Common ship equipment

Spaceships of all kinds need, naturally, equipment to function. You may have seen many mentioned here and there in articles. Here's a comprehensive list, with links to more detailed articles if available.
Relevant articles:
Starship Categorization
Warship classes

Main Systems

The main systems of a starship; the very most integral ones to its function, universal in their use.
See: Fusion power, Antimatter

Power systems

The various ways to provide electricity to a starship, to run damn near everything in it.

Fusion-based

The overwhelmingly most common form of powering a starship is via fusion reactors. Nearly every ship in existence today uses at least one, and many larger ones use several. Even ones with antimatter-based reactor systems have backup fusion reactors. Fusion fuel, hydrogen, is dirt cheap, and quite literally the most common element in the universe. Fusion reactors are safe, efficient, scaleable, and just overall a fantastic option.
A fusion reactor, per the name, fuses hydrogen atoms inside a superheated plasma, into helium. This process releases thermal energy, which can then be used like any other reactor system. Many fusion reactor designs can also make electricity directly from the plasma inside, though most of those are in use in smaller things, like personal vehicles or synthetic bodies.

Antimatter-based

Yet, sometimes that's not enough. There comes a point where adding more fusion reactors becomes inefficient compared to installing an antimatter reactor. Antimatter reactors are enormous, very complex, and costly to both install and fuel. Outside of larger clusters, antimatter production is very rare. However, the efficiency of antimatter is unmatched. Quite literally, in fact. Antimatter is the most efficient fuel out there, and while that is most evident in thrusters, it is also noticeable in power generation.
An antimatter reactor funnels both a stream of hydrogen and antihydrogen ions together, where they annihilate, creating a lot of heat and radiation. This energy is then used to power turbines and the like, creating electricity for a ship to use. While antimatter is expensive and complex to even transport and store, even a kilogram can sustain full operation of a battleship for decades.
A single antimatter reactor module. A proper reactor will have thousands of these.

Antimatter Reactor Module by MadToxin

Other

Some ships still utilize fission reactors. While undoubtedly valuable back in the days before fusion, they are now archaic and old designs, nowhere near as useful as fusion. Still, they are about the same cost, and while fissile materials are far rarer, they are also far more efficient. They don't really have much of a place anymore, but do still exist in ships with no access to even basic developed civilization.
Solar power is a popular backup for many ships. Most have some sort of deployable system, which, when aligned properly and at a decent distance, can keep the ship functional even if the reactor(s) are dead.

Propulsion

The technologies to move a spaceship across the incredible distances of space.

Fusion-based

For much the same rationale as fusion power, fusion thrusters are by far the most common type of propulsion. They work by using the fusion reactions' energy to push the superheated matter out of a thruster, pushing the ship along rather efficiently. The main disadvantage here is the long plume of the thruster, which being very hot, is dangerous to anything behind it. It is also very easy to detect from far away, if one is somewhat behind it.

Antimatter-based

Fusion thrusters have their limits, however. Much like the reactors, they become inefficient at a point. However, this inefficiency is not very relevant for most scenarios. Save for one. Interstellar travel. To this end, antimatter was adapted to be used for propulsion with thrusters. Much like the reactor counterpart, antimatter thrusters are incredibly powerful, and any large ship worth its salt has a set. Most are located external to the hull, in sets of two on each side. Fuel is expensive and difficult to work with, but absolutely worthwhile. Before faster-than-light travel was invented, antimatter thrusters were irreplaceable for interstellar travel.
The way they work is by pushing the particles and absurd energy created by the annihilation reaction out of a thruster, like any other rocket engine. The volatility of antimatter makes systems very complex, and thus the thrusters themselves are enormous. The plume, too, is massive, tens of kilometers, and very, very hot. With all of these considerations, antimatter engines are only truly ever used on the really large ships, often the smallest of those being upwards of five kilometers long.

Chemical-based

The long plumes of superheated matter that the two main thrusters difficult to use around space stations and other ships and the like. Instead, ships of all sizes use various chemical thrusters, not dissimilar to ones today, to manouvre both near and far from other things. They're mainly used for small adjustments to trajectory and rotation, but can also be used to move without creating superheated plumes that can melt steel.

