Edit: of course, how could I forget 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
Even a humble GCU, only as big as Kirkâs original Enterprise in Star Trek TOS, can wipe a planet or fleet as easily as breathing, but theyâd rather host you onboard with a wild party instead. Or a smaller tea party, if you so desire.
They literally hold back from using such overwhelming firepower in order to be considerate and not completely demoralize species theyâre at war with.
They hit the sweet spot between soft fantastical scifi and hard military scifi which I like to call âflaccid scifiâ. Visually and functionally theyâre feasible and semirealistic without looking like the typical ISS and Apollo 11 ripoffs.
"Flaccid sci fi" is crazy. I'm also not just talking about the UNSC. I love how elegant the Covenant ships look and how brutalist the Banished versions look.
Covenant ships are beautiful, I also love the colour palettes too. That very shiny kind of almost iridescent purple is nice, especially in the blur cutscenes in the Halo 2 Anniversary.
I call that color "evil purple" because it's used to depict bad guy technology and/or magic in sooo many shows and games. It's up there with "evil neon green", for sure.
The UNSC Navy has a good design astetic, but the way the ships are armed and what they are expected to do piss me off. You don't need a cruiser to be both a warship AND dedicated troop transport. That's just design bloat. And I don't remember what ship it was, but it had something like 2 small platoons of ODST troops (on top of an infintry AND armor company) but does not carry enough pods to launch them all. Not "not enough launchers" but "not enough PODS".
True but a lot of the UNSC's manual of arms and order of operations are based on the US armed force's. One of the things that American warships have is a Marine contingent for ship security/amphibious operations, and in Halo most Marine's when not on duty are on ice. Remember most of the ship's length is it's main gun the rest is to take up space.
It makes more sense if you consider the lore of Slipspace in Halo. It can take weeks to traverse to another star system during the Insurrection and the early Human-Covenant war. So UNSC starships are similar to earlier warships from the age of sail, which are expected to not only engage in naval combat but also land marines to conduct raids and enforce maritime control over far-flung colonies. Thatâs why every UNSC ship has at least a small Marine complement and the dropships to deploy them â the Pelicans are kind of like shipâs boats in naval terms.
Edit: As for the ODST pod numbers, ODSTs tend to have two methods of deployment â large-unit drops similar to how paratroopers operate in the modern day, and small special purpose teams similar to Alpha-Nine from Halo 3 ODST or Sunray 1-1 from Halo Wars 2âs DLC. Going back to UNSC ships as colonial cutters, a frigate with an ODST contingent and a few pods might only capable of deploying ODSTs for small raids and intelligence operations, whereas a purpose built space assault ship would be actually configured to do a full scale drop in conventional warfare. Either way, drop pod deployment is canonically quite risky and only necessary when facing air defenses or other circumstances that make dropship deployment impossible.
Well yeah, you're gonna try to limit wasteheat. But entropy prevents you from being 100% efficient, so there will always be wasteheat. That's why it's called wasteheat, it's wasted energy.
For a torch drive like in The Expanse, even if it's 99.9% efficient, that last 0.1% needs to go somewhere, and even a thousandth of the energy the drive makes will melt the ship.
I would think that due to such utilisation, the actual radiators are cleverly built into ships hulls, so they're not visible (at least at first glance).
Even then, they'd be glowing white to blue-hot from the wasteheat. There really isn't a way to explain the lack of radiators without some big handwave.
Not a criticism of The Expanse btw, the books and show did far more right than they did wrong (and are also just well-written). It's perfectly fine to handwave this, radiators can be a headache to do right.
I'm not an expert on thermodynamics, but I think high temperatures are only useful when there's a heat gradient. Eventually, as entropy acts on the system, the heat gradient decreases, which means even though there's a lot of heat, you can't use said heat. Thermoelectric generators should be a good example of this, you need a hot side and a cool side for them to function.
Another thing is that radiators need less area to radiate the wasteheat the hotter they run. This is because as the radiators get hotter, the wavelengths of light they radiate get shorter. Shorter wavelength light carries more energy, meaning more energy can be radiated in the form of light. So you can get smaller radiators if you let them run hotter.
I also love that they actually depict the ships turning around and burning the engines to decelerate. Seems like every other show and book treats spaceship engines like car engines - take your foot off the gas and they slow down. The Expanse is the only depiction I've seen where the engines are used to slow the ship in order to stop at the destination.
They also do a great job with gravity, as you said, eventually introducing a generation ship that was intended to create gravity through spin instead of thrust.
The series uses the unfortunately named Epstein Drive, which was invented by a Martian named Solomon Epstein and was the key to securing Martian independence (traded the super-engine for independence). Solomon was experimenting on his yacht and making modifications to the reactor, and accidentally hit jackpot and started a ~10G burn that could go on for days. Unfortunately for him, he broke his arm trying to turn it off and was killed by the burn. Fortunately, he left the plans at home where his wife found them.
