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](http://media.photobucket.com/image/black hole cygnus/VulcanJediConsular/Sci-Fi Artwork/cygnus1.jpg?o=1) <-- beautiful
Star Wars getting a lot of love. Sooooo many great ships.
No mention of Space 1999’s Eagle?
How about the Earthship ARK from The Starlost show?
Ooh, good ones. I’d forgotten those.
The ships in the 70s Buck Rogers TV show were nice, too:
Also listed in the poll itself.
I’m glad to see Farscape getting some love here.
I’d add the Death Star to that list. While not technically a space ship, I think the only thing that competes with it on the immediate recognition factor is the original Enterprise.
My fave space ship was always the Discovery from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Not only is it a great design, it also manages to be plausible (as in it looks like something that could be built for reals) and cleverly contains some great visual symbolism, like how the ship resembles a spinal cord which ties in the design with the earlier image of the cavemen tossing the jawbone in the air.
Recently, though, I loved the ship in Sunshine. I have some serious problems with that movie as a whole, but that ship was gorgeous.
Poll lacks:
- TIE and TIE variants
- Most of the human and Centauri ships from Babylon 5 (no Starfury?!)
- TARDIS
And, yeah, I LOVE the original Cylon ships (used to have an awesome toy of it back in the day) and the ship from the Black Hole was awesome.
Has anyone pointed out to Hugin that he might have missed one or two ships, because if they haven’t they really should.
Haha, I admit I’m guilty but no Babylon 5 ships was kind of an oversight – it had so many great ones!
My top five:
TIE Interceptor
Starfury
Shuttle Tyderian
Original BSG Cylon Raider
That Black Hole ship
/Starfury!
The Milton Bradley Starbird.
If you were a kid in the 80’s everyone had or knew someone who had one of these things.
Launch fighters!
Another vote for the SDF-1 because of the description above.
Oy vey.
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The forum software allows for a poll to have 20 entries, no more. When I was working up the poll on the back of an envelope I got up to 40 ships very easily. I said in the OP that the poll was mostly there to jog people’s memories, and that it would be incomplete. And my own list in the first post added a ship, the Discovery from 2001, that wasn’t in the poll.
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The poll has three ships from Babylon 5 and three ships from Star Wars. Obviously between SW, Trek and Bab 5 I could have made a list 4 times longer, but I wanted to represent a couple ships from other movies/shows.
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I said up front that the poll didn’t include space stations, fighters, or ships primarily famous from literary sources, because it’s a poll mostly about beautiful visual design.
I’m really enjoying the thread, I didn’t imagine it would get such a healthy amount of response, but it’s kind of annoying to get people who apparently didn’t actually read the OP repeatedly going “Why isn’t such and such a fighter in the poll?” “Why doesn’t the list include this particular ship?” “What about this great ship from this book, of which there are little or no pictures or video clips extant?”
shakes head
And the TARDIS? Really?
I’m glad I’m not the only one that liked that ship. I liked the show too, even if it did have rather shitty special effects.
LOL Indeed they do. I stand corrected!
YES YES YES YES. Oh, how I LOVED this thing as a kid.
Has anyone else noticed how many of these cool designs are coming from the 1970s? It’s not that there was more sci-fi on TV back then or anything. I’m not sure if it’s that the 1970s aesthetic appeals to us because most of us here are of a similar age, or if it was just a really, really good era for ship design.
Certainly, a lot of it seems to be that people were borrowing heavily from each other; the Viper, X-Wing and Buck Rogers Starfighter all could have been different models made by the same starship factory. The BG Basestars are just twelve Star Destroyers put together – six on the bottom arranged in a circle like a pizza, and six on top and upside-down. ;) But then other great designs, like the Cylon Raider and the Cygnus really don’t seem to derive from anything else in the era, and are no less great to me.
To some extent this can be attributed to the amazing talent and imagination of the folks working on Star Wars. They were able to come up with a bunch of concepts that were both unique and timeless.
Out of all of the stuff since, oh, 1990, I really can’t think of one that’s worthy of even being in the neighborhood of most of the designs from the 1970s. I can’t help but feel that choosing Serenity is more because of the idea of the ship, not anything in how it looks. Even the Star Wars prequels – they derive their ideas from the originals in most cases, but in weird ways; new designs, like the droid fighters, are less appealing for some reason.
Am I totally off base here? It is just my own perceptions and fondness for that era showing?
Hell, even the ship from Jason of Star Command was pretty cool…
Also you forgot Lone Star’s Winnebago.
Incidentally, and depressingly:
"According to an ex-Disney employee, the [Cygnus] model was stored in a crate in the ‘Boneyard’, where old props and such are stored on the Disney lot.
It was rained on a great deal, and, one day, smashed to pieces by a poorly-driven forklift which accidentally backed into the crate.
Pieces of the model were taken by various folks as souveniers."
R.I.P.
Some of my favorites.
The Tardis
Eagles from Space 1999
Earthship ARK from that horrible show The Starlost (Walter Koenig was in it, so I guess it wasnt that bad)
Star Destroyers Mostly because of that opening scene from the first movie.
The Yamato I know it as the Argo though
The original USS Enterprise
TIE Interceptors and B-Wings
There are so many movie and TV shops ships out there.
Even really bad, horrible series and movies had some amazing starship designs.