Modular Starships

[SpaceMarine93]

In many science fiction stories, we have epic space battles between starships. Most starships in fiction (that I know of), such as the Star Destroyers and Federation starships are basically one big structure/hull from front tip to engine. My brother pointed out that these designs are very inflexible; they are essentially 'stuck' in their shapes, armaments and abilities that was initially built into them for the rest of their service, with modifications requiring extensive amount of efforts, making them very specialized, which limits the ships' capabilities and reduce their ability to adapt to different situations. When a situation arises which the ships are not designed to deal with, it would be difficult for the ship or the crew to handle.

Here's the thought: Instead of building a big, solid ship structures, have the entire spaceship composed entirely of hundreds, if not thousands, of attachable and detachable modules, each modules are designed for a specific task – Engine, Hull, Weapons, Cargo bay, Fuel, Life Support, Living Quarters etc. All the modules would be controlled from a single Command module at the center of the ship.

This would increase flexibility in ship design and construction, as it would simply a matter of getting a command module and strapping on whatever modules the crew needs for their mission. They could alter ships’ structure and abilities at a whim. Want to go faster? Dump excess cargo bay and armor modules and strap on extra fuel compartments and engine modules. Want to turn your ship into a mighty battlestar? Strap on extra weapons, armor and hull modules. Need more maneuverability? re-position the hull and armor modules to make fins and put the engines on them. Need starfighter support in deep space? Put a carrier bay below your ship. You could adapt your ship for virtually any task.

Each of these modules are either mostly or partially composed of catoms (programmable matter) and nanites, which are capable of self-repair to a certain degree when damaged, making them highly durable. They also have limited shape-changing (to fit into any new starships). They could be upgraded periodically. They are all connected in a decentralized system, like a network of computers, all controlled from the command module, and if certain modules are irreversibly damaged, the other modules connected to the system with similar functions would adjust and alter accordingly to take over the function of the damaged module

And here’s the best part – inevitably, even such a ship are not invulnerable to damage. Maybe the enemy used a precision laser blast to take out the bridge or blew up the engine and life support, making the crew dead or abandoned the ship. Any remaining modules on the ship that are intact could then detach from the destroyed ship, and if a modular ship belonging to the same fleet is badly mauled in combat, it could immediately scavenge those drifting modules and use them to replace any modules on the ship that was damaged, making them fighting fit again in a very short period of time, perhaps even during a battle. Even better, if the modules used by ships of the enemy are of similar patterns, you could hack into those modules’ systems and be able to use the destroyed enemy ships’ intact modules for repairs.

So, am I the the first one who had this idea or is this already been considered by someone else at one point?

Edit: corrected title and some content.

[Ahriman238]

Posleen battleglobes, Suliban cell-ships, even the Star Wars X-Wing games had modular ships (albeit most were freighters. Think there's some OA ships like this as well. Not really an entirely original concept.

I know OA has ships made from nanites that can reconfigure themselves. Plus Stargate, in the form of the Replicators. In some Star Trek Novels the Borg do this.

And of course, the idea of ships having interchangeable parts to allow for salvage and simplify supply is roughly as old as the first ironclads.

[Dave]

Well look, one of the biggest problems airplanes and spaceships deal with is mass. The more you have of it, the more fuel you have to bring along to push it, etc, and it's blinking expensive to get it up there in the first place.

Modular designs use more mass than non-modular designs. Why? Because you have to connect the modules to each other, in standardized ways. You need bolts to hold them together, you need standardized brackets to hold the bolts, you need standardized connectors for <life support, fuel, people movement, data, electricity>. All this adds more mass then you would use if you just had one module for each task. (Also, you want to do logistics for routing all those connectors? What if you need more capacity in the tubes that carry the stuff you need? Are you going to pay the mass penalty to carry extra hoses and routing devices? or just pretend the problem doesn't exist?)

That, and scaling problems -- thirty small engines don't get you as much a bang for your buck as an engine the size of thirty engine modules. You get more efficiency out of a engine that big because (generally) you can run it hotter, fire it longer, and (here's the kicker) you only have to build one nozzle, one set of reactant tubing/pumps/tanks, rather than drag along that * 30. In the end, one big nozzle is more mass and energy efficient then 30 smaller ones.

The other problem is that these bolted-on connectors don't get you quite as much structural integrity as you might want. Sure, they're safer for the individual occupants, and you have to destroy every piece when you want to destroy the enemy, but they just aren't going to hold up to maneuvering quite as well. (unless you don't mind losing pieces at high acceleration.)

That's not to say the idea isn't without merit -- we use it in cargo shipping containers. This lets us standardize shipping handling methods (one crane that only does shipping containers versus a dozen different offloading methods), carry a wider variety cargo on a boat (need it frozen? Add a box with a freezer unit built in!), and so forth. But ships and railroads and such don't pay much of a penalty for extra mass, not the way planes and spaceships do.

And the ISS is made out of modular pieces, mostly because you can't put the whole thing up there in one go with a massive rocket, you have to do it in pieces. When we build bases on the moon, you bet they're going to be modular, for the same reason.

