@@michaelpettersson4919 Could have been budget or time constraints as well, or the animators could have forgot/overlooked that detail, the latter feels more likely.
My problem with the design was that having flat habitats on a centrifuge will lead to a sloping gravity effect inside each dome, where it actually feels like being on a hill.
It honestly would not be that much of an issue if the ring was larger but with a ring this small you'd have what feels like a 20 or 30° slope on two sides of the domes. Additionally I think that ring is way too small anyways. The speed you have to spin to reach 1g is too high, so the crew would likely experience cognitive and other physical problems when inside the domes.
If you look at 4:30 it actually kind of look like the domes are attached to the ring via giant hinges, and are supposed to swing outwards while the ship is under thrust to be in line with the rest of the gravity. That hinge mechanism would also explain why they are only attached on one side. My guess is that this ship is a typical case where the the designers put in a lot of thought to make sure everything makes sense and gravity is consistent throughout the ship, and then the show runners just either forgot about it, or deliberately ignored it because because they thought the ship looks cooler with the domes folded in and spinning.
@@SacredCowShipyards yeup, and this is why am going to write a sci-fi novel that actually does shit right, because apparently am one of the few that damn well can, even go into the pitfalls as well, cause, even if you where to make the perfect warship, you will have bullship to deal with
Still put the domes on the back of the ship and add some kind of protection so that random bits of debris don't take out the the entire food production
@@agravemisunderstanding9668 probably if you don't have sci-fi forcefields, any shielding is futile and it's much wiser to use a "self-healing" material (say, a sticky liquid caked between two layers of organic glass, that will solidify shortly after it's exposed to vacuum), And just accept any micrometeorites flying right through, and causing some relatively easy to repair damage.
I kinda remember this series. Yeah, it sucked. What really killed it for me was when that probe came back full of flesh and started bleeding all over the place. After that I had to be falling-over drunk to finish it and see where it crashed.
Something, something. Ghost mother's personality steals a body, the flesh probe is genetically the weird scientist guy's flesh, the ship almost explodes once or twice, mother tries to escape, scientist guy takes the pod instead and travels into the alien thing and winds up back home with his family (or my headcannon is he's in a coma because he hit his head or something). It was dumb and trope-y.
This is yet another fun example of "Design by Committee", and whats worse judging by the cameras, AI issues, and so on that Committee consisted entirely of Hollywood Executives and one Art Student Intern. O.o
Regarding the front of ship, absorbing kinetic energy is highly likely to be majorly developed by the time we are exploring space with ships like that. Still though I agree, we'd still want a craft to be as robust as possible under all seen and unforseen conditions. It's almost a certainly we'd be aware of other species in space by then too... Some would argue we already know. The odds are not all other species will react friendly.
Oh, Battletech. I love you, but 'zenith and nadir points' aren't trojan points, and going from a solar polar orbit to the plane of the ecliptic takes a lot of ∆v. Like...A LOT.
too be fair the domes in some shoes look like there supposed to be able to fold out from the spinning ring at the attaching point so they could stop spinning it to switch to thrust G but they would be incon vient as hell
"It looks cool" For a TV show, that's all is needed, it doesn't have to make sense. The only exceptions I can think of, are the ships from "2001, 2010, and the Expanse". In novels, the reference should be the Rama series from master Clarke. By the way, suscribed. I love to be witness of a good rant, and some time has passed from the "Star Disney" movies... Oh, the rages! The hate! The betrayed feelings!...Good times.
Well, it could be a Nuclear Salt Water Rocket (NSWR), as they do have combustion chambers after a fashion. However, while I have never heard of this series until now, I very much doubt it.
Based on the structure, it really seems like the domes would be able to flip out, but then you have a giant glass shield in front of the ship, which has all the critical, life sustaining equipment inside it.
@@Asgard961 You forgot to add-in the radar, and the magnetic - field deflector array produced as a wave front in front of the ship. It keeps charged particles, as well as in-bound metalic rocks from wrecking the ship. Or just say there's an invisible disk tether in front of the ship. It was (is) not seen by the audience, so you can go whine about something else.
Yeah, the design is dubious. There should be a rotational hub in the middle of the ship. The center stack should be microgravity (unless you're under thrust).
