You can't have a series about space and not look at least in the general direction of Star Trek, I used to watch it as a teen and it was one of the things that got me so interested in space in the first place! Not to mention there are a few ingenious ideas for technology, which thanks to Star Trek's popularity are pretty much accepted in science fiction.
One of the biggest issues that a deep space exploration team face is the requirement for supplies, the longer you're away from a port the more supplies you need. Star Trek's answer for this was the 'replicator' an ingenious technology that essentially creates whatever food for you right in-front of your eyes; and not in a robot chef kind of way either, no no... In an "it's appearing out of thin air" kind of way!
Amazing, I'm going to assume that in order to create the food you need at least the base materials, the elements that makes up the food for example. This could mean that instead of 'fuel' we could use (for lack of a better word) tanks of elements to construct the food from. It's a small detail I know... But I do get carried away with this space stuff sometimes.
Let's have a look at the designs of the spaceships:
These are the human ships in the series, there are also various other races ships, which look completely different to the fairly recognizable design of these.
All of the human ships, or at least most of them are relatively similar in design. They feature a disc at the front, and 2 large engines at the rear, there is also usually a 'body' to which the disc and the engines are connects.
As you can see, when it comes to designing spaceships you can be as imaginative as you'd like, it doesn't really matter about practicality because there isn't really any drag in space! Alas... I'm a practical person, and any ship in any series of mine is going to be of a practical design!
So I won't be taking any influence from Star Trek for the design of the ship, I'd like to incorporate the replicator - it's a very practical idea! There is one other thing in Star Trek that's important - the ships are fast! Very fast! They travel through enormous sections of space almost instantly using something they call 'warp':
That's what I'm talkin' about! With this technology reaching Alpha Centauri won't even take 20 seconds! Perfect. Although the speeds will be similar, i'd like to go about it without directly ripping off Star Trek. "Warp speed now" is an obvious Star Trek rip off, and I don't want there to be any confusion.
I have an idea for what to use as the 'reactor' that I'll go over when I show some designs etc, but for the actual traveling I'm still pretty stumped, perhaps opening some kind of 'rift' or using worm-holes, or I could just stick to the obvious, and just make the engines make the ship go very VERY fast...
Yes... Very very fast it is! Maybe even very very very fast, who knows.
Matty out!
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