The Apollo Lunar Lander. The only real space ship we ever built. (I guess we built another one for the next trip now, though, so I'll go with "ever flown")
People can say it's ugly all they want, but, as an engineer, it's exquisitely designed for its purpose. That's true beauty to me.
Ha! I literally never thought of that until I read your comment.
I always hoped in the end that it would grow some giant wings but I moved out to work in another city and didn't have cable so I never saw the end of the show.
I guess I could download it and find out.
Being capable of both time and space travel honestly makes it less implausible than a ship that just goes FTL. The whole "is infinite" thing is pretty speculative even if it's cool, though.
Mistake Not My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Mere Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans Of Wrath
Not sure in what context you're asking this question, but my answer is the International Space Station. I love how it's possible to see it at random sometimes at night, and the way it crosses the sky just looks different compared to a regular airplane flying at night.
Pedantic question! Does the ISS count as a spaceship? I feel like something that travels in an orbit is kind of the equivalent of something stationary on a planet… so it feels like more of a, uh, station, than a ship to me. It’s a good answer, though!
Feels like a tomato fruit situation. It's technically a ship, but we know it as a station?
A marine equivalent might be a floating structure with its own propulsion system. Technically a boat, but it doesn't move around that often and it let's other boats dock/undock from it.
The Kestrel Cruiser from FTL. Even though it's not even the coolest ship in the game, The Kestrel is still the most nostalgic for me.
It brings me back to when I first played FTL a decade ago. I was a kid back then and loved the game so much, I even built and painted a cardboard Kestrel model.
When it comes to FTL, The Lanius Cruiser is my favorite, but Kestrel was fun to play too. I remember going back to it several times, after unlocking new ships.
Enterprise refit. Loved the original Enterprise and the Enterprise D when TNG came out, but there was something magical about seeing the refit on the big screen.
GW: Visually, which is your favorite episode of Atlantis so far?
MB: “The Eye.” The Rainmaker team created their own CG software to create the stormy water for the ocean. The level of detail and control has never been seen in TV effects before. Dan and Jose at Rainmaker pulled out all the stops and created mind-blowing shots. I think we went about 3.5 times over budget on that one — but you can’t get away with crap. You guys can spot that a mile away, and nothing kills a show quicker than cheap looking effects.
The Prometheus may have been ugly, but it was my favorite because it was Earth's first. It was kinda janky and totally experimental, but it was absolutely a necessary step in our advancement of science enabling better and cooler ships like Daedalus. It was usually outgunned and outsized by everything it went up against, but still managed to leave a mark. It saved the day in the battle of Antarctica enabling the discovery of Atlantis.
Do I think it was a better ship? Of course not, it was totally inferior (and ugly). But it made for a better story. For a good portion of the show it was all we had and it was barely enough, but it became more of a character than a tool. The moment the Prometheus was blasted in half was just as serious as any character death (and not just because of Pendergast). It was a huge blow to us and let the viewers know the Ori were a real threat.
It did, for very short periods of time. And from that, we got the epic scene where they opened a window through a ship's shield for a Death Star run shot at Anubis.
Well the 303 worked!
Sure, with a salvage hyperdrive from an Al'kesh. At least until that broke down and they had to upend an entire planet's beliefs to get home. The original hyperdrive had the same problem as the one from the 302. And the working one came from the Asgard.
Idk. I just couldn't get over the captain doing his best James Carrey Kirk impression.
Earth: Give us things!
Asgard: lol no
Earth: Give us things!
Asgard: Give back the things you stole!
Earth: sudo We saved your skinny butts from the Replicators! Give us thing!
The Hail Mary currently. Just such a cool ship from a fun book. To think about what would go into building it and what that means to humanity is humbling.
Other notables:
Enterprise E from First Contact because it looks cool.
Cygnus from The Black Hole
Sulaco from Aliens
Trimaxion Drone Ship from Flight of the Navigator
The Abominator-class Offensive Unit Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints (my usual favourite lol)
While I know it's easy to hate on everything MCU these days, I do still absolutely love the Milano from Guardians of the Galaxy 1 and 2. The design doesn't feel practical at all, but it's still a really fun to look at and agile ship, which is something a lot of sci fi doesn't really depict very well.
The one from The Fountain was kinda similar. It was unique enough to stick with me over the years anyway.
I don't know if Ringworld really counts as a ship but I loved that too. The Out Of Band 2 from A Fire Upon The Deep seemed like it would be pretty baddass. Or the alien ship from Rendezvous with Rama.
“I’ll take the Lewis and Clark to a safe distance, and then I will launch TAC missiles at the Event Horizon until I'm satisfied she's vaporized. Fuck this ship!”
There's a lot of ships I like in sci-fi, but the one that comes to mind at the moment is the garfish-class cruiser in robotech
Or if we're talking about real spacecraft here, I like the soyuz (and really the whole r-7 derived rocket family to be honest), as I like the look of it's side boosters and the four engine bells on each engine
It's a fast ship that can flown solo, but also comfortably carry six people with their own quarters. It's fast, can cloak itself and defend itself from anything it can't outrun or hide from.
I don't want a big starship that needs a big crew to fly. But, I don't want a small ship that can't carry guests.
Rebel Blockade Runner, mostly because it's the first ship you really see in A New Hope and my first interaction with the Star Wars franchise as a kid in the early 90s.
That's how I think of it too, but apparently it's a CR-90 Corellian Corvette. I imagine that info was created later and didn't exist for the first movie.
The wedge ships belonging to the Chitzas in the books from the "quantum series" by Douglas Phillips. they were bad ass ships ran by badass little porcupine dudes. They were able to travel beyond the visible universe in hours. The books were so much fun.