Flags and emblems in science fiction

[tkdguy]

I admit I never thought about it despite seeing some of them in various shows. But a couple of YouTube videos got me hooked on the idea. After all, we have used flags for centuries. Why wouldn't we use them in the future?

 

First, here are some flags from different sf shows and games:

 

 

Next, here are some flags for the moons in the solar system:

 

 

 

Which ones do you like?

[Zeropoint]

I'd add a criterion . . . or rather, encapsulate some of his criteria a bit differently: An ordinary person should be able to draw the flag 1) with no special artistic ability, 2) from memory, 3) with just a single pen or pencil. This obviously includes the "works in black and white" requirement, sets a limit on the amount of detail, and sets a practical limit of three colors (blank, filled, and hatched). Equally obvious is that my criterion doesn't fit a lot of real world national flags; we've got way too many flags that are just a set of three stripes.

[DShomshak]

I won't be able to watch the videos until a few days from now, but I designed a few flags and logos for societies in my Star Hero setting and some friends' Traveller setting. The best, I think, was for a Traveller adventure I ran. The setting was a lost colony -- lost because for 200 years people thought plague had destroyed it. The "flag" was actually the logo for the genetic research company that set up the colony, Joralemon Biome. It was a big space station in an asteroid belt orbiting a red giant star, so the logo incorporated those elements: a sunburst in red, orange and yellow, the letters J and B, and a double helix. I thought it turned out so well that I used it for the cover design of an imaginary supplement of the adventure. Let's see if I can get it to post, and you tell me if you'd pick it off the shelf for a second look if you saw it in a gaming store:

dEAN sHOMSHAK

[DShomshak]

And here's the logo for Barnardia, an industrial colony at a jovian world orbiting Barnard's Star. Barnardia does hypernuclear engineering: Most of the colony consists of monstro-gigantic particle accelerators to produce antimatter, strange matter, monopoles, and the like. The logo is an extremely stylized syncrotorn surrounding a red dwarf star.

 

Dean Shomshak

[DShomshak]

Here's the emblem I designed for the world of Scheat, as part of some Traveller background I never had a chance to use. "Scheat" is an old name for Beta Pegasi, the star it orbits. Beta Pegasi is a red giant; Scheat is therefore a very young world, made habitable through terraforming. (And with an expiration date, because Beta Pegasi will eventually go supernova. If isn't destroyed first by one of the spare protoplanets that are still careening through the system. But it had a good location otherwise.) The prancing pegasus is of course for the star's location as seen from Earth, the red sunburst-section is for the star itself, and the orange upper part is for the planetary sky.

That Scheat would have an orange sky is a wild-ass guess on my part. Beta Peg radiates most of its visible light in the red-to-yellow part of the spectrum, with almost no blue. Scheat also has a dense atmosphere that scatters light more than Earth's atmosphere does. (And the planet has no true night, just a long perpetual sunset as sunlight bends around the planet.) It's atmosphere is also higher in CO2 than Earth's, and that might change the sky's color. (See Peter Ward's book, Under a Green Sky.) That might result in a sort of muddy brown on Scheat. But I don't know, and an orange sky looks better.

 

Dean Shomshak

 

 

[archer]

I wouldn't be surprised if many flags of settled worlds were based somehow on the corporate emblem of the company or companies which played a major part in the original settlement of the world.

 

So for example if ATT helped settle a world, the flag would likely be blue and have an image of the Death Star on it.

 

The other option would be flags that were derivative of the settler's homeworld or of pop culture from that homeworld. For the pop culture example, the flag might have a white background with five interlocking rings like the Olympic flag.  But instead of simple rings, they would be round portraits of Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, Spider-Man, and Black Widow to remind people to rise above themselves and be heroes for the community.

 

Of course in 400 years, the original meaning would be lost and most of the citizens would probably think those were the portraits of their founding fathers rather than of fictional characters.

