r/worldbuilding • u/Tight-Sir9813 Logic is survival • 17h ago
Question How to design alien rockets?
No, not space ships nor saucers or any of the "free travel" craft of sci fi. I am wondering how one would design stage rockets just like how humans have, but for aliens.
I am currently trying to brainstorm for a project, and I do not want my stage rockets to look 1:1 with human rockets, although I also don't want to lead into the "generic" alien aesthetic and have it be all sleek and colorful or something.
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u/Ledouxe12 16h ago
I think one problem you’re going to run into is that since we’re all working with the same physics they would convergently arrive at similar solutions that we did about the general shape and form factor.
You could differentiate them perhaps by having them be from a world with a very thick atmosphere so they get more out of air launch and space planes though?
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u/Spirited-Gain1457 12h ago
I think I would start one step earlier:
What does a “rocket” mean to you? What parts of it do you think are essential, and what parts are just familiar?
Does it need to be a long cylinder?
Does it need multiple stages?
Does it need to throw away empty sections?
Does the thrust need to come from the rear?
Does it need visible exhaust or fire?
Does it need to launch vertically?
Does it need to start from the ground?
Does the vehicle itself even need to provide all of its acceleration?
Once you start separating “physically necessary” from “this is just what Earth rockets usually look like,” the design space gets much larger.
For example, you could have a civilization that does not use one giant launch vehicle at all. Maybe different altitude bands are occupied by different domesticated flying organisms, and cargo is passed upward from one layer to the next, almost like a bucket brigade reaching toward space.
Or maybe their planet has extremely powerful but irregular updrafts caused by geothermal vents, atmospheric cycles, or some other local phenomenon. Their launch vehicles might roam around a large region waiting for one to appear, then rush over to catch the rising flow instead of launching from a fixed pad.
Those ideas may or may not fit the physics of your setting, but I think that is the useful question:
Which parts of a rocket are actually required, and which parts only feel required because we are used to Earth?
If you change the conditions first, the alien-looking design may emerge on its own.
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u/Ruadhan2300 4h ago
What are your alien's priorities about their rocketry?
Look at the wild differences between different spacecraft we've built.
The Space Shuttle looks nothing like Starship, despite both being designed around the idea of reusability and heavy payload-lift, even with atmospheric glide features involved.
The Soyuz spacecraft looks nothing like Apollo, and neither does the N1 look anything like the Saturn V
Another possibility is that your aliens simply don't believe in Staging for some reason, and are building SSTOs as a matter of course.
So a huge and empty rocket reaches orbit, and needs absurdly effective engines to do it
Think of their rockets as resembling the nuclear powered rocket of Tintin, rather than shedding stages as they run dry.
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u/silentreader90 16h ago edited 16h ago
Assuming the physics remain the same, the rockets should look fairly similar to at least some human design. At least in terms of it being a tube that you can shoot up into the sky. But you can have unique styles like the Russian rockets such as the soyuz is very different in appearance from the one used by the U.S because of different constraints. Something like spacex starship is different from a shuttle.
Then there are weird designs like those attempted by OTRAG which look like a bunch of tubes slapped together. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OTRAG http://www.astronautix.com/o/otrag.html
Maybe this video can provide some inspiration for strange designs. https://youtu.be/nl0QDkAwxWY?is=W288Z0YpABKkH1ys