But for truly mobile spaceships, the mass / structural integrity penalty is just too big.

[SpaceMarine93]

Posleen battleglobes, Suliban cell-ships, even the Star Wars X-Wing games had modular ships (albeit most were freighters. Think there's some OA ships like this as well. Not really an entirely original concept.

I know OA has ships made from nanites that can reconfigure themselves. Plus Stargate, in the form of the Replicators. In some Star Trek Novels the Borg do this.

And of course, the idea of ships having interchangeable parts to allow for salvage and simplify supply is roughly as old as the first ironclads.

But for truly mobile spaceships, the mass / structural integrity penalty is just too big.

Darn. Still, it's a good idea.

[Eternal_Freedom]

I tihnk a better idea is instead of having just a big collection of modules, have a standardised skeleton plus weapon/crew/sensor modules. So have, perhaps, main engines, a spine for attaching modules, and a command module at the front. That way you can optimise your ships for whatever situation you face without hitting the problems Dave described.

[Dave]

I tihnk a better idea is instead of having just a big collection of modules, have a standardised skeleton plus weapon/crew/sensor modules. So have, perhaps, main engines, a spine for attaching modules, and a command module at the front. That way you can optimise your ships for whatever situation you face without hitting the problems Dave described.

Yes, I think that would work significantly better. It's just that you have to weigh the cost/benefit of increased modularity benefits vs mass/strength cost. And how often will you need to switch out the modules? (or, "How often does a ship change roles?") If it's a cargo transport, yeah, you definitely benefit from modularity (tanker vs cargo vs people). If it's the biggest, meanest ship in the fleet, the two roles for that ship are (1) beat the tar out of the enemy and (2) host the diplomats and the signing ceremony for the enemy's total surrender. The latter can be taken care of in the ship's mess hall with a little extra cleaning and decoration. Not really a candidate for a modular system.

Also, did you spot this thread?
http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic. ... 8&t=148827

EDIT: And besides, modular ships just look ugly as sin. You can't make them look good.

[Batman]

It depends on how much magitech you want to use. If most of your structural integrity is provided by forcefields anyway, modularity becomes a lot more viable from that PoV, and technobabble engine performance might actually scale linearly with the number of engines (highly unlikely but at least theoretically possible) but the connectors nightmare simply won't go away.
If you want a modular ship you'd likely fare better with having a core hull with most of the functions you'll need anyway (power generation, life support, quarters, bridge, engine room, mess hall, sick bay, stores etc) and add in a handful of mission-specific modules that only take up a fraction of the ship's mass/volume.

[Stark]

PROPTIP: modules don't have to be boxes. They can be any shape, and exchanging a pew pew module for a bang bang module might not involve any change in shape at all.... if shape even mattered.

Trying to adapt horrible videogame mechanics into engineering is just a daft idea. This concept only works if you expect to be hit and you expect to not instantly be destroyed, which is a pretty narrow situation. If the enemy weapons are powerful, the entire ship will be destroyed or rendered useless, and if they're not hitting you then you wasted your time and could have built a more efficient ship.

The idea of 'strapping on' modules ad-hoc or at whim is such a fundamental misunderstanding of propulsion I don't know what to say. Lets hope they all have an iManifest so the flight computers can handle the change in structure and centre of mass.

[Batman]

EDIT: And besides, modular ships just look ugly as sin. You can't make them look good.

There's no reason modular ships need to look any different than regular ships. Their structural integrity is just going to stink to high heaven without copious use of technobabble and making all the modules fit together properly is going to be murder

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Actually, the Traveller game, in the New Era setting, (early nineties), had the Reformation Coalition running around in ships known as "clippers", which were more or less Discovery shaped- the ship from 2001- with modules clamping on to docking points on the spine, the docking clamps and modules had to be structurally rated for it but that's only as hard as anticipating the need and building for it.

Then again, the Aurora class clippers did have nuclear-electric drive systems with total delta-V of about 2.6 million metres per second, more if one of them was a fuel module. Frustratingly low magitech for how far in the future it was supposed to be, really.

Oh, and the OP- look for the "Lost; Fifty Suns" story by A.E Van Vogt, sometime around the late forties/early fifties- absent the programmability and the nanites, as you might expect from sci- fi of that vintage, the battleship Star Cluster fits the OP perfectly.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Another one, early eighties and early Baen- it was in the local library, I was bored- Their Masters' War, humans used as another species' military pawns, can't remember the author and not worth looking for as a good read really, but did explicitly go with that take- the characters deployed form the multi unit "Battle Cluster" Anah.

[Coalition]

Trying to adapt horrible videogame mechanics into engineering is just a daft idea. This concept only works if you expect to be hit and you expect to not instantly be destroyed, which is a pretty narrow situation. If the enemy weapons are powerful, the entire ship will be destroyed or rendered useless, and if they're not hitting you then you wasted your time and could have built a more efficient ship.

