Little Lights on Starship's sides

[criticalmass]

Every time I come here I am amazed about the depth of knowledge that has been reached about everything wingcommandery, and every time, albeit a casual but regular fan of the series, I feel like a newbie. What question can be raised that does not have a factual, documented and checked answer already in the tons of material?

Well, I got one.

Everyone loves capships. They look massive, hulky, elegant or mean in their design, and create a feeling of "I wanna be there" if they're done well. From bow armament to side armor, conning tower to engine casing, it's a feast for the eyes.
And adding to that is the one feature that always makes me wonder for a moment - the little sparkling rows of lights, the gleam of portholes that interrupt the line and gives the eye something to glide along...

Portholes? And stacks of them? It always looks a bit like an office building packed into the ship, or like the rather expensive outer cabins on a cruise liner. So I ask myself: What is beyond those?
I am having a bit of a hard time seeing those stacks of decks being crew cabins, with engineers, technicians and officers gazing across the universe through their bay windows, while the pilots - as we know - sleep in bunk beds in windowless dorm rooms. Or offices? Certainly those ships have some administrative staff aboard, but does it really requirer that much paperwork to run a decent ship? Or maybe it's workshops, repair floors, storage units, meeting rooms, the cantina, the brig. Maybe a nice idea for a brig: It would scare the juice out of your prisoners when they could see enemy fighters zooming by.

Also, on a technical note: Is that transparent material just as strong as the normal armor, or isn't that a weak point in those floating fortresses? I know that in the games there's no spot-difference on capship armor, but as a fighter pilot, wouldn't it look tempting to fire a rocket through those windows and hit the salad bar..?

Anyway, I hope you gather from my tone that I don't want to tread on anyones toes, but am just jocularily interested if the masses of available material say something about that too.

 

[gevatter Lars]

I think we have so many windows on spaceships because it looks cool. There isn't a real reason why a warship should have that many windows, espacialy as you pointed out that they are most likely a weak point.
In Mass Effect they even added armorplates to the windows that can be retracted to give you a view at the stars or closed during combat.

As for Wing Commander.
We see windows in quite a lot of places: bridge, crew-quarters in wc2, offices, gunnary controle, cantina/bar nearly everywhere we have windows in the background.
If that sums up to the number of windows we see on the ships? I don't know, never put any bigger thoughts into that.
Personaly I go with "good looking" before realism, because if you want to do realistic ships you won't only remove the windows but also have more clear lines, no hugh gaps between armor plates and most likely tones of other stuff that make the ships uninteresting to look at ^_^

 

[Bandit LOAF]

Portholes? And stacks of them? It always looks a bit like an office building packed into the ship, or like the rather expensive outer cabins on a cruise liner. So I ask myself: What is beyond those?

Hah, I bet I know what brought on this thought--front page story the other day with the new Saga ship, right? (I know, there's some irony in complaining that a Saga screenshot now has too much light, but...)

In all seriousness, most of the games are pretty good about keeping windows to a minimum... the outlier is Wing Commander III, which went a little overboard applying a window texture on all the capital ships. One thing you can see when you compare a Wing Commander III capital ship to its retextured Wing Commander IV equivalent is that the vast majority of the windows were quietly removed. Check it out:

https://www.wcnews.com/ships/images/4views/wc3confedcruiser.png
https://www.wcnews.com/ships/images/4views/wc4cruiser1.png

https://www.wcnews.com/ships/images/4views/wc3confeddestroyer.png
https://www.wcnews.com/ships/images/4views/wc4destroyer1.png

I am having a bit of a hard time seeing those stacks of decks being crew cabins, with engineers, technicians and officers gazing across the universe through their bay windows, while the pilots - as we know - sleep in bunk beds in windowless dorm rooms. Or offices? Certainly those ships have some administrative staff aboard, but does it really requirer that much paperwork to run a decent ship? Or maybe it's workshops, repair floors, storage units, meeting rooms, the cantina, the brig. Maybe a nice idea for a brig: It would scare the juice out of your prisoners when they could see enemy fighters zooming by.

We have seen the other side of a number of those rooms over the years. Almost all of the rec rooms we've seen have windows--remember the window behind Shotglass (in Super Wing Commander it becomes a great in-joke... if you leave the game to sit long enough various funny things fly by, including the Avatar from Ultima Serpent Isle and a witch) or the big viewport in the movie's version that let pilots see that Charybdis was "eating suns for breakfast"? Wing Commander III's rec room had those forward-facing you could see one of the escort ships out of... and Wing Commander II even had an 'Observation Deck' with big windows instead of a visible bar (or place to sit).

The bridges we've seen are patterned after those on current warships, too, with large windows that overlook the ship all around (seen on the Tiger's Claw on Academy and in the movie, the Concordias in WC2 and the movie and the Victory). Another telling one is 'gunnery control' on the Victory, which has a huge window. I think the implication with all of these is that although it feels like there shouldn't be that in the reality of Wing Commander there is a benefit to being able to see what's going on outside a ship rather than relying on sensors.

We have seen windows on quarters, too--Blair's cadet quarters on the Tiger's Claw had a window facing outward (you can see it at the start of the second episode, when he's writing a letter to his family). The Tiger's Claw sleeping area in WC1 seemed to have a little window, too, on the airlock door (maybe that just opened to another door, though). (As for the crew size--ships in Wing Commander carry hundreds or thousands of crew packed into a small area, just like real warships.)

Also, on a technical note: Is that transparent material just as strong as the normal armor, or isn't that a weak point in those floating fortresses? I know that in the games there's no spot-difference on capship armor, but as a fighter pilot, wouldn't it look tempting to fire a rocket through those windows and hit the salad bar..?

Surprisingly, there's an answer to this--it isn't as strong! There actually is a difference in (some of) the games--in the RealSpace games (Wing Commander III and IV) certain areas on capital ships (including those with many windows, the engine intakes and the 'insides' you can fly into) take damage 50% faster than the regular armor.

I think we have so many windows on spaceships because it looks cool. There isn't a real reason why a warship should have that many windows, espacialy as you pointed out that they are most likely a weak point.

I mentioned it above, but we probably have to accept that while real space is so enormous as to render visual sighting with mark one eyeballs useless... that's probably not how it works in Wing Commander. Ships in Wing Commander seem to behave like actual water ships rather than futuristic spacecraft in lots of ways. So you have a bridge with big windows to watch for attackers and observe battles and so on...

... and lights to help see other ships! Dundradal and I were just talking about doing a Wing Commander analog of the Battle of the Philippine Sea with the ships turning on all their lights to guide the crippled fighters home at the end.

 

[Shaggy]

I'm betting the main reason you see so many windows on a starship is so that it would give the ship a sense of scale. It's sort of like having a scabbard make a sound when the hero draws his sword or even sound in space. It's something that if it's not there it will affect the audience's viewing. If the Midway had no windows at all it wouldn't be perceived as being nearly as big as it is supposed to be. And I'm pretty sure that throughout WC the capships and the fighters are pretty out of scale to one another, but the portholes cheat the scale issues.
Then again I could be full of crap or possibly insane.

 

[gevatter Lars]

I don't find your argument that bad. Sure the windows give a sense of scale in a way.

 

[Dundradal]

I started replaying WC3 the other day and one of the first things I did notice was the amount of windows on the Kilrathi capships. This time around I thought of cruise ships with windows all over....every suite has a view!

 

[Wedge009]

No, you're not insane, Shaggy, the windows can definitely help with a sense of scale. I recall seeing one capship rendered with rather small windows and it helped make the ship look as big and impressive as it's supposed to be.