Battletech. I love you, but 'zenith and nadir points' aren't trojan points, and going from a solar polar orbit to the plane of the ecliptic takes a lot of ∆v. Like...A LOT.
No surprise that George RR Martin was the writer who specializes in medieval stories. Also the "Designer' is the the evil woman trapped in the ships computers.
I was completely unaware of this series, but god, that is an awful ship design by any stretch. Even if for some reason I *wanted* to do that mess on the front end in a somewhat plausible way, I would have had a Secondary ring in front of it that the domes were locked into on the other side, and then some sort of an impact shell in front of that, protecting the entire ship from things in front of them. The domes would be designed to spin around that center while the ship was free floating, but would rotate on their own axis to face forward when in burn. It would be like a really massive Ferris wheel. I guess there is some point to that, if you really wanted to maintain gravity regardless of speed, but chances are you would still lose proper gravity fairly regularly due to necessary changes in speed and course.
The only way they could get away with this is if the domes only rotated when the ship wasn't under acceleration, like in orbit or in a just floating along at a constant speed, oh wait you mentioned that
Oddly enough, this version of the Nightflyer is its second incarnation. There was a movie version of the story long before the series was made. The ship design was completely different although no better in terms of aesthetics. It looked like a partly melted flatiron with the handle removed. The movie was much better than the series however.
I believe in the novel the ship was built by the captain's mother. She created a sex switched clone of herself to be her partner/son. That is the current captain.
You could have a nice landscape in the domes of terraced cliff-side city, like Morocco, Hong Kong, or Pueblo Bonita. Spectacular views. It would be interesting if the doctors eventually dictate that you have to achieve 1G average gravity, but also had portions of your ship that would require manning in microgravity, so people rotate in and out. I maintain that the primary thing you have to account for with 1G thrusting vehicles is whether the universe incorporates their status as projectiles of mass destruction, as planet-killers. "If everybody has this tech, and can achieve relativistic impacts with ease, how are there any inhabited planets left?"
It's perfectly alright, the crew likely just treat the domes like one of those spinning carnival rides where you're pinned to a wall. In all fairness, proper biohazard procedures are something they should win some big points for because literally no other setting ever gets that right.
There is more stuff in interstellar space than you'd imagine. Actually, whole starcluster masses of material flies between the stars. It's not a lot of stuff flying freely around like in a planetary sytem, but it's enough that, if you travel with a significant percentage of the speed of light, it would accumulate. Even just one hydrogen atom per squaremeter would add up to tons of hydrogen colliding at relativisitc speeds with the hull of your ship after just a few hours of travel. The friction would turn it into a plasma and it would spew out terawatts of radiowaves in the direction of travel. So, yeah... very bad news for the domes in front of the ship. They're pretty much done... they get grinded down.
All I remember from this show, despite that I watched it, is that the ship has showers in the form of those weird glass coffins that can _easily_ drown you, which is exactly what happens or almost happens to one of the characters. That alone speaks volumes about the considerations for safety or basic common sense in its construction.
Reminds of a poorly designed OPA Behemoth. it had a spinny drum but it was the bulk and centered mass and wasn't designed to necessarily be on while under thrust.
Yeah, the design is dubious. There should be a rotational hub in the middle of the ship. The center stack should be microgravity (unless you're under thrust).
It's sad that there went a lot of thought into the design to make it look realistic but it all falls flat because filmmakers are apparently allergic to understanding physics.
Speaking of Thrust gravity, maybe some battletech stuff? The Egg carriers, the special ship from the HBS videogame (I imagine you'll be annoyed at the gravity blocks being complicated on hinges, those things failing actually can be a random event you get), or the Leopard and how so many video games give you a Leopard and forget it TOO has only thrust-gravity? Oh holy shit you actually do cover the HBS Argo!
Based on the structure, it really seems like the domes would be able to flip out, but then you have a giant glass shield in front of the ship, which has all the critical, life sustaining equipment inside it.
@@Asgard961 You forgot to add-in the radar, and the magnetic - field deflector array produced as a wave front in front of the ship. It keeps charged particles, as well as in-bound metalic rocks from wrecking the ship. Or just say there's an invisible disk tether in front of the ship. It was (is) not seen by the audience, so you can go whine about something else.
Actually the thrust to rotational "gravity" options also appears in the book The Mote in God's Eye (1982 by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle) where the rotational system is used when the ship is on station somewhere while the thrust system is used when the ship is going somewhere. And yes they do explain how people have to switch the "wall" to the "floor" and how furniture has to move to make this work.
When space sci-fi so blatantly ignores physics, it turns me off immediately. I can forgive a little "I guess so" in the depiction, and even miracles lite artificial gravity over this turkey.
It would have made sense for the greenhouse pods to be arranged like that if they folded out (or pivoted in as to not leave a huge central gap) during acceleration so that "down remained the floor" and also if they were multi decked with the lower decks being crew space as it would then further justified putting extra "transparent armor" on them and making them feasible as a starship bow. My guess is that the technical advisor/designer for the show had a similar idea and that maybe there was even an episode where that was a central plot point but it got cut out so it wasn't a developed plot feature in order to strictly follow the law of Chekhov's gun.