Even video game mechanics show why this is a bad idea. When you shoot the boss and pieces come off, the boss gets smaller/different weapons come out.

Imagine a boss with the full hit points of all the smaller components combined, and all the weapons available to be pointed at the character's plane/ship/transformer. You have to deal with all the hit points, all the weapons, and it has all those weapons until the last hit point is lost.

[Isolder74]

There are a few ways to make that work. One way is to have a main central ship the the modules attach to. Like a series of cargo pallets on a pallet ship. The big issue is that no matter how well you build the various modules they are going to be no better then the weakest link. Theoretically if you took a heavy freighter and used it as a backbone of the concept, you are restricted to how well you can lock the various pallets to the central ship and limited on any type of shielding and armor you can accommodate in that central section. Whatever addition each pod/pallet adds can only be reliable to protecting that individual section, especially armor, and section would have to provide their own power and personnel. You could say that they could share deflector shielding to defend each other.

It would give you the options of having a Carrier Pods, Missile Pods, Cannon Pods, or Troop Pods. The catch is there can't be any way to ensure mutual protection during boarding as you can't have as many connections between the various pods as you would between areas on a normally built ship, massive cases of redundancies so every pod can be attached in any position in the system.

There are just too many points of failure when compared to a dedicated ship.

[The Yosemite Bear]

lego warships

[S.L.Acker]

Wouldn't it be better to have a ship for each task?

One of the common complaints about Star Trek ships is that they cram to much into one vessel. This is as bad as doing that because no modular ship will ever be as good as a ship built from the ground up to do a task. They might get very close, but they will generally be held back.

A better method might be to use a common hull and then build variations on that. This seems to be the way real life navies do things, with ships in a class getting slightly better right out of the shipyard as time goes on. It's also the approach used by the Empire when it comes to the ISD and her variants.

[Ultonius]

This post from the hard SF blog Rocketpunk Manifesto suggests that deep-space spacecraft will probably consist of at least two modules, the drive section and the payload section, but that these may not necessarily be detachable.
Personally, I think it might end up being something like the 'block construction' used in modern shipbuilding, where prefabricated sections complete with wiring and piping are put together to form a ship. You might have a central backbone with the payload section (control room and crew quarters + cargo hold/weapons) at one end, and the drive section at the other, with fuel tanks placed around the backbone next to the drive section, and if required, shuttles placed around the backbone between the fuel tanks and payload section. This would allow the shuttles to both be easily refueled and easily accessed from the payload section. If you can spare the mass, the whole ship might have a layer of anti-meteoroid whipple shielding, or thicker armour, which would hide the modules from view.

[Shroom Man 777]

In 'verses like Star Wars, their warships like the ISDs are "one big structure/hull from front tip to engine". But think about the integrity of that design, in the context of that (fictional) environment the warships are operating in and what forces their "one big structure/hull" are designed to withstand.

So, with that in mind, imagine a modular ship made out of many smaller components, and imagine it getting hit in the ovaries, right in the babymaker, with some huge high-yield explosion that'll just send its smaller bits scattering around. Maybe a "one big structure/hull" would be more able to absorb damages.

In Star Wars and other verses, their warships are basically giant space-faring tanks. Solid slabs of armor, big gun(s), engaging in direct combat and if necessary taking direct hits and withstanding it. You can't make a "modular" tank, or you could, but it's not going to be as durable as a more solid design, and it will have to operate in a much different way than the solid tanks.

[SpaceMarine93]

Alright, now that I understand why modular ships are not practical. What about the part about building ships out of Catoms (programmable matter)? Has someone thought of that before? Or like modules it had inevitable drawbacks?

[Ultonius]

I suspect that building a ship completely out of programmable matter would have similar structural problems to making one completely modular. A solid skeleton is probably a necessity, especially if accelerations are higher than milligees. However, programmable matter would have its uses. This article talks about how active material 'swarms' could be used in spacecraft for cargo handling, cushioning sleeping crew against course corrections, and docking. If programmable matter was cheap enough, spacecraft could have their crew quarters lined with it, allowing furniture like beds and chairs to be absorbed back into the walls or floor when not being used, to save room.

[Starglider]

Each of these modules are either mostly or partially composed of catoms (programmable matter) and nanites, which are capable of self-repair to a certain degree when damaged, making them highly durable. They also have limited shape-changing (to fit into any new starships).

This technology makes repair and refit of conventional integrated designs much faster, more energy/material efficient and less manpower-intensive. As such there is no reason to use clunky modules. Look at the current trend with 3D printing towards fully custom, computer-optimised and organic looking structures and wiring/plumbing networks. With this sort of technology you don't need standardised parts (except for highly specialised stuff the normal assemblers can't make) or even maintenance access panels, since given time, energy and material, nanites can break down and recreate most components in situ. You don't need the semi-mythical 'general assemblers' for this, a mix of hundreds or thousands of types of task-specialised micro and nanobots (possibly themselves produced by local fixed nanofabricators) would handle all the different materials and structures required.