This Old Ship- Starfield Edition

I recently began playing Starfield with great expectations only to be a bit disappointed by the mundane aspects of the world in the year the story opens 2330 AC. Upon seeing the state of the first ship I entered, I started thinking about interior ship design. I know that as the game progresses the ships' design change and so on. But you know what? It's 300 years into the future, and even the lowliest ship will surely look far out and high-tech (to our 21st century eyes). Instead, we get this:

Starfield ship interior

This is an antiquated Star-Wars vision of the future based on 70s, 80s, and 90s aesthetics, which has been done over and over to the point that it's lost its wow factor. We've seen this ship before- Firefly, the Matrix, Alien, etc. This has been our pop-cultural vision of the future for the past few decades. So, on entering this first ship in the game, I was just underwhelmed. It felt like an old familiar place and didn't have that sense of wonder I would expect from being in the 24th century.

It's 2023 (as of publication of this article), and we're living in the era of SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, and Blue Origin, so we can look at their ships' design and extrapolate three centuries into the future. Personally, I wouldn't want to whiz around the galaxy in a sardine can with tubes and wires everywhere, as shown in the game. By the time we reach an era of galactic travel, ships are going to look much different than their ancient counterparts. So, I fired up the old Stable Diffusion engine to develop some quick ideas for interior design. The following images are three of them.

Very swanky ships, eh? Alright, so I'm being tongue-in-cheek here (just barely), and I do understand that in the first ship the player encounters, the game is trying to establish the rough and tumble nature of the ship's owner, his beat ruggedness, his lack of economic means and so on, but man when I saw a dirty pot in that ship's kitchen sink, I nearly lost the plot.

I was really hoping for something different with this game in terms of science fiction elements, but so far it seems like it's going over familiar territory. The small details of the world is littered with anachronisms that pull me out of the magic circle of the game, the space of make-believe that transports you into another world and gives a game its own reality. When I enter the 24th century, I expect to see a radical transformation of the world, but instead, Starfield provides scenes like this one:

Starfield work area

Blackboard, notebooks, pencils... welcome to the future.

I admit that the furniture in my ship is tacky, but I'd like to point out the aesthetics of the ship's architecture, which to my mind appears futuristic and stylish. Perhaps one hundred years from now, the designs I generated will look antiquated and quaint. So what will replace it? Imagine the interior of ships 100, 200, and 300 hundred years into the future. Perhaps the ships will be made of synthetic flesh or some exotic quantum flux. By the time the story in Starfield begins, it's the year 2330, humanity has advanced technologically, and this has happened:

Starfield game lore

That's right. Humanity creates and controls wormholes. If that's the case, then we'd probably have incredible looking ships, even the cheap-o ones, and as much as I love stationery, we'd certainly wouldn't use blackboards and pencils to design them.

I don't expect that humanity will be flying around in Playboy Mansions across the universe, but I sure hope our ships look fabulous.

Images generated by @litguru using Stable Diffusion software and screenshots from the game Starfield

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