I don't know if anyone pointed this out yet, but the glass on the domes is literally useless! Someone might say: But the Plants need light! Then I reply: Yeah Stupid, but they will not get it from our Sun while we travel through deepspace to a new liveform! The light intensity from a sphere like our sun decreeces by the power of 3 the further away you are, so you would nee additional lights to feed the plants enough UV Light for photosynthesis. Also why would you want it to be glass anyway!? The unfiltered cosmic radiation cannot be good for the plants as well as the gardeners.
I have not watched this television show personally. That said, based on what I heard in this video, I see these problems with this spacecraft: (1) Having the rotating section of the spaceship -- the domes -- at the FRONT will cause problems when the vessel tries to maneuver in any way due to gyroscopic forces such as precession. The Omega Class destroyers from *BABYLON 5* had their rotating sections amidships to minimize these problems. (2) I do not know the exact numbers, but a spacecraft accelerating at a constant one gravity would be close to the speed of light within two to three years. That brings the problems of having any debris that hits the spacecraft moving passed it at near the speed of light, AND inducing the time dilation effect, in addition to having to turn the spacecraft around -- fighting the aforementioned gyroscopic effects -- just slow down halfway through the trip.
Cigar or elongated seafaring-shaped space ships (no liquid water to traverse in space) with doodads hanging off them are always a bad idea. Furthermore, space is packed by the cubic millimeter with thousands of dust particles that are cruising at an average speed of 25 miles per second, so ships like the one featured in this video, traveling at least 60 miles per second to generate 1G, would either suffer constant serious damage or be completely trashed after just a few days. Google an image of the nose section and window plates of the space shuttle after just a few days in space to see what I mean.
In short, .. a 1mm cubic mass of a milligram of iron dust speck impacts with the kinetic energy of aircraft anti-tank ammo. And that shows Star Wars imperial T/I fighters have to have some form of navigation deflectors and structural integrity fields to hold itself together just taking off from Earth at 12km/8min per sec. Let alone of what ever fiction speed they are list to have from the pass thirty odd years of table top role playing games, novels, and blow bull cut away tech manuals used as fan base cash grabs.
@@wilemelliott if I remember it right, there is a medical problem with a parasite that made the nervous system fall out, meaning the spinal column. That was a bit of bad writing.
It looks like the domes were designed in concept to be able to fold forward. That'd actually make the most sense, by being able to angle them between 0 and 90 degrees you'd be able to have 1g inside at all times, regardless of ship acceleration. All you'd need to do is slow down the rotation of the ring and fold the domes forward during ship burns. That being said, if the series never showed this, or worse it specifically shows the domes folded while under acceleration, then that's on the director. I wouldn't really call that the fault of the ship design though. Anyway, all the other points are spot on. The domes look like they would tear off without handwavingly strong materials.
With that outtro statement, have you ever played Star Citizen. Might be fun to hear your thoughts on some of those ships. Morphologus does reviews on Star Citizen ships, but he's comming at them from an architectural background. Might be fun to have the opinions from a navy background.
Yeah, the ship at a glance doesn't look too stupid, but when you started to mention how its accelerating at 1 G to simulate gravity on the rest of the ship, its like, why did you even build the spinny domes in the first place when you could have just not have them spin and turn them up?!
:) You have to understand the very first U.S. rocket had a re-entry vehicle for the first astronauts. One of the thing the engineers did not wish to put on the vehicle was windows. HOWEVER...somehow some reason, the Astronauts who wanted windows, overruled the engineers. The reason was this was because before they were astronauts, they were United States Airforce pilots who flew some of the first Jet-fighters. The reason the engineers did not want to put windows on the vessel. Possible micro-meteorites which would turn those windows into glass shards. However the astronauts did not want to fully fly by instrumentation alone, they wanted "eyeballs" to land. However you can't pilot the re-entry vehicle once it was in atmosphere so....there would have been no need for windows. However, people that don't know how engineering works, are usually the fools in charge of how things get built in the long run. Reason why we have so many buildings and vehicles that are garbage. The astronaut argueing for windows for a re-entry vehicle that could not be piloted in atmosphere was just a pilots ego trip. And let that be a lesson to NOT allow an Astronaut design your spacecraft. Because they're not engineers.
May have been to give the astronauts some sense of "being in control". To be able to look outside, even with no ability to change your course, could be a calming factor. Knowing full well it will compromise the structure of the ship somewhat, I'd still want to actually see what's going on outside. Just saying the psychological factor could have played a big role in that decision.
@@Gauntlet1212 Never let a fools errand dictate the safety of the overall vehicle. Functionality over pipedreams. If the astronauts couldn't get past the psyche evaluation, then they wouldn't have become astronauts. That's a failing grade right there. Which begins to make me wonder how many people were in charge of over-riding the people that were in charge of engineering the spacecraft, and "passing" those individuals who did not pass the psyche evaluation.
Engineers who never strap their asses in the vehicles they design have created some glorious screwups through out history. Hell, just look at all the stupid decisions in automotive component placement where fluids that must be changed regularly flow over structural members instead of draining through a clear path, or half the vehicle needs to be disassembled to replace a part that is expected to fail and be replaced regularly due to wear and tear [like having a starter motor UNDER an intake manifold].