I don't know if anyone pointed this out yet, but the glass on the domes is literally useless! Someone might say: But the Plants need light! Then I reply: Yeah Stupid, but they will not get it from our Sun while we travel through deepspace to a new liveform! The light intensity from a sphere like our sun decreeces by the power of 3 the further away you are, so you would nee additional lights to feed the plants enough UV Light for photosynthesis. Also why would you want it to be glass anyway!? The unfiltered cosmic radiation cannot be good for the plants as well as the gardeners.
Cigar or elongated seafaring-shaped space ships (no liquid water to traverse in space) with doodads hanging off them are always a bad idea. Furthermore, space is packed by the cubic millimeter with thousands of dust particles that are cruising at an average speed of 25 miles per second, so ships like the one featured in this video, traveling at least 60 miles per second to generate 1G, would either suffer constant serious damage or be completely trashed after just a few days. Google an image of the nose section and window plates of the space shuttle after just a few days in space to see what I mean.
In short, .. a 1mm cubic mass of a milligram of iron dust speck impacts with the kinetic energy of aircraft anti-tank ammo. And that shows Star Wars imperial T/I fighters have to have some form of navigation deflectors and structural integrity fields to hold itself together just taking off from Earth at 12km/8min per sec. Let alone of what ever fiction speed they are list to have from the pass thirty odd years of table top role playing games, novels, and blow bull cut away tech manuals used as fan base cash grabs.
I have to correct something: Transparent aluminum DOES exist. It's not science fiction. Transparent aluminum is called "optical sapphire", or if you prefer, optically-clear corundum. It's the same stuff rubies and sapphires are made from -- Al2O3 -- but without the impurities that give those gemstones their color. It is frequently used for watch faces because it's incredibly scratch-resistant and very difficult to shatter.
Sure, but we're not really in a position to mass produce it large quantities to make large windows out of. So near future scifi stuff would be large sheets of transparent aluminum.
The domes would only be experiencing any kind of "gravitation" lateral to the rotational forces when the ship is accelerating. If the ship is simply coasting, the rotational forces would be all that is felt. It's still a dumb design to have it at the front of the ship. Or at all. The design implies they are using the sun's natural light to fuel photosynthesis.. but there's no guarantee that the orientation of travel would be towards the sun. Something, I would argue, absolutely stupid. Stars are hot and known to kick out all kinds of EM radiation to play massive fuckery with electronics. Accelerating towards a star would be like driving towards the centre of nuclear blast, you only guarantee your own death while the car's computers go nuts and prevent you from changing direction. Or worse. If the ship has enough energy to accelerate to a reasonable fraction of C, it has enough power to fuel a modest hydroponics setup, or at least simulate an internal green space with the use of UV lighting, screens for the outside view, paired to a set of hull mounted cameras to make it feel 'real'. It'd be safer, more effective, and absolutely just as conducive to mental health as that setup.
You could also have the habitation pods at 45 degrees out and accelerate and turn both at 0.5 grav. the pods would have downwards full gravity down and the ship has half gravity down.
"Naming the series after the ship seems to be a predominant thing in SciFi" Star Wars Episode IV A New Hope -> Death Star One Avatar -> Venture Star Stargate SG1 -> Ha'taks & Death Gliders Dr. Who -> Time And Relative Dimensions In Space Independence Day -> City Destroyer
Terrible ship design in the series, but also completely unlike the one in the original movie/novel. Except for the psycho Mum/AI in the computer controlling everything. That is from the original. And really the central part of the plot, since it was the growing relationship between the 'Captain' & the passengers that set off the AI.
LOOK! REACTORS ARE HARD! Lifeboats? I mean in interstellar space? Mehhhhhhh. LAck of auxilliary craft - yeah that's an issue unless you never intend on landing on a planet - or just aren't doing exploration. For a spooked out hauler.liner it makes sense. Maersk cargo ships don't have a bay full of speedboats after all. They just burn their bunker fuel and get where they are going eventually. Maybe one of the faults in designing interstellar ships is assuming them to be too much like ocean going vessels - I mean the Nightflyer is basically a mishmash of concepts that aren't thought out very well. I mean the things that look stupid like the single life pod are just that way because the writer needed it to be to create the tension. Weak writing is the culprit.
Okay so I'm horrible with physics but if there's one thing I learned from helicopters it's that if the propeller is spinning the rest of the craft wants to as well, needing the tail rotor to counter the rotation. If you were to launch a ship with one area spinning wouldn't the rest of the ship attempt to as well? We can assume they have some equivalent but I would like to see it.