Faster-than-light Drive

The machine that makes between stars incredibly more convenient and at least some kind of interstellar community possible.
See: FTL travel and FTL fuel.
Modern FTL drives function by using negative matter, FTL fuel, to create a bubble in a given volume of space. It then warps space in front and behind it to move much faster than light while technically not doing so at all, thus avoiding the issues of relativity and the whole "reaching c needs infinite energy" business. This bubble is incredibly strange from a scientific perspective, as the matter inside seems to not move at all from an objective perspective (which in and of it itself is a near-insane concept), and thus experiences no time dilation effect whatsoever. This bubble also destroys nearly anything it touches via Causal Correction, forbidding anything at all from interacting with the stuff inside. It's also fairly inaccurate, as the bubble shifts and jitters along its travel path, and estimating distances while being isolated from everything else is imperfect at best.

Life Support

The stuff that keeps the people inside of a ship alive.
"Life support" generally denotes systems dedicated to cycling air and water throughout a given vessel. Humans need oxygen to breathe, and while they can survive for quite a while without, synthetics, too, need air to breathe; hydrogen for their fusion reactors. Generally, the air inside a ship is only present in certain areas. Most of the sections of sizeable spaceships are not intended for extended human use, and, for example, a cargo hold or ammunition factory is not worth pressurizing. For the areas with air, that air is stored in large tanks, in- or outside the ship, and recycled as necessary. Most large vessels also have facilities to convert the carbon dioxide from breath back into oxygen, and can also use the helium that comes from synthetics fusing hydrogen from air.

Weapons

Guns. Stuff you use to destroy your opponents' ships and stuff. Most weapons are mounted on turrets across the hull of a given vessel, and these tend to be moveable across the hull along tracks. On many civilian ships, they are also concealed in hatches when not in use.

Mass Drivers

The main guns; electromagnetically propelled shells of metal, going at very fast speeds, causing damage via kinetic energy transfer.
See: Mass Drivers

Railgun schematics by MadToxin

Railguns

Contrary to trends in handguns, railguns are the most common form of starship weapon. Two parallel rails, with a current running through in opposite directions to the other. When a specific piece of conductive metal is placed between the two, a circuit is formed, and the Lorentz force propels the piece forward at high speed. When it reaches the end, the piece breaks off, and the rod of metal is flung forward out of the cannon at very high speed, with a lot of kinetic energy.
Easy to maintain, affordable, and generally powerful, railguns are very reliable as main weapons on a ship. A single one is unlikely to breach any decent ship's defenses, but a hundred can do wonders. Spinal (cannons mounted on the centerline of a ship, running through it; very big and powerful) railguns are fairly rare in general, but do exist and are as powerful as any other spinal weapon.

Coilguns

While coilguns dominate personal arms, they are somewhat rarer in starship weaponry, compared to railguns at least. Still, they are used a fair bit. A coilgun is, per the name, a barrel with coils around it, each activating in sequence to push and pull a projectile. At the scale of a spaceship, this is usually less powerful than a railgun of similar cost.
That said, there is an exception; spinal weaponry. Due to the construction and easier-replaceable nature of the coils, making really long coilguns is better than railguns. This being the case, most ships cruiser-size and larger tend to have some sort of spinal coilcannon, as something of a long-range alpha strike.

Plasma Weapons

Guns that use superheated matter as ammunition; often short-range, expensive, complex, but also incredibly powerful.
See: Plasma weapons.

Plasma Proper

Plasma weapons are mostly found in more developed clusters' navies. They boast extreme destructive power and the ability to disrupt hardened plasma shielding, but are complex to use and maintain. A plasma cannon first fuses up air in its reactor, then electromagnetic fields, much like in a coilgun, project it forward. The tip of a cannon is shaped in such a way that the plasma maintains its shape for a while, and since there is no meaningful amounts of air in space to remove heat from it, the range is considerable. Short-range for starship combat, but much farther than it would be in-atmosphere.

