If you’re doodling in your sketchbook trying to invent an entirely new visual language for a yet-to-be-imagined fully thought through sci fi world; yes, maybe.
But if you’re building out a vaguely familiar pop-cultural game world that you want people to not think too hard about but nonetheless believe in and be inspired by, which has things like space marines and laser pistols with recoil and detachable clips, suits with giant shoulder pads and front plates that look like abs, ancient aliens invading in big round organic ships, plasma shotguns and MEN and WOMEN and LAVIAN BRANDY and “engineers” who talk about “brain stuff” with the same cadence as millennials on tiktok; then there’s absolutely nothing wrong with referencing shapes and designs which bring their own sense of culturally understood visual presence along with them.
I mean, that’s why basically every sci fi ship (Elite included) has wing-ey shapes and a cockpit and looks like an airplane or part of an airplane even though none of that design language is appropriate to envisioning real space flight that far into the future.
These shapes have a recognizable front and a back and little fiddly bits which intuitively
mean things to people when they get shot off or damaged and so that’s how it works. And when it doesn’t look like that, it looks like either a robotic fish or a robotic bird, (see most
anime ships,
Black Panther,
Guardians of the Galaxy,
Jupiter Rising, etc), because
those shapes have immediately recognizable fronts and backs and little fiddly bits which intuitively
mean things to viewers when they get shot off or catch fire.
Otherwise you end up with stuff like “
Flight of the Navigator” or The
Starship of the Imagination from “Cosmos,” which are cool and appropriate for what they are, while also being nothing anyone playing videogames wants to fly.
The last three significant ships to come
into the Elite Dangerous universe were the Chieftain, the Krait, and the Mamba. All of the major excited effusive compliments around these three ships were NOT that they were original, but how much they resembled other things.
The Chieftain was complimented for
Looking Like A Star Citizen Ship, and/or for looking like The
Pelican from Halo or the
dropship from Aliens.
This was especially emotionally important to people at the time. A major point of contention/embarrassment between ED/SC fanboys was “EUUOUGH DO YOU HAVNE ANY SHIPS WHICH DONT LOOK LIKE CHEESE WDGES ?? hurrdurr. ED white knights were actually upset about this enough that The Chieftain made them happy the same way
Space Planet Legs makes them happy now. As a comparative talking point (“whoa-ho-ho looks like Star Citizen’s got some competition now!”) and absolutely nothing else. But I digress.
The big excitement around the Krait, apart from it being a revival of one of the
classic 1984
vector shapes, was that it looked and felt kind of like the
Millenium Falcon from Star Wars. And the Mamba was praised for resembling something like a modern sports car crossed with a speed boat. Everything about these designs traded on looking similar to some other universally agreed-upon “cool thing”.
Whaddya think: in real life, does
Richard Branson have a cooler looking space ship, or are you more of a
Bezos fan? Which one would you want to see imported into a video game? If you chose the flying -tube: I respect your integrity, but I don’t want you designing my videogames.