[DShomshak]

Here are three emblems from the Alpha Centauri system in my Star Hero setting. Two of the three refer to Alpha Centauri being a trinary star system: A, a yellow star a bit brighter than the Sun; B, a cooler and dimmer yellow-orange dwarf; and C, or Proxima, a red dwarf star so faint and distant from the other two that it wouldn't be visible from any planets around the other two. Nevertheless, being trinary is part of the system's "brand," for lack of a better word.

 

Hestia is the most populous world. Its emblem is actually that of the dominant society, which has a strong American influence. There are several other large cultures, though, and numerous small ones.

Poseidon, the next planet out from Alpha Centauri A, is a waterworld, the result of it forminG deficient in radioactive elements to maintain mantle heat. Nobody planned to settle it; colonization happened through a typo that nobody cared enough to correct. Blue for the world-ocean, the three stars for Alpha Centauri, and the trident for the planet's name.

The Centauri Belt Alliance occupies an asteroid belt around B, where a planet was prevented from forming by tidal disruption from A. It's a no-frills design, black and white, with the initials CBA and little stars to represent the asteroids.

These are rougher than the preceding. At the time I designed them I never got past scanning the pen-sketch originals. For this I just colored them in.

 

And why circles instead of rectangular flags? They're based on NASA mission patches: the ones I remember were circular. My assumption is that these mission patches were more influential in early space colonization than the classic flag. After all, no air in space to set a flag fluttering and looking flaggy. So even when planets were settled, the official form of the government emblem often remained the circular patch.

 

Dean Shomshak

[DShomshak]

Is anyone else going to post anything? Because I have only a little more.

 

Dean Shomshak

[tkdguy]

I don't have any ideas at this time, but thanks for sharing your work.

[DShomshak]

Here are some flags and logos from my Planetary Romance setting, Sard.

 

The first logo for Sard would be very bad as a flag. It has complex overlapping shapes and several colors, depicting the planet's tentacular plants, the ruins of aeson-defying crystal left by its long-extinct native species, and the three stars of the 40 Eridani system (a K-type yellow-orange dwarf, red dwarf and white dwarf). But it includes the planet's most salient features.

I just dashed off a possible replacement, a purely abstract design. The Old Sardians didn't do representational art, but they adorned their buildings with complex geometric "mandala" and "frieze" interlacing designs. Here's a logo using a simple interlaced mandala. Navy blue for the planet's sky, yellow-orange for the sun.

 

Sard has six major countries and any number of tiny breakaway kingdoms, city-states and tribes. They tend to use old-fashioned flags. One of the major countries is the chivalrous kingdom of Hyperborea. Here's its flag: yellow and orange for the golden sunlight and the orange pigment used by one of Sard's three coequal phyla of plants, a sword for martial courage, an H for the country's name, and the two circles with a sort of "e" logo for... um, I don't remember. It's been several years.

 

The most powerful country, however, is usually considered to be Karkovy -- formerly the New Kharkov colony, settled chiefly by Russians. (I started designing Sard very long ago, before the Soviet breakup. Kharkov has already been de facto annexed back into Russia from Ukraine, though, and I expect the rest of Ukraine will be reconquered within a few decades.) So the flag of Karkovy is a tricolor like the Russian flag, adorned with the three stars of the 40 Eridani system and a band of Old Sardian arabesque.

 

Finally, the Sard campaign I ran took the PCs to the breakaway Karkovan province of Ostrog and conflict with its warlord. Ostrog itself is a mining town, extracting minerals from the crushed remains of one of the subterranean cities the Old Sardians built i their failed attempt to survive their companion star's collapse from red giant to white dwarf. If the banner of Ostrog looks a bit Soviet, that's not an accident.

 

I have a few other incomplete flags and logos, but I think that's enough. I hope I've encouraged other people to post some flags and logos for their SF settings, too.

 

Dean Shomshak

 

[tkdguy]

Thanks for sharing, Dean! 

 

[IndianaJoe3]

I have a campaign idea that I've been noodling with that was based on a flag idea. The flag was the UN flag, only in black instead of blue, with crossbones underneath. The name for the setting was Pirate Earth.

[archer]

Aha! https://xkcd.com/1815/

[Zeropoint]

"There's a compromise bill to keep the notification bar but at least charge the battery."