@@wilemelliott I'll tell you what. There's a little movie called The Pentagon Wars. It describes the design and birth of the Bradley fighting vehicle. I had watched this movie when I was younger, and after I got out of the armed forces. And I was kind of dumb struck, considering I had worked with these vehicles. But basically the movie was very accurate to what occurred between the vehicles first inception all the way to it's creation. I think the final portion of the film is overblown, but it GETS the message through. It gives you the idea of what an Engineer HAS to go through, in dealing with people that don't know what their talking about. In essence, trying to make something do everything, and be very bad at doing anything at all.
I have to correct something: Transparent aluminum DOES exist. It's not science fiction. Transparent aluminum is called "optical sapphire", or if you prefer, optically-clear corundum. It's the same stuff rubies and sapphires are made from -- Al2O3 -- but without the impurities that give those gemstones their color. It is frequently used for watch faces because it's incredibly scratch-resistant and very difficult to shatter.
Sure, but we're not really in a position to mass produce it large quantities to make large windows out of. So near future scifi stuff would be large sheets of transparent aluminum.
the only... ONLY way those domes would make sense is if they rotated... if they opened outwards, then when under 1g of thrust the domes where in the line of gravity, then when the engines shut off, the domes rotated back into position, and THEN began rotating for gravity... THAT would make sense.. But no... never ask them to make sense
If I remember right, it took them ~9 months to get out to where the Volcryn were passing by. No attempt was made to flip-and-burn to decelerate and match ET's speed, though. So, basically, Einstein would have been a right proper /bitch/ by then.
10:45 -ish. Why not dump biohazards through the combustion chamber of the engines? Instant incineration, instead of semi active whatevers floating around near the ship. Yess, it could be a structural weakness... (like everything else on the ship already isn't? ;P ) but you could construct it somewhat like torpedo tubes on submarines, where the ocean can't flood into the submarine. similar the "engine plasma" (or whatever) can't flood into the ship that way.
I don't watch this show, and when I looked at the thumbnail I figured that the primary drive would HAVE to be the thing with the domes and middle spike, and those bell-ends were at the BOW of the boat just to piss away some velocity in midcourse or at the destination. Boy was I wrong.
The designer missed the clear oppurtunity of making each dome spin around its own axis as well.
The look like they could and the animators just forgot....
@@michaelpettersson4919 Could have been budget or time constraints as well, or the animators could have forgot/overlooked that detail, the latter feels more likely.
That would deny it's centrifugal force ? Maybe ??? 🤷🏻♂️
What for tho?
@@HalIOfFamer Whynot/for completness sake(with complete = these spining cups in a amazement park)
If you look at 4:30 it actually kind of look like the domes are attached to the ring via giant hinges, and are supposed to swing outwards while the ship is under thrust to be in line with the rest of the gravity. That hinge mechanism would also explain why they are only attached on one side.
My guess is that this ship is a typical case where the the designers put in a lot of thought to make sure everything makes sense and gravity is consistent throughout the ship, and then the show runners just either forgot about it, or deliberately ignored it because because they thought the ship looks cooler with the domes folded in and spinning.
"And that's when I lit them on fire, your honor."
@@SacredCowShipyards yeup, and this is why am going to write a sci-fi novel that actually does shit right, because apparently am one of the few that damn well can, even go into the pitfalls as well, cause, even if you where to make the perfect warship, you will have bullship to deal with
Still put the domes on the back of the ship and add some kind of protection so that random bits of debris don't take out the the entire food production
@@agravemisunderstanding9668 probably if you don't have sci-fi forcefields, any shielding is futile and it's much wiser to use a "self-healing" material (say, a sticky liquid caked between two layers of organic glass, that will solidify shortly after it's exposed to vacuum), And just accept any micrometeorites flying right through, and causing some relatively easy to repair damage.
Exactly what I was thinking.
Funny thing, the first ship that came to my mind, when you criticize Nightflyer at first, with actual functional design was Argo from "Battletech" and moment later you brought it yourself!
The concept can be done right-ish.
This is not that.
I was thinking the same thing, although also had the jumpships from Battletech come to mind as well, as most feature a similar feature.
@@downix The Argo is on my list.
@@SacredCowShipyards Hello, this is Comstar. We would like to apologise for the misjump, the diversion of your jumpship and the jamming of your comms... etc... See "Why Tex should not write video games"
The reset button being in the reactor housing is like the most 40K grim dark turned grim derp thing ever.
Except in 40k the solution is usually to tell techpriest "no, we can't make someone sacrifice their live to glory of Omnissiah, find another solution"... at which point techpriest would sigh and reveal that he has remote control of the reset and can do it at will\/(-_-)\/
@@TheArklyte 40K warp reactors are refueled by teams essentially sent to their death. Staggered of course, so that as folks melt from the reactor output the next poor sods are still slowly managing to push the fuel closer to the reactor. It’s functionally pretty similar to having a reset button inside a reactor. Lutein has a grim video about it.
@@Wildbarley let me guess, another example of new lore going for retroactive grimderping? Yeah, I kind of stopped caring about GW's "official" take around 2014-2016;)
@@TheArklyte Star of Damocles was written in 2007 my dude. I read back on release. And it’s consistent with rogue trader lore from 90’s white dwarf issues.