I'm /sure/ this is all hand-waved away through some kind of zero-friction bearing that the rotational section is riding on, even though thrust from the non-rotational section would make that /very/ complicated. It's also plausible that the non-rotational section has station-keeping thrusters that give it the counter-torque necessary to not spin. The upshot is it's /still/ stupidly overcomplicated, only worse now.
That could be countered with thrusters. The reason helicopters need constant counter trust is also because of the air drag the blades create. If a helicopter would spin its rotor in space then the rotation would not become worse over time. If the rotor has constant rotation, the main helicopter body would as well, when you stop that main body rotation it stays like that, with the rotor still rotating.
I thought of a bigger problem: I think this craft would try to flip end over end when the domes are spinning, like this: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-1n-HMSCDYtM.html (dancing t-handle in zero G). This would be extremely hard to prevent with thrusters. It would need another spinning thing somewhere.
Sorry but you could have Squed the pooch on this on! If the domes open like a flower. Then 1g thrust would open them strait on. And close up as craft goes bellow 1g.... As for structural ability, you mostly need to look a sheering strength... ALso this sounds like the Writer cannot write worth shyte. As they took a good ship, and pooched it very badly.. As the Graphics make it clear that the domes should swing out like a flower..
Also, the glass dome thing would make ~some~ sense when they're near a source of light, but zero sense in an interstellar ship. Less than zero, actually - think of Pluto.
Why do people design ships like this I think it's only to make them aesthetically pleasing you know it's like one of the problems that I have with Star Trek federation ships is the bridge yes let's build this hulkingly big starship it's several hundred meters wide and long and let's put the bridge on the very tippy tippy top and put it under a dome they won't fire on that no they wouldn't dare I would if I was designing a Starfleet ship there would be no dorm on top the bridge would be completely built inside the middle of the damn ship you know why to protect it I'm sorry people do not think when they design starships for TV series they want to make them look good but they don't want to make them practical the only practical ships are from the expanse are from Babylon 5 and a few other TV series with Earth has made their ships practical with the exception of the drive system to the ships on the from Stargate ask you one they're pretty well what a standard Navy ship should look like in my opinion and why is it people want to design these massive ships and have glass where you can actually see them I'm sorry I would design a ship with no windows if you want to see outside you can turn on the screen or something because the idea of looking outside and outside of window into space is insane because you're going to possibly get killed
Funny thing, the first ship that came to my mind, when you criticize Nightflyer at first, with actual functional design was Argo from "Battletech" and moment later you brought it yourself!
@@SacredCowShipyards Hello, this is Comstar. We would like to apologise for the misjump, the diversion of your jumpship and the jamming of your comms... etc... See "Why Tex should not write video games"
Except in 40k the solution is usually to tell techpriest "no, we can't make someone sacrifice their live to glory of Omnissiah, find another solution"... at which point techpriest would sigh and reveal that he has remote control of the reset and can do it at will\/(-_-)\/
@@TheArklyte 40K warp reactors are refueled by teams essentially sent to their death. Staggered of course, so that as folks melt from the reactor output the next poor sods are still slowly managing to push the fuel closer to the reactor. It’s functionally pretty similar to having a reset button inside a reactor. Lutein has a grim video about it.
@@Wildbarley let me guess, another example of new lore going for retroactive grimderping? Yeah, I kind of stopped caring about GW's "official" take around 2014-2016;)
@@TheArklyte Star of Damocles was written in 2007 my dude. I read back on release. And it’s consistent with rogue trader lore from 90’s white dwarf issues.
They're clearly hinged, so my guess is that the animators didn't get the memo from the concept artist/ship designer, the writers didn't want to work gravity changes into the script, or some executive didn't like how it looked and vetoed it. Given the described plot contrivances, my money is on the writers fucking things up.
For something F-ed up check O'Neill space stations. In Gundam they were used extensively. They even showed what happened when they were punctured during battles.
@@xhagast Sorry man, O'Neill space stations are fine. That windstorm mess sucking people out into space is pure Hollywood lies. Even with a fairly huge hole it would take months or longer for one of those suckers to decompress to dangerous levels.
