Space Viking The Art of John Schoenherr and the Sphere Ships of H. Beam Piper

 

The story Space Viking by H. Beam Piper was first published in Analog Magazine between 1962-63, it was latter republished as the book Space Viking in 1964. I find the art by John Schoenherr very interesting. So let’s look take a look at the spherical ships in the Space Viking. Spherical ships were very common in early scifi art, stories, and tactical games. 

The duke’s ship the Enterprise described at the beginning of story is 2000 feet tall this would equal the ships diameter. This means not worrying about the 4 landing legs/fins, the duke’s ship has a Surface Area 12566370.6 square feet. Mathematically this means we are looking at 4188790200 cubic feet inside the hull. The Circumference of the ship would be 6283.18531feet, with a radius of 1000 feet. At the maximum circular area of the sphere the Area would be 3141592.65 square feet. If you look closely at the art those landing struts retract into the ship. This is a massive ship! 

Even if we shave off some feet applied to the diameter for the legs these are still huge ships. So why look at these on a site about TTRPGs? Well I also enjoy tactical games and many early TTRPGs started first with folks War Gaming including space battles. Many of the early tactical space games reflected the idea of huge ships with huge crews, as scifi progressed the ships have gotten smaller possibly because of the restrictions of early movie and television film sets or the idea that maybe they didn’t need to be huge especially as technology became smaller.

As I pointed out before the legs/fins retract, or rather swing into the ship creating perfectly spherical spaceships which is a pretty cool thing. 

So if your into old tactical space games, modern tactical space games or sci-fi based RPGs you might have fun putting the Sphere Ships back into your games.