Just send a servitor. I don't see a problem
My problem with the design was that having flat habitats on a centrifuge will lead to a sloping gravity effect inside each dome, where it actually feels like being on a hill.
It honestly would not be that much of an issue if the ring was larger but with a ring this small you'd have what feels like a 20 or 30° slope on two sides of the domes. Additionally I think that ring is way too small anyways. The speed you have to spin to reach 1g is too high, so the crew would likely experience cognitive and other physical problems when inside the domes.
also my first thought when I saw the flat domes
7:50 "How big is your engineering crew and how good is their life insurance?" If servicing the engines is fatal to the crew, the only crew you will get will be those with weird psychological disorders. That could make for an interesting plot.
The Imperium of Mankind has a funny solution to that Problem called Servitors
when I first saw this ship, I assumed the ring of domes were at the stern ... some sort of containment/propulsion system
That would have made so much more sense.
Same.
They're clearly hinged, so my guess is that the animators didn't get the memo from the concept artist/ship designer, the writers didn't want to work gravity changes into the script, or some executive didn't like how it looked and vetoed it. Given the described plot contrivances, my money is on the writers fucking things up.
For something F-ed up check O'Neill space stations. In Gundam they were used extensively. They even showed what happened when they were punctured during battles.
@@xhagast Sorry man, O'Neill space stations are fine. That windstorm mess sucking people out into space is pure Hollywood lies. Even with a fairly huge hole it would take months or longer for one of those suckers to decompress to dangerous levels.
It actually looks like the design document has them tilted at 45 degrees when under thrust and 90 degrees inward when coasting and they never stop rotating the ring they are mounted on - rather than having the bass of the domes facing rearwards and the glass facing forwards and NOT rotating when under thrust... the 45 degree thing would work and but it would require almost as much annoyance to people in the domes when they change thrust state - moving the domes angle when they change course might be useful too. but that sure is a lot of moving parts.
I suppose a giant armoured umbrella cold have been mounted on the front to protect the domes from radiation and such too.
It looks like SeaQuest DSV and an Argo ship had a baby to me.
@@rogernummerdor Actually what you say makes it make sense. The time would be used to repair the hole. Making the concept viable.
@@rogernummerdor The only instance of a colony collapsing due to combat that I can recall was Heliopolis in SEED (a bad series) and even then it was kinda due to idiots blasting the central support structure with anti-ship weaponry until it catastrophically failed. In all other instances a hole means that people near it do get sucked out but otherwise it's just a declared emergency and everyone shelters because of ya know, the giant robots shooting eachother INSIDE the colony. Colonies themselves in UC timeline at least are so sturdy that they get used as improvised orbital impactors.
I love how this sci-fi ship that basically represents the whole of humanity, has reactor design, safety and management at the same level as Chernobyl.
So, what I thought was the stern was actually the bow? That really isn't a promising start!
I mean, tbf, if they _did_ have the greenhouses in the stern... with the Drives... that would take a _Helluva_ boom, even _without_ considering reactor placement, so...
I’ve never seen the show but I’ve read to story by George R Martin and I thought you enjoy a few details from the story that may not been covered in the show.
The ship was custom designed by that crazy lady who infected the ai of the ship. Maybe this explains some of the nonsense features.
The person leading the expedition to meet the new race was considered kinda a cook if I remember correctly and did not have a lot of funding which was why this weirdo ship was chosen!
Thanks for the amazing content! Keep up the great work
Epic fails are many.
They are afraid of dark matter but have no problem cruising through the corona of a star at full speed.
They can slow down enough to land on a planet and speed up again, but needed a star for a gravity assisted speed boost.
IF , big if , the Domes could gimbal outwards , like a Daisy Wheel , and the Rotation reduce , the system could work .
Reset Button INSIDE the Engine . Obviously designed by a Shiny Arse , rather than an Engineer . L O L !
That reset button was clearly designed for a dramatic character sacrifice.
Kind of remind me of the "space garden" ships in "silent running".
My first though on looking at it, too
@@johnfairhurstReviews Me too :-)
Good movie, that
@@carlosandleon rest in peace little drone...
If the ship was shrunk down and the domes replaced with cutting heads I might see the design as an asteroid mining ship but even then it wouldn't be a very good one.
I kinda remember this series. Yeah, it sucked.
What really killed it for me was when that probe came back full of flesh and started bleeding all over the place.
After that I had to be falling-over drunk to finish it and see where it crashed.
Something, something. Ghost mother's personality steals a body, the flesh probe is genetically the weird scientist guy's flesh, the ship almost explodes once or twice, mother tries to escape, scientist guy takes the pod instead and travels into the alien thing and winds up back home with his family (or my headcannon is he's in a coma because he hit his head or something).
It was dumb and trope-y.
when I first saw this ship I honestly thought it looked amazing, then I went what do you mean those aren't mining drills on the front.