It actually looks like the design document has them tilted at 45 degrees when under thrust and 90 degrees inward when coasting and they never stop rotating the ring they are mounted on - rather than having the bass of the domes facing rearwards and the glass facing forwards and NOT rotating when under thrust... the 45 degree thing would work and but it would require almost as much annoyance to people in the domes when they change thrust state - moving the domes angle when they change course might be useful too. but that sure is a lot of moving parts. I suppose a giant armoured umbrella cold have been mounted on the front to protect the domes from radiation and such too. It looks like SeaQuest DSV and an Argo ship had a baby to me.
@@rogernummerdor The only instance of a colony collapsing due to combat that I can recall was Heliopolis in SEED (a bad series) and even then it was kinda due to idiots blasting the central support structure with anti-ship weaponry until it catastrophically failed. In all other instances a hole means that people near it do get sucked out but otherwise it's just a declared emergency and everyone shelters because of ya know, the giant robots shooting eachother INSIDE the colony. Colonies themselves in UC timeline at least are so sturdy that they get used as improvised orbital impactors.
7:50 "How big is your engineering crew and how good is their life insurance?" If servicing the engines is fatal to the crew, the only crew you will get will be those with weird psychological disorders. That could make for an interesting plot.
I mean, tbf, if they _did_ have the greenhouses in the stern... with the Drives... that would take a _Helluva_ boom, even _without_ considering reactor placement, so...
IF , big if , the Domes could gimbal outwards , like a Daisy Wheel , and the Rotation reduce , the system could work . Reset Button INSIDE the Engine . Obviously designed by a Shiny Arse , rather than an Engineer . L O L !
This is even worse than you think, that spinning section wouldn't just spin by itself. It would impart an opposite motion to the rest of the ship, so you'd have the whole thing counter rotating. Eeeeeven better still, bodies with spinny bits with uneven distributions of mass, in zero-g 'flip'. (video from the ISS showing this funky effect: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-1n-HMSCDYtM.html) Suffice to say, the ships design wouldn't make it out of earth orbit. (well perhaps as a debris cloud maybe)
when spinning up the ring, the ship would probably negate its rotation by firing rotational thrusters. But this reminds me of the Avalon (Passengers, 2016): in the film, when power fails, the ring stops rotating (why would he?) and gravity in the ring section drops to zero instead of just dopping slighly because some momentum would go to rotating the shaft of the ship.
Epic fails are many. They are afraid of dark matter but have no problem cruising through the corona of a star at full speed. They can slow down enough to land on a planet and speed up again, but needed a star for a gravity assisted speed boost.
I’ve never seen the show but I’ve read to story by George R Martin and I thought you enjoy a few details from the story that may not been covered in the show. The ship was custom designed by that crazy lady who infected the ai of the ship. Maybe this explains some of the nonsense features. The person leading the expedition to meet the new race was considered kinda a cook if I remember correctly and did not have a lot of funding which was why this weirdo ship was chosen! Thanks for the amazing content! Keep up the great work
The domes are. . . cute. I get the general idea it has been suggested before. Nice clear domes so sunlight comes in for the plants. This would be great if this was a space station in a specific orbit somewhere. Normally I see a video trashing a scifi ship I want to argue. But this sounds like a train wreck. No a train wreck would probably be a more sound design.
If the ship was shrunk down and the domes replaced with cutting heads I might see the design as an asteroid mining ship but even then it wouldn't be a very good one.
1. Mummy please make the bad ship go away. 2. The captain in the tube reminds me of the 'Ship that Sang' books not a bad read. 3. Holy mummy issues Batman what's this Evangelion
What it reminds me of is the *_Valley Forge_* from *_Silent Running,_* one of the few SF spacecraft which is more *_BADLY_* designed than the *_Nightflyer._*
Knowing Nothing about this Show. Just looking at the ship, visually it reminds me of Valley Forge from "Silent Running". With the domes inverted. I wonder if the design is an homage. Hmmh, that one might be worth tearing into at some point. I assume Valley Forge had some kind of space magic gravity generation...
Good centrifuge designs in Dream Pod 9's "Jovian Chronicles" where they are gimballed to reorient while under thrust [and rotation is stopped for that]
If I remember right, it took them ~9 months to get out to where the Volcryn were passing by. No attempt was made to flip-and-burn to decelerate and match ET's speed, though. So, basically, Einstein would have been a right proper /bitch/ by then.
