The mothership design concept
Posted: 30 Sep 2018 10:23
I'd have gone for a submarine-type design ; well, if the mothership sometimes enters atmospheres, at least. Otherwise, if it's a space-only spaceship, then going for a "saucer" or spherical design could be great ; as already mentioned, due to the sheer size of the mothership (I don't remember which developer of a famous WW2 fighter plane said that, but one of them declared that "a good big design will always be better than a good small design". Bigger = bigger powerplant, more resources, more people to reproduce and colonise, more resilience towards on-board epidemics or mutinies, and should things go south, you can always seal a part of the ship if it was hit by something and lost its airtight status. Well, it's easier to do it on a 8 square miles ship than on a ship that's as big as a nuclear submarine...