Star Wars combat vehicles are iconic, sure, but almost always dumb in design and employment. Look no further than all-terrain transports that have legs instead of treads and are now shaped like apes for no good reason. So when Star Wars spilled details on a new First Order spaceship called the Dreadnought, I expected something visually cool, totally unusual, and wildly inaccurate—like a spaceship with wings and a dragon neck or something.
Instead, the opposite happened. At first glance, it looked like Star Wars had actually veered toward the plausible. The reason for this rush of excitement? The Dreadnought was much more symmetrical.
Stuck in the Past
Here's why symmetry matters. Well-designed spaceships are made without obvious tops and bottoms (see 2001: A Space Odyssey). That's because there is no up or down in space. But this series almost always botches space battles. In Star Wars all spaceships face one another as if fighting on a two-dimensional plane. Just look at the latest trailer for the The Last Jedi to see what I mean.
Star Destroyers are the most badass byproduct of Star Wars' misunderstanding of simple physics. The original design was a huge triangular wedge with a towering superstructure jutting out in one direction. But by getting rid of that structure, the Dreadnought actually makes a little more sense.
Of course, Star Wars being Star Wars, not everything is perfect. If you look closely you'll actually see a narrow bridge stretching across the aft, meaning the First Order remains stuck in their conventional 2D way of thinking.
Star Wars came up with its future combat aesthetic by copying war movies of the past, like the WWII epic The Dam Busters. That's why we have X-Wings chasing TIE Fighters like Spitfires instead of shooting at them with missiles. The massive ships like the Empire's Star Destroyers and the Rebel Alliance's Star Cruisers are stuck even further in the past—back in the age of sail, blasting away at close range like it's Master and Commander. The Dreadnought only doubles down on this horribly outdated military tactic.
In a post on StarWars.com, Lucasfilm's design supervisor Kevin Jenkins describes the design as a "sort of heavy artillery that's much bigger than a standard Star Destroyer, about two-and-a-half times the size of a standard Star Destroyer," he says.
Let's dissect this statement. Using the words "heavy artillery" to describe the weapons (and even the Dreadnought's name) speaks to its idiocy. The actual dreadnought was an early 20th century warship with big guns and steam power meant to be the apex predator of naval warfare, a deadly match for any other warship and a deliverer of terror through coastal bombardment. That style of warfare ended in World War II, when small aircraft armed with bombs and torpedoes proved that range and precision beat out brute power and huge guns.
Ironically, many of us learned this military lesson as children watching the original Star Wars. Remember when one minuscule-yet-precise X-Wing blew up a space station that could destroy planets?
Heavy Artillery
The First Order slapped some massive guns on the Dreadnought that lower from the "bottom" of the spacecraft—even though in space there is no "bottom"—and are meant to bombard whatever planet it's orbiting. Like some war-mad Krupp salesman selling cannons to the Kaiser, the Star Wars design ethos is obviously "bigger is better."
In reality, those massive cannons are not that useful. They can't point in 360 degrees, leaving a wide firing arc blocked by the spacecraft's own girth. It would be better to have several cannons or turrets that could at least cover more directions, or a missile battery that can fire at enemy ships from longer range. Even better would be making a warship with a fleet of smaller drone ships laden with anti-ship missiles. They'd launch, close the distance, fire the missiles, and return to rearm.
But Star Wars also has a pervasive fascination with lasers, whether a Stormtrooper blaster or a planet-killing space station, when really all a spacecraft that size needs to do is redirect junk from space to crash into the planet. Anything with any mass impacts the surface like a meteor, releasing tremendous energy. The amount of the energy depends on the size of the debris, but even small objects can release nuclear-sized blasts. You don't even need cannons and explosive warheads to get the job done.
Pizza the Hut
All of that aside, why do Destroyers—and now Dreadnoughts—have to look like a piece of pizza? This shape would make sense if you're parting air in front of an aircraft. The delta wing shape is essentially a triangle, and that helps keep the aircraft stable at high speeds. But there is no air in space, so this design is pointless.
It is true that Star Destroyers, as seen in Rogue One, are designed to fly within planet atmospheres. Even so, this shape still doesn't make sense. Instead, these ships should look less pizza slices and more like whole pizzas, or maybe ravioli.
In fact, the best look for this ship is one that's been used since the beginning of sci-fi—a simple saucer. That shape is well suited for high- and low-speed travel, and if you look at a space capsule from the bottom, it looks like a saucer. Robert Braun, a Georgia Tech professor of space technology who served as NASA's chief technologist, once told Popular Mechanics that this configuration provides two main benefits to high-speed craft.
"If you wanted to go at supersonic speeds, heat is something you're going to have to deal with...Bowl-like shapes dissipate heat, and this same shape provides predictable aerodynamics through all of those [speed] regimes."
In the end, does it matter that Star Wars ships don't make sense? After all, it's a series that relies on hokey religions and one particular family's propensity for superpowers. And that's fine. But the warships are not really the fantasy elements in Star Wars. With only mysticism and unrealistic "tactical" vehicles, a galaxy far, far away begins to feel less tactile and relatable, creating a needless barrier to really enjoying the movie.
When these warships enter the screen, my initial rush of wide-eyed wonder is quickly replaced with eye rolls.
Joe Pappalardo is a frequent contributor to Popular Mechanics and the editor-in-chief of the Dallas Observer. His new book, Spaceport Earth: The Reinvention of Spaceflight is available now.
This article was originally published on September 7th, 2017.
Joe Pappalardo is a contributing writer at Popular Mechanics and author of the new book, Spaceport Earth: The Reinvention of Spaceflight.