Particle Beams

Particle beams are enormous. Nearly all such weapons are spinal, with very few exceptions, as the cooling systems alone are significant. A particle beam is a plasma weapon, and so the cannon is similar; electromagnetically guided plasma fired out from the barrel. However, for particle beams, the plasma is continuously fired, as a beam. The destructive power of this beam is incredible, and most ships' shielding and armour will melt and vapourize in seconds. They're also very, very expensive.

Missile Weapons

Self-guided rockets with payloads of various materials that explode at their target.
See: Missile Weapons.

Large

The larger variety of missiles are generally about the size of a modern ballistic missile, though many can be larger. They are durable, almost immune to common point-defense weapons, and carry with them complex suites of control and detection systems. Some can even decipher a ship's position based on communications to and from it.
Generally, these are launched in volleys of tens of missiles, striking the target at about the same time. They can reach potentially millions of kilometers in range, and are also used for engagements at those ranges.

Small

Smaller missiles, often called micromissiles, are most often a few meters long, if even that; many are small enough to be handled by a regular human. These are far simpler than the larger ones, and thus tend to be close-range, at least in comparison. The method of attack is also similar; compared to the smaller volleys, micromissiles are launched in swarms of thousands, or more. This generally ensures that while many are intercepted by point-defense, many more are not. It takes either a high-power ship like a big battleship or a picket boat built for point-defense to reduce to power of a volley like that effectively.

Payload

Missiles explode. Whoa, no shit. Usually, the payload is about the same between large and small missiles; the small ones aren't so much smaller that the explosives couldn't fit. The three main payloads are, somewhat similar to power generation; chemical, fusion, and antimatter explosives. Chemical explosives are much the same as today, and only tend to be used in special cases like in the presence of some sort of electric or magnetic disturbance. Fusion explosives are essentially like modern thermonuclear weapons, only without the primary fission component, just pure fusion. These are far more compact and efficient, though also relatively more expensive. Antimatter explosives are the most powerful and costly. The sheer energy density of antimatter allows the packing of a considerable amount more power compared to fusion, though the complex workings of the electromagnetic confinement system do take up more space and make the missile less robust.

Armour and Defensive Systems

Ways to protect your spaceboat from both enemies and random debris and such.

Plating

See: Carbon-Interlaced Aluminium Alloy.
The structure of a voidcraft's hull is as follows; The outermost plating is the armour, and is what is covered here. Underneath, there is lighter, less dense structural elements, in which the actual connections like power cables or water pipes are. The armour plating is generally composed of CI-A alloy, though not always; many ships tend to only have a layer of it, or on some important structures. Many use other alloys of steel and aluminium.
Some smaller ships tend to have armour plating in a single layer, often a couple meters thick. However, most larger vessels employ a layered approach that serves several purposes. The most common configuration is one with two layers of the armour proper, and a layer of water between them. The water serves a dual purpose. It is both insulation and defense, as it reduces the impact of hits as well as slow down ones that make it through the first layer of protection. It is also the ship's water reserve, as water is used for everything from human consumption and cooling systems to splitting into oxygen and Hydrogen for various purposes.

Armour layers by MadToxin

Hardened Plasma Shielding

See: Hardened plasma.
Hardened plasma shielding is explained well enough in the article above, but here it is again. With how a spaceship generally experiences no meaningful gravity nor has any significant amount of particles or air around it, the hardened plasma can be projected very far away. This, combined with the longer periods of time involved with void warfare, allows the shields to take longer to deploy as the gas travels towards the magnetic fields. The magnetic fields themselves are generated by small, usually around a few ten centimeters wide, drones that hover around the ship and move to where necessary to project the electromagnetic field that the gas is attracted to. It sends out the signal to harden as well. Starship shielding also has layers. These layers are most often tens of meters apart, and something like the Titanic Lance's ten layers are, in total, spaced out over two hundred meters.