Supposedly, the artist who designed the Omega-class destroyer copied the Leonov's rotating section as a joke expecting someone to notice it, have a chuckle and change it, but no one did.
With that outtro statement, have you ever played Star Citizen. Might be fun to hear your thoughts on some of those ships. Morphologus does reviews on Star Citizen ships, but he's comming at them from an architectural background. Might be fun to have the opinions from a navy background.
I'm just thinking of the structural stress of having combined forces on the supporting arms of those domes. I see them snapping off in a catastrophic way.
Absolutely. This monstrosity should have torn itself into a million pieces the first time they fired up the engines with the domes (and the ring they're attached to) were spinning. (Or thw other way around.) Whether the domes were extended outward or not.
I was completely unaware of this series, but god, that is an awful ship design by any stretch. Even if for some reason I *wanted* to do that mess on the front end in a somewhat plausible way, I would have had a Secondary ring in front of it that the domes were locked into on the other side, and then some sort of an impact shell in front of that, protecting the entire ship from things in front of them. The domes would be designed to spin around that center while the ship was free floating, but would rotate on their own axis to face forward when in burn. It would be like a really massive Ferris wheel. I guess there is some point to that, if you really wanted to maintain gravity regardless of speed, but chances are you would still lose proper gravity fairly regularly due to necessary changes in speed and course.
10:45 -ish. Why not dump biohazards through the combustion chamber of the engines? Instant incineration, instead of semi active whatevers floating around near the ship. Yess, it could be a structural weakness... (like everything else on the ship already isn't? ;P ) but you could construct it somewhat like torpedo tubes on submarines, where the ocean can't flood into the submarine. similar the "engine plasma" (or whatever) can't flood into the ship that way.
Jesus Christ, I thought you were joking when you said I could better. I legitimately could make a better sci Fi universe than this holy *shit* Don't even wait the 24 hours before cubing this one, you'd be doing them a favor.
At least in The Core the unobtanium actually gets used, which, granted, is damning with faint praise. It looks like the Avatar version is a room-temperature superconductor that basically explains... all of their available technology, but that's never actually articulated in the movie. I do like how the Rebel Galaxy game has "obtanium", though. As the flavor text goes, "apparently it wasn't that hard to find after all".
No surprise that George RR Martin was the writer who specializes in medieval stories. Also the "Designer' is the the evil woman trapped in the ships computers.
When space sci-fi so blatantly ignores physics, it turns me off immediately. I can forgive a little "I guess so" in the depiction, and even miracles lite artificial gravity over this turkey.
the design is *PURELY* for the sake of someones idea of "cool" oh, and lets not forget "plot" thats why you find a reset button for the engines inside the engines instead of in the engine room related to that particular engine, thats why you see ships in series and movies have fail safe features and various other vital features located inside the deadly reactor instead of outside it where its not deadly, thats why there is no protective gear to protect the crew when they have to go inside on a guaranteed suicide mission so they can save the ship, it's all down to terrible writing as they attempt and fail hard in creating a "dramatic" scene where someone has to sacrifice themself for everyone else.
It's sad that there went a lot of thought into the design to make it look realistic but it all falls flat because filmmakers are apparently allergic to understanding physics.
What is the point of the transparent domes? If they're to get starlight for greenhouses, then the glass parts should face outward, right? Why do they face one another? 🤷
I believe in the novel the ship was built by the captain's mother. She created a sex switched clone of herself to be her partner/son. That is the current captain.
The only way they could get away with this is if the domes only rotated when the ship wasn't under acceleration, like in orbit or in a just floating along at a constant speed, oh wait you mentioned that
Against my better judgement, I watched this series. A couple or so decades ago, there was a low-budget film called Nightflyers which was based on the same story by George RR Martin. It sucked as well. Martin should stick with fantasy.