"lets just keep skipping through the crazy" im totally stealing that. :D
This is even worse than you think, that spinning section wouldn't just spin by itself. It would impart an opposite motion to the rest of the ship, so you'd have the whole thing counter rotating. Eeeeeven better still, bodies with spinny bits with uneven distributions of mass, in zero-g 'flip'. (video from the ISS showing this funky effect: czcams.com/video/1n-HMSCDYtM/video.html) Suffice to say, the ships design wouldn't make it out of earth orbit. (well perhaps as a debris cloud maybe)
when spinning up the ring, the ship would probably negate its rotation by firing rotational thrusters. But this reminds me of the Avalon (Passengers, 2016): in the film, when power fails, the ring stops rotating (why would he?) and gravity in the ring section drops to zero instead of just dopping slighly because some momentum would go to rotating the shaft of the ship.
i imagine it will make it out of earth orbit, just not in the direction it's supposed to
The domes are. . . cute. I get the general idea it has been suggested before. Nice clear domes so sunlight comes in for the plants. This would be great if this was a space station in a specific orbit somewhere.
Normally I see a video trashing a scifi ship I want to argue. But this sounds like a train wreck. No a train wreck would probably be a more sound design.
Yeah. At least a train wreck originates from a good design.
I'm just thinking of the structural stress of having combined forces on the supporting arms of those domes. I see them snapping off in a catastrophic way.
Absolutely. This monstrosity should have torn itself into a million pieces the first time they fired up the engines with the domes (and the ring they're attached to) were spinning. (Or thw other way around.) Whether the domes were extended outward or not.
Never seen the series. But looking at the pictures of the ship, wow. Love your review and i would agree. Compress that ship into a cube and recycle?
This is yet another fun example of "Design by Committee", and whats worse judging by the cameras, AI issues, and so on that Committee consisted entirely of Hollywood Executives and one Art Student Intern. O.o
"What if we hit a micro asteroid, Captain?"
"Don't worry, we've got glass in the sideways gardens, I hear that's pretty tough."
What it reminds me of is the *_Valley Forge_* from *_Silent Running,_* one of the few SF spacecraft which is more *_BADLY_* designed than the *_Nightflyer._*
Good centrifuge designs in Dream Pod 9's "Jovian Chronicles" where they are gimballed to reorient while under thrust [and rotation is stopped for that]
1. Mummy please make the bad ship go away.
2. The captain in the tube reminds me of the 'Ship that Sang' books not a bad read.
3. Holy mummy issues Batman what's this Evangelion
2. The brainship books by Anne McCaffrey.
@@colinmoore7460 thank I could not for the life of me remember the series name
Nightflyer "Look at the domes I have."
STARLOST "Hold my beer..." (1973 CTV)
SILENT RUNNING “Hold my granola…”
Regarding the front of ship, absorbing kinetic energy is highly likely to be majorly developed by the time we are exploring space with ships like that.
Still though I agree, we'd still want a craft to be as robust as possible under all seen and unforseen conditions.
It's almost a certainly we'd be aware of other species in space by then too... Some would argue we already know.
The odds are not all other species will react friendly.
So essentially it is part Valley Forge, Red dwarf, discovery one, made out of unbeleivabulium...
"It looks cool"
For a TV show, that's all is needed, it doesn't have to make sense. The only exceptions I can think of, are the ships from "2001, 2010, and the Expanse".
In novels, the reference should be the Rama series from master Clarke.
By the way, suscribed. I love to be witness of a good rant, and some time has passed from the "Star Disney" movies... Oh, the rages! The hate! The betrayed feelings!...Good times.
This channel is practically a salt mine, for a variety of reasons.
No, it should still make sense in universe.
If the ship doesn't make sense in the universe the story is set in, it is stupid.
Knowing Nothing about this Show.
Just looking at the ship, visually it reminds me of Valley Forge from "Silent Running". With the domes inverted. I wonder if the design is an homage.
Hmmh, that one might be worth tearing into at some point. I assume Valley Forge had some kind of space magic gravity generation...
Who designed it? Clearly a descendent of the guy who designed TITANIC.
or std the Discovery is pretty stupid looking with all the holes
"Things you can see through are not as strong as things you cannot"
Diamond has entered the chat.
too be fair the domes in some shoes look like there supposed to be able to fold out from the spinning ring at the attaching point so they could stop spinning it to switch to thrust G but they would be incon vient as hell
Earth Force destroyers remind me greatly of the Leonov from 2010: The Year We Made Contact
Supposedly, the artist who designed the Omega-class destroyer copied the Leonov's rotating section as a joke expecting someone to notice it, have a chuckle and change it, but no one did.
I want to know why their NUCLEAR REACTOR has a COMBUSTION CHAMBER?! That's like the British reactor in the 50s or 60s that had a legit chimney!
Well, it could be a Nuclear Salt Water Rocket (NSWR), as they do have combustion chambers after a fashion. However, while I have never heard of this series until now, I very much doubt it.
Reminds me of the ships in the 1970s Sci-Fi Masterpiece - Silent Running :)
Oh, Battletech. I love you, but 'zenith and nadir points' aren't trojan points, and going from a solar polar orbit to the plane of the ecliptic takes a lot of ∆v. Like...A LOT.
Domes to let in the light of deep space...well, maybe they can grow food and make air when they're near Earth orbit and pointed at the sun?
No surprise that George RR Martin was the writer who specializes in medieval stories. Also the "Designer' is the the evil woman trapped in the ships computers.