Hardened Plasma Schematic by MadToxin

Point-Defense

Modern point-defense systems are most commonly high-power pulse laser systems. They attack any meaningfully sized object that comes close to either the hull, if it's large enough, or other equipment on it. Smaller objects, like railgun shells (which, that said, are very difficult to intercept) can be vapourized instantly, where large missiles can take several minutes of dedicated fire from multiple turrets. Some point-defense gun are also much like handguns, especially coilrifles. Some, too, are low-power coil- or railguns with explosives inside that explode near the target.

Other

Various miscellaneous methods to protect ships.

Chaff systems

Generally, chaff-based jamming and defense denotes deploying amoumts of stuff in front of what you want to protect, in order to distract or confuse targeting systems. In that regard, chaff hasn't undergone much change in the last 800 years. It's not a common system, but still in use in some civilian ships or very large targets without much point-defense, so not most warships. Usually, that method is simply deploying millions of small strips of some reflective material, often aluminium, to reflect laser radar-based targeting systems as well as scanning systems.

Electronic jamming

Electronic jamming is similar to chaff-based jamming, but more direct and common. Most often, it is done by bombarding the targeter, usually an incoming missile, with massive amounts of junk data and signals to confuse the tracker and conceal the real target's signal. Another method is to instead the exact opposite; instead of concealing the target, it reveals it by bombarding it with so much electromagnetic radiation that everything looks like the target, further confusing the targeter.

Other Systems

The various other systems of a ship not immediately vital to running it, but still very important.

Communications

Ways to talk to people from far away.
See: Communications.

Direct

Direct communications are most often just lasers, pulsed in a way to communicate a message. This laser is very narrow, and is generally aimed right at the target ship's respective communication receivers. This can make for patchy communications at long distances, but as lasers are indeed light, those long distances are measured in millions of meters. Within a fleet, for example, where ships are at most a few hundred kilometers away from one another, it is no issue. The nature of a laser makes these communications impossible to intercept or ever detect, save for the most complex and sensitive systems, which would be overwhelmed by other, general communications and even solar radiation unless they're right in the path of the laser.

Indirect

Indirect communications are just that, indirect, broad, wide-channel. They are striking similar to modern radio systems, only far more powerful. Broadcasting electromagnetic waves in all directions, this tends to have much larger range than a direct transmission, as there's no need to keep a receiver precisely aimed. That said, the range is also less, as the broadcast is less powerful on average. The main advantages are naturally that one can contact several targets at once easily, but anyone else can also detect the broadcasts just as well. Many ships, especially military ships, emply encryption to prevent those open-to-all broadcasts from being understood by those who shouldn't. Common methods include simple code and encryption, often both.

Sensors

The way the ship looks at things, from far away.
There are generally two main applications for a given type of detection; direct and general. Direct scanning is analysing specific aspects of a target, like shape, emission, equipment, and such. General detection is just looking for stuff around the ship, and scanning everything with little to no detail.

Radar

Radar detection and scanning systems are just that, Radio Detection and Ranging. Modern radars work about the same as ones in the 21st century, though naturally more efficient and powerful. The electromagnetic waves are transmitted rather wide, though their relatively low power forbids especially long-range detection. Still, within that range, they tend to be more efficient than other alternatives, and are more precise when used for direct scans.

Lidar

Lidar works much the same as a radar, only with lasers. The lasers are transmitted toward a target, and the time it took for the reflected light to return is measured to detect the distances, and thus shapes, of the target. Lidar is far longer-range than regular radar, but is also less broad, requiring more scanning for a wider area. That said, it is also very precise at long distances, and can be used to detect shape and structure from several light-seconds away (billions of meters). As is the nature of lower-power lasers, this sort of detection is susceptible to jamming via chaff.

Spaceship sensor ranges

Gravitational wave detection

Gravitational wave detection is a somewhat niche detection system, only really present on larger ships and stations. It scans for gravitational waves and disturbances in space-time around it. That scarcity is mostly due to its cost and complexity, as well as the fact that such a detection system requires a significant amount of space on a ship to exclude the ship itself from scans. However, it makes up for it in its extreme range of detection, measured in terameters (10¹² meters). Due to the nature of of the machinery, the scan is a continous, 360-degree scan, though one that cannot be used for precise, direct analysis or scan. The range is often considered a worthwhile tradeoff to the restrictions, though.