Also: I would only use windows to let light in, when I am 1.) Being near a bright lightsource and angled to catch all that light (like with a star), or 2.) Don't have fusion to light my own candle. So this makes truly no sense: Having glas domes rotating in this manner instead of a Torus that is directly perpedicular to the centrifugal force (like with an O'Neill Clyinder) is supoptimal to say the least. Having actualy domes on an interstellar spaceship, that spends most of its travel time far away from any pertinent lightsource that could shine through the domes, makes no sense. I mean, sure, it's sci/fi, but this is a weak argument because: Even sci/fi should adhere to the most basic principles of physics. It's ridiculouse much like it is with the TV show "The 100", in which they travel with an interstellar spaceship to other starsystems to do what again? Oh yeah, to "drill for oil", because "Earth is bone dry". Okay... so they build a fusion engine to get oil from another starsystem. That checks out. ;) Apart from the fact that Titan has whole lakes of hydrocarbons, which dwarf every oil deposit Earth ever had, it makes no sense to create a fusion drive (and let's be real here: When you have a drive on board, and assuming you are not using antimatter or something equally exotic, then they have to use fusion to go to other starsystems roundtrip style in less than 140 years) just to get oil from distant stars. So, I would say: The TV show "The 100" should be your next target for a new video :)
Speaking of Thrust gravity, maybe some battletech stuff? The Egg carriers, the special ship from the HBS videogame (I imagine you'll be annoyed at the gravity blocks being complicated on hinges, those things failing actually can be a random event you get), or the Leopard and how so many video games give you a Leopard and forget it TOO has only thrust-gravity? Oh holy shit you actually do cover the HBS Argo!
Ironic. Fox squashed the best space series ever made (can't really call 'Firefly' science-fiction)...and SyFy runs with this nonsense? This series made SG1 seem like the acme of logic and reason, which it was not, though it was a decent enough series...I suppose. I guess I never really got used to McGyver pretending that he was Kurt Russell.
You could have a nice landscape in the domes of terraced cliff-side city, like Morocco, Hong Kong, or Pueblo Bonita. Spectacular views. It would be interesting if the doctors eventually dictate that you have to achieve 1G average gravity, but also had portions of your ship that would require manning in microgravity, so people rotate in and out. I maintain that the primary thing you have to account for with 1G thrusting vehicles is whether the universe incorporates their status as projectiles of mass destruction, as planet-killers. "If everybody has this tech, and can achieve relativistic impacts with ease, how are there any inhabited planets left?"
Major spoilers!! When I realized it was using thrust gravity and rotational gravity **at the same time** I had the exact same thought about where the floor would be in those. Namely that it was rotating *while under thrust* I don’t know what those rotating elements are made of but they are nigh indestructible for how much shit they get put through. I do like the creative undermining of expectations the first scene made it look like a typical survival series and the one dude goes crazy and kills everyone. And then the artificial hologram made me think he is the ships AI and is dealing with other shit but then he’s a person and his mother is the problem AI but then he’s an Android but then he’s a test tube baby and the show just really subverts expectations in a really interesting way. I do have complaints though. Several. The domes at the front are one. The crazy AI meter hijacking the physical body of someone is like ???? How tf?? Even an artificial organic approximation of a personality should not be able to do that, let alone a computerized software program, idgaf how advanced it is. I could buy that the tech Lonnie can die if she’s unplugged, I can buy that since it is her brain interacting with the computer, that can be traumatic at best and brain damaging or destroying at worst. But the computer hijacking the organic makes no sense.
Typical of today's movies that are total nonsensical bullshit it reminds me of the beginning of Aliens 1986 when LT. Ripley says to the inquest board "What ", did IQ's just drop sharply wile I was away"? it seems that nobody reads or reviews or even sits down and brain storms in any scientific and logical manor beyond "Oh that's sound cool let's run with that". This is why today's movies and TV show suck and are only vehicles for political morality lectures telling us that we all wrong instead of good stories that entertain us. fans are abandoning beloved franchises in droves because of the woke and non cannon bullshit forced down out throats as if we are all total morons that cant realize that we are being fed a bunch of shit.
There is more stuff in interstellar space than you'd imagine. Actually, whole starcluster masses of material flies between the stars. It's not a lot of stuff flying freely around like in a planetary sytem, but it's enough that, if you travel with a significant percentage of the speed of light, it would accumulate. Even just one hydrogen atom per squaremeter would add up to tons of hydrogen colliding at relativisitc speeds with the hull of your ship after just a few hours of travel. The friction would turn it into a plasma and it would spew out terawatts of radiowaves in the direction of travel. So, yeah... very bad news for the domes in front of the ship. They're pretty much done... they get grinded down.
Oddly enough, this version of the Nightflyer is its second incarnation. There was a movie version of the story long before the series was made. The ship design was completely different although no better in terms of aesthetics. It looked like a partly melted flatiron with the handle removed. The movie was much better than the series however.