I was completely unaware of this series, but god, that is an awful ship design by any stretch. Even if for some reason I *wanted* to do that mess on the front end in a somewhat plausible way, I would have had a Secondary ring in front of it that the domes were locked into on the other side, and then some sort of an impact shell in front of that, protecting the entire ship from things in front of them. The domes would be designed to spin around that center while the ship was free floating, but would rotate on their own axis to face forward when in burn. It would be like a really massive Ferris wheel. I guess there is some point to that, if you really wanted to maintain gravity regardless of speed, but chances are you would still lose proper gravity fairly regularly due to necessary changes in speed and course.
The only way they could get away with this is if the domes only rotated when the ship wasn't under acceleration, like in orbit or in a just floating along at a constant speed, oh wait you mentioned that
Oddly enough, this version of the Nightflyer is its second incarnation. There was a movie version of the story long before the series was made. The ship design was completely different although no better in terms of aesthetics. It looked like a partly melted flatiron with the handle removed.
The movie was much better than the series however.
Basically this ship would have been much better suited as a space station than anything meant to travel anywhere but low orbit.
I believe in the novel the ship was built by the captain's mother. She created a sex switched clone of herself to be her partner/son. That is the current captain.
A ghost running around in the AI? So you are telling me that the ship has a... Ghost in the Machine... ah ah ah heh.
You could have a nice landscape in the domes of terraced cliff-side city, like Morocco, Hong Kong, or Pueblo Bonita. Spectacular views.
It would be interesting if the doctors eventually dictate that you have to achieve 1G average gravity, but also had portions of your ship that would require manning in microgravity, so people rotate in and out.
I maintain that the primary thing you have to account for with 1G thrusting vehicles is whether the universe incorporates their status as projectiles of mass destruction, as planet-killers. "If everybody has this tech, and can achieve relativistic impacts with ease, how are there any inhabited planets left?"
It's perfectly alright, the crew likely just treat the domes like one of those spinning carnival rides where you're pinned to a wall.
In all fairness, proper biohazard procedures are something they should win some big points for because literally no other setting ever gets that right.
And there's no way that amount of plants is going to provide more than a drop in the bucket of that ship's oxygen needs
There is more stuff in interstellar space than you'd imagine. Actually, whole starcluster masses of material flies between the stars. It's not a lot of stuff flying freely around like in a planetary sytem, but it's enough that, if you travel with a significant percentage of the speed of light, it would accumulate. Even just one hydrogen atom per squaremeter would add up to tons of hydrogen colliding at relativisitc speeds with the hull of your ship after just a few hours of travel. The friction would turn it into a plasma and it would spew out terawatts of radiowaves in the direction of travel. So, yeah... very bad news for the domes in front of the ship. They're pretty much done... they get grinded down.
11:40 Beautiful conclusive statement at the end. 😂👍
All I remember from this show, despite that I watched it, is that the ship has showers in the form of those weird glass coffins that can _easily_ drown you, which is exactly what happens or almost happens to one of the characters. That alone speaks volumes about the considerations for safety or basic common sense in its construction.
Reminds of a poorly designed OPA Behemoth. it had a spinny drum but it was the bulk and centered mass and wasn't designed to necessarily be on while under thrust.
Yeah, the design is dubious. There should be a rotational hub in the middle of the ship. The center stack should be microgravity (unless you're under thrust).
It's sad that there went a lot of thought into the design to make it look realistic but it all falls flat because filmmakers are apparently allergic to understanding physics.
All too common a problem.
Speaking of Thrust gravity, maybe some battletech stuff? The Egg carriers, the special ship from the HBS videogame (I imagine you'll be annoyed at the gravity blocks being complicated on hinges, those things failing actually can be a random event you get), or the Leopard and how so many video games give you a Leopard and forget it TOO has only thrust-gravity? Oh holy shit you actually do cover the HBS Argo!
Looking at some of the shots, it looks like the domes are meant to flip out when under thrust, didn't happen, but maybe someone at least tried?
Based on the structure, it really seems like the domes would be able to flip out, but then you have a giant glass shield in front of the ship, which has all the critical, life sustaining equipment inside it.
@@Asgard961 You forgot to add-in the radar, and the magnetic - field deflector array produced as a wave front in front of the ship. It keeps charged particles, as well as in-bound metalic rocks from wrecking the ship. Or just say there's an invisible disk tether in front of the ship. It was (is) not seen by the audience, so you can go whine about something else.
Indeed, otherwise you'd just make a giant ring.
Actually the thrust to rotational "gravity" options also appears in the book The Mote in God's Eye (1982 by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle) where the rotational system is used when the ship is on station somewhere while the thrust system is used when the ship is going somewhere. And yes they do explain how people have to switch the "wall" to the "floor" and how furniture has to move to make this work.
Mech-Warriors: Yay, Argo!
Maintenance Crew: Who the actual eff designed these stupid ass, hinged living area pods!
When space sci-fi so blatantly ignores physics, it turns me off immediately.
I can forgive a little "I guess so" in the depiction, and even miracles lite artificial gravity over this turkey.
This ship is a "No OSHA compliance" nightmare
This show sounds like someone read Revelation Space but skipped around a lot.
The ship looks like a hand held blender. I never seen this show. Missed it somehow.