Heat Management

The methods to keep you from cooking alive inside your space-tube.See; Void for more details about why it's that way and not freezing.

Radiators

Radiators are quite literally bit plates of conductive material extended out from the ship. They often have water-conducted systems to transfer heat into them, but, as the name implies, the way they get rid of heat is by radiating it away. There are often thousands and thousands of these on a given ship, and on warships, they tend to be retractable to protect them.

Heatsinks

Heatsinks are a simple, often emergency solution to quickly lose heat. Only really used on smaller ships, a heatsink is a big block of conductive material, to which heat is directed, and then, it launched out into space. Thus, the ship loses heat, at the cost of losing the heatsink as well. Most ships have multiple in store. Larger ships rarely use such systems, as they are just far too large for any heatsink to be efficient.

Miscallaneous

Various systems and methods not easily categorizeable.

Hologram by MadToxin

Screen systems

See: Display Tech
Most screens on starships are simple enough, displaying important information like ship status or target specifics, crew condition or maybe just the progress of the Captain's coffee request. They're screens, same as today. Screenglass, too, is very common. It is essentially a method to make a ship's hull seemingly transparent, and allows display of information on it. Larger ships practically always have a section or place for a large, 360-degree view of the outside. Many small ships, even frigates and corvettes, tend to have some as well.

Holograms

See: Display Tech
Holograms are used on larger ships for three-dimensional representations of data, inconvenient to show on a 2d screen. Ship condition, the location of a fleet or relevant targets, approach direction of a habitat, and so on. They're fairly complex and expensive, though also very convenient.

Ablative ice

Back in the day, interstellar travel had to be conducted via sublight speeds, in actual, proper space, not the weird zero-time-dilation bubble that erases everything on contact with it, and so, there's stuff in there. When travelling at the standard speed of 0.7c (70% of lightspeed or about two hundred million meters a second), stuff hits hard. Even small particles, and especially the large ones. Thus, ships need protection. They also need to keep ice on hand, for a multitude of purposes. The logical conclusion came to be to put a big block of ice in front of the ship, and shave it into a cone-shape. Ironically, despite the emptiness of space, aerodynamics are a real concern at relativistic speeds.

Planetary entry

Large ships are not built for atmosphere or planetary gravity. The math technically can work out, as any ship capable of accelerating to 0.7c in a reasonable time can lift itself off a planet with about a g of gravity and approximately Earth's atmospheric density. Still, it isn't efficient nor is it safe. Getting a ten-kilometer long tube upright to get the thrusters aligned is hard enough, and then there's the thruster plume incinerating everything withing kilometers. Large ships, and most spaceships in general, are built in space and spend all their lifespans in space. That said, large ships can enter atmosphere and even survive landing, as the Void Traveller indicates. It's not safe or very easy, but it can be done. Chances are that it'll just rip apart one side of the ship though. Interior will be fine, though.
Instead, ships use shuttles held in hangars to travel planet-to-orbit. Smaller vessels ranging anywhere from ten meters to a hundred or more. Due to their size, these ships lack gravity, as spin-gravity doesn't really work with something that small. They serve various purposes, but mostly to transport cargo and people from ship to ship, habitat, surface or wherever.

Hangars, docking bays, and such

These shuttles have to be kept somewhere, naturally. The hangars are for that. They're essentially like any other sci-fi hangar, though the doors are physical, proper doors. Most hangars are not pressurized. Most are rather large and, naturally, on the outer sections of the ship's interior. Many ships also have some sort of repair yard, often similar to the hangar but more industrial and built for, well, repair. Fighter craft and such aren't much of a thing, though they do exist. They are, however, only ever used in-atmosphere.
Docking bays for smaller ships are a thing, though only really on larger ships, naturally. Fleet-carrier ships, for one, have a lot of those, since that is their entire point. Larger battleships tend to have space for something frigate-sized or so, sometimes, rarely, more. These facilities are often more large holding areas, but some have proper repair systems and various pieces of machinery more fitting for a proper shipyard.

Table of Contents:

Spaceships...
...are dope

— me