Pink Starships

Ok, so with the release of the Barbie movie, there have been all kinds of Barbie-related memes coming out. Today I saw the above. I'm not usually a massive fan of either Barbie nor the colour pink, but this I love. It is so great.

(I don't know the author beyond the watermark, so if this is yours I hope you don't mind me sharing it. Happy to link back to the original if anyone knows it).

Anyway, being the combo engineering/astrophysics/planetary science/science fiction nerd that I am, I self nerd-sniped and ended up writing the below ridiculous exploration of the idea of pink spacecraft. Enjoy!

So, the reasons why real (or realistic fictional) spacecraft are boring colours are either because they're saving weight on paint or for thermal reasons (hence the Space Shuttle's distinctive black and white). The paint weight thing applies to aircraft, too – a coat of paint on a large object can become surprisingly heavy. But, this means that any time a spaceship is not black, white, or metal-coloured,* they've decided that the extra mass and effort of painting is worthwhile. (So, in Star Trek, the Federation mostly try and save on paint – except for the newer Star Trek Online black-and-white livery – but lots of the alien ships are colourful).

*By metal-coloured, I mean greys and silvers, because while there are (just two!) metals that are other colours (e.g. copper is... copper-coloured, and gold is... you get the point), those would not make sense from a materials perspective for a spacecraft hull. Potentially there might be some kind of alloy with a different colour, but again all the useful alloys I can think of are some variant on grey, silver, or at best a shiny dark grey (e.g. tungsten carbide), or maybe blue-grey. (And yes, there might be a reason you'd use ceramics, but this is getting to be waaay too deep a materials-science rabbit hole just for the below...)

I conclude that we do not see enough pink spacecraft in science fiction, because of course someone is going to do that. 😃

Plus, we almost never see aliens with a radically different sense of aesthetics. If you grew up on a planet with pink vegetation and a red sky,* one could guess that those would be the native inhabitant's aesthetic equivalent of greens and blues to us (i.e. neutral, calm colours). 🙂

*Yes, this is possible. Pretty much any sky and vegetation colour is plausible depending on the star type, except for a green sky (unless you want a funky heavily-chlorinated atmosphere). Check out Artifexian's amazing video on the topic of planet and vegetation colours if you're interested.

Now all we need is for a pink spacecraft to appear in Star Trek canonically – or any other franchise for that matter. Maybe someone can convince the developers of games like Star Trek Online to allow these as custom paint jobs for ships. I'm going to have to keep an eye out for any mods for spaceship games that let you play with Barbie-themed ships, because I'd be surprised if that didn't happen. 😆