So there's a Ghost in the Ai A Ghost in the Machine as you said. Now... where have I heard that before!.
"Ok...that's a weird nesting doll of horror..." LOL!
I mean, I'm not wrong. ;)
@@SacredCowShipyards Whoever was designer team for pilot seat, they had to binge Neon Genesis Evangelion for a week straight while on drugs.
The dare was a good call, you are good content sir
By 8:30 I'm strongly suspecting that it isn't a ship, it's a overcomplicate offering dish to some supernatural entity
It would have made sense for the greenhouse pods to be arranged like that if they folded out (or pivoted in as to not leave a huge central gap) during acceleration so that "down remained the floor" and also if they were multi decked with the lower decks being crew space as it would then further justified putting extra "transparent armor" on them and making them feasible as a starship bow.
My guess is that the technical advisor/designer for the show had a similar idea and that maybe there was even an episode where that was a central plot point but it got cut out so it wasn't a developed plot feature in order to strictly follow the law of Chekhov's gun.
I don't know if anyone pointed this out yet, but the glass on the domes is literally useless!
Someone might say: But the Plants need light!
Then I reply: Yeah Stupid, but they will not get it from our Sun while we travel through deepspace to a new liveform!
The light intensity from a sphere like our sun decreeces by the power of 3 the further away you are, so you would nee additional lights to feed the plants enough UV Light for photosynthesis.
Also why would you want it to be glass anyway!? The unfiltered cosmic radiation cannot be good for the plants as well as the gardeners.
I have not watched this television show personally. That said, based on what I heard in this video, I see these problems with this spacecraft:
(1) Having the rotating section of the spaceship -- the domes -- at the FRONT will cause problems when the vessel tries to maneuver in any way due to gyroscopic forces such as precession. The Omega Class destroyers from *BABYLON 5* had their rotating sections amidships to minimize these problems.
(2) I do not know the exact numbers, but a spacecraft accelerating at a constant one gravity would be close to the speed of light within two to three years. That brings the problems of having any debris that hits the spacecraft moving passed it at near the speed of light, AND inducing the time dilation effect, in addition to having to turn the spacecraft around -- fighting the aforementioned gyroscopic effects -- just slow down halfway through the trip.
BTW, MINE was the 666th _Like._
😊😊😊
Noice.
6:19 I think some of the mech repair bays are in the gravity blocks. For work better done while under gravity.
Cigar or elongated seafaring-shaped space ships (no liquid water to traverse in space) with doodads hanging off them are always a bad idea. Furthermore, space is packed by the cubic millimeter with thousands of dust particles that are cruising at an average speed of 25 miles per second, so ships like the one featured in this video, traveling at least 60 miles per second to generate 1G, would either suffer constant serious damage or be completely trashed after just a few days. Google an image of the nose section and window plates of the space shuttle after just a few days in space to see what I mean.
In short, .. a 1mm cubic mass of a milligram of iron dust speck impacts with the kinetic energy of aircraft anti-tank ammo. And that shows Star Wars imperial T/I fighters have to have some form of navigation deflectors and structural integrity fields to hold itself together just taking off from Earth at 12km/8min per sec. Let alone of what ever fiction speed they are list to have from the pass thirty odd years of table top role playing games, novels, and blow bull cut away tech manuals used as fan base cash grabs.
Mirrored my thoughts. I lost patience with Nightflyers very quickly. It was too silly.
Only one life pod? With one seat? Sounds like a 19th century White Star cruise.
I'm glad I missed that show.
saw one episode and it actually turned me off investigating the source material [I think its a novel]
@@wilemelliott if I remember it right, there is a medical problem with a parasite that made the nervous system fall out, meaning the spinal column. That was a bit of bad writing.
It looks like the domes were designed in concept to be able to fold forward. That'd actually make the most sense, by being able to angle them between 0 and 90 degrees you'd be able to have 1g inside at all times, regardless of ship acceleration. All you'd need to do is slow down the rotation of the ring and fold the domes forward during ship burns.
That being said, if the series never showed this, or worse it specifically shows the domes folded while under acceleration, then that's on the director. I wouldn't really call that the fault of the ship design though. Anyway, all the other points are spot on. The domes look like they would tear off without handwavingly strong materials.
I assume the domes were made of glass to allow sunlight in, but this effect is nullified by the fact that _the domes are all pointing inward._
With that outtro statement, have you ever played Star Citizen. Might be fun to hear your thoughts on some of those ships. Morphologus does reviews on Star Citizen ships, but he's comming at them from an architectural background. Might be fun to have the opinions from a navy background.
Wait, that's the bow, not some sort of fusion drive magnetic containment system? Oh.
its alright it got cancelled years ago
so its fine, leave it in the dust and let it be forgotten. don't put attention to it or they'll make a season 2
Yeah, the ship at a glance doesn't look too stupid, but when you started to mention how its accelerating at 1 G to simulate gravity on the rest of the ship, its like, why did you even build the spinny domes in the first place when you could have just not have them spin and turn them up?!
My ears are burning. As should this ship.
It's just so. Bad. So very bad.
