What's your favorite off the beaten path spaceship?
The Event Horizon is great. So are the others that immediately come to mind. What's your favorite forgotten/lesser known ship. Here's the Cygnus from The Black Hole.
I've always loved the fighters (Starfury?) from Babylon 5:
I used to spend a lot of time modelling them in 3D software, just because! I love the aesthetic, how they have a hint of modern military (the cockpit is Apache helicopter-like), the way they're held then launched almost like missiles, and how agile their design inherently is. Plus, the design obviously has some nods to the ship in The Last Starfighter and of course the X-Wing from Star Wars - both of which are cool ships.
In the game Elite Dangerous, there's a ship called a Vulture that has similar elements (cockpit, size-ish, agility) and in VR is the closest I've come to feeling like I'm flying one!
The GunStar from The Last Starfighter blew me away as a kid. Pretty good CG for the era as well, but the design felt sleek and believable.
I've always loved the Vipers from BattleStar Galactica as well as the Veritech from Macross (well... robotech since that's what it was called here when I was a kid lol) but I feel like those are both pretty mainstream now?
The morphing ship from Flight of the Navigator was pretty cool. In that same era, the bubble ship from Explorers was pretty awesome concept.
Do personal vehicles count? I always wanted to have a Light Cycle from tron. I loved that they just turned it on and their disk became the steering and it just formed around them. Plus it was cool af. The Cylcone from Macross / Robotech was pretty cool in that same vein.
I'm honestly a little bit flabbergasted to learn that CG was in use on the Last Starfighter (1984). I was about to get pedantic, but as I usually do when that's my instinct - I googled it. I would never have guessed.
Maybe I'll see if my husband wants to watch it later. He hates early CGI
There was definitely some terrible weird looking CG from back in the day... but some of the examples were really well done and still hold up ok. There are some moments in Last Starfighter where you're like "ouch... flat shaded cg" but some other moments where it looks great. I think a chunk of the ship was also practical, but there were some detailed CG in it.
When movies used it for something that wasn't meant to look realistic, back before it was feasible, it still holds up ok. For a sci-fi spaceship or things like the vehicles in TRON, you don't get that weird uncanny valley feel as much IMO.
I'm gonna say the Nostalgia for Infinity from Alastair Reynolds's Revelation Space series. It's the size of a small city and was built centuries before the start of the series to carry 100k passengers, but now it's completely decrepit, crewed by 6 people, and the majority of the ship hasn't been explored by anyone in decades.
Moya from Farscape. She's a biological ship, and the writers did an amazing job giving her a personality and exploring her lifecycle, including having children. She becomes one of the main characters as the series evolves.
Without question it’s Serenity from Firefly. I know Firefly is relatively well known on the internet, but in general I’d say it’s off the beaten path. That ship is my friend.
I'm a black templar player so I feel obligated to say the Eternal Crusader. It's a 10,000 year old ~20km long Gloriana class battleship that serves as the HQ for the black templar's never-ending crusade to purge the galaxy of xenos and heretics. I love all the ships in 40k, they're all just so over the top lol.