:) You have to understand the very first U.S. rocket had a re-entry vehicle for the first astronauts. One of the thing the engineers did not wish to put on the vehicle was windows. HOWEVER...somehow some reason, the Astronauts who wanted windows, overruled the engineers. The reason was this was because before they were astronauts, they were United States Airforce pilots who flew some of the first Jet-fighters. The reason the engineers did not want to put windows on the vessel. Possible micro-meteorites which would turn those windows into glass shards. However the astronauts did not want to fully fly by instrumentation alone, they wanted "eyeballs" to land. However you can't pilot the re-entry vehicle once it was in atmosphere so....there would have been no need for windows. However, people that don't know how engineering works, are usually the fools in charge of how things get built in the long run. Reason why we have so many buildings and vehicles that are garbage. The astronaut argueing for windows for a re-entry vehicle that could not be piloted in atmosphere was just a pilots ego trip. And let that be a lesson to NOT allow an Astronaut design your spacecraft. Because they're not engineers.
May have been to give the astronauts some sense of "being in control". To be able to look outside, even with no ability to change your course, could be a calming factor. Knowing full well it will compromise the structure of the ship somewhat, I'd still want to actually see what's going on outside. Just saying the psychological factor could have played a big role in that decision.
@@Gauntlet1212 Never let a fools errand dictate the safety of the overall vehicle. Functionality over pipedreams. If the astronauts couldn't get past the psyche evaluation, then they wouldn't have become astronauts. That's a failing grade right there. Which begins to make me wonder how many people were in charge of over-riding the people that were in charge of engineering the spacecraft, and "passing" those individuals who did not pass the psyche evaluation.
Well, didn't the Air Force change the astronauts for chimpances and had the last laugh in the end?
Engineers who never strap their asses in the vehicles they design have created some glorious screwups through out history. Hell, just look at all the stupid decisions in automotive component placement where fluids that must be changed regularly flow over structural members instead of draining through a clear path, or half the vehicle needs to be disassembled to replace a part that is expected to fail and be replaced regularly due to wear and tear [like having a starter motor UNDER an intake manifold].
@@wilemelliott I'll tell you what. There's a little movie called The Pentagon Wars. It describes the design and birth of the Bradley fighting vehicle. I had watched this movie when I was younger, and after I got out of the armed forces. And I was kind of dumb struck, considering I had worked with these vehicles. But basically the movie was very accurate to what occurred between the vehicles first inception all the way to it's creation. I think the final portion of the film is overblown, but it GETS the message through. It gives you the idea of what an Engineer HAS to go through, in dealing with people that don't know what their talking about. In essence, trying to make something do everything, and be very bad at doing anything at all.
It looks like an over-decorated knockoff of a B5 Explorer class.
I have to correct something: Transparent aluminum DOES exist. It's not science fiction. Transparent aluminum is called "optical sapphire", or if you prefer, optically-clear corundum. It's the same stuff rubies and sapphires are made from -- Al2O3 -- but without the impurities that give those gemstones their color. It is frequently used for watch faces because it's incredibly scratch-resistant and very difficult to shatter.
Sure, but we're not really in a position to mass produce it large quantities to make large windows out of. So near future scifi stuff would be large sheets of transparent aluminum.
The domes look like something from Silent Running, the Movie.
Ships named Nightflyer make me nervous. And so it's confirmed that this is based the novel and film of the same name.
the only... ONLY way those domes would make sense is if they rotated... if they opened outwards, then when under 1g of thrust the domes where in the line of gravity, then when the engines shut off, the domes rotated back into position, and THEN began rotating for gravity...
THAT would make sense..
But no... never ask them to make sense
Some times, the "rule of cool", just makes you want to shoot the designers.
Nightflyer isn't even cool in a first place!
Rule of cool only works if its actually cool
The series is based on a novella with that title. It's from something like 30 years ago.
One of the few things that particular author has ever managed to finish.
Also... how long are their trips? I mean, newtonian physics fuckery aside, you run 1G for a year and you're gonna be hitting C
If I remember right, it took them ~9 months to get out to where the Volcryn were passing by. No attempt was made to flip-and-burn to decelerate and match ET's speed, though. So, basically, Einstein would have been a right proper /bitch/ by then.
Those rotating domes are going to be a bitch when flipping.
What's the point of a transparent dome over a hydroponics section when it's artificial lit and you are out of range of star light for the plants?
"Reasons."
Seems like the Domes would fold out while the ship is thrusting.
Seems like. But they don't.
I thought the six domes where the engines also the ship has a horrific design
Its a dumpster fire in space. and when it goes by you will know. ☺
10:45 -ish. Why not dump biohazards through the combustion chamber of the engines?
Instant incineration, instead of semi active whatevers floating around near the ship.
Yess, it could be a structural weakness... (like everything else on the ship already isn't? ;P ) but you could construct it somewhat like torpedo tubes on submarines, where the ocean can't flood into the submarine. similar the "engine plasma" (or whatever) can't flood into the ship that way.
SyFy lost me when they canceled Dark Matter.
I don't watch this show, and when I looked at the thumbnail I figured that the primary drive would HAVE to be the thing with the domes and middle spike, and those bell-ends were at the BOW of the boat just to piss away some velocity in midcourse or at the destination. Boy was I wrong.
i thought those domes were supposed to be lasers in a fusion drive, maybe the original sketch got misinterpreted.