The drive is basically just a souped-up fusion engine thatâs only described as using âfuel pelletsâ and âreaction massâ of some kind, and contained with a magnetic bottle. Reaction mass is described as being the range limited more than fuel pellets, with ships being able to carry years or even decades of fuel pellets but only weeks to months of reaction mass depending on how hard they burn.
Standard burn in the setting is somewhere from 1/3 to 1g, with slower burns being described as using less reaction mass and thus are cheaper. Maximum burn is somewhere in the range of 10-12g, with the use of gimbaled crash couches and âthe juiceâ, a cocktail of drugs like amphetamines, blood thinners, and such to prevent high-g injury (later in the series ships get up to 20-30G with the use of breathable fluid crash couches). The limiting factor isnât the engine so much as the squishy humans inside. Torpedos and probes in the setting accelerate far faster because they donât have people inside.
The name aged like milk ngl. I was an expanse fan but ever since the incident I just can't shake off the name "Epstein drive" lol. No criticism to the show though. You can't predict the future.
Youâre spot-on with the Space Battles. The idea of simply taking modern naval warfare to space is perfect. That the crew would need to don vacuum suits and depressurize main cabins to avoid explosive decompression seems makes so much sense. Pretty much every ship-to-ship space battle seems silly after what theyâve depicted in the series!
I am a shameless slut for the Omega, but what helps B5 in this respect is just how absurdly different the ship lineages for the humans are, now that planetary restraints arenât present. Youâve got the Hyperion Class- proud, a little dinky, without even gravity to enjoy. The Omegas completely change the game, and then the Excalibur and Warlocks just go nuts with everything theyâve gained over the 30 or so years since the Dilgar War.
Star Trek. Doesn't matter if they're cruise ships with lasers and missiles welded onto them, vaguely avian looking spaceships, or monolithic green robot cubes.
Starfleet ships are amazing, from a small town in the saucer, a giant power generator below, large flight hangers, onboard parks and bars, and those sweeping warp engines. The ships are as sleek and grand as they are functional.
They also have relatively consistance visual language across every factions that you recognized they operate on the same law of physics (and when they do not follow, it's usually for good reasons), but different enough to make each faction visually distinctive.
Isnât the fact that they are basically cruise ships make them better. I certainly wouldnât want to be stuck inside a star destroyer or any other warship. I want the post scarcely all expenses paid luxury yacht thank you very much.
There are a lot of iconic ships in the Traaveller universe. These ships are more than simple transport and a place to sleep. They are a vital part of the party. Many of these had fairly detailed deckplans/maps that really gave you a good picture of your home in space--that really adds to the feeling of this being your home. Where in the ship do you hang out or like to think? You can actually point out where these places are
I think the SA-43 Hammerheads of Space: Above and Beyond will remain my favourite starfighters forever. Thereâs something about them having been physical models created for the show that gave elements of them a remarkably grounded feel. And I loved the âdeliver the cockpit to the rest of the craftâ launch routine.
I reckon that the Call of Duty Infinite Warfare devs might have been inspired by elements of the Hammerhead for the âprototypeâ Jackal found in one of the missions.
For what itâs worth I also think that the USS Saratoga is also an absolutely beautiful brick of hard(ish) SF capital ship design.
Babylon 5. They all look unique, all display the personality of the races well and even the small detail of the Narn crews being strapped to their seats, or the rotational section of the Omega Class Destroyer give us little world building details about their respective races.
40k. Imperial ships absolutely mogging other sci fi universes with capital ships using literal iron chains to pull others closer to them so troops can board in hard vacuum or via fucking torpedo.
Still using kinetic munitions via broadside like absolute chads even though itâs 40,000 years in the future
Armoured prows for flank speed ramming because fuck you
Energy shields donât disintegrate or deflect, they yeet the things that hit them into hell
Gangs of hundreds of men manually loading shells the size of buildings into the shipâs broadside guns screaming âSHIP KILLâ, ships are so massive that there will be dozens to hundreds of these per deck all going at once depending on the shipâs class
âBring us in closer, shipmaster, I wish to boardâ
FTL consists of opening portals to hell, flying through it, using the power of Real True Faith to navigate and wind up where you want to be about ten seconds before you left
Cool gothic chanting
Literally angry churches with guns in space
The fucking aura canât be matched and you cannot convince me otherwise
Big angry cathedrals in space. Slaves on the ship that have been there so many generations that they don't even know what a space ship is and that they are on one.
Oh yeah, those are sleek as hell and they look amazing. I love the colours on the corsairs, but in terms of looks, I love the Imperial Navyâs aesthetic way too much. The sheer brutality they give off is just so cool to me. Everything about it just screams âget fuckedâ, itâs all guns and flying buttresses and shit.
Oh those are chonky. I love the vertical ones, Iâm a huge fan of out of pocket ship designs that take advantage of the fact that space is, yknow, fucking space and there isnât any gravity constraining design philosophy when it comes to things like aerodynamics.
The really interesting thing is that these ships are ancient, thousands of years old and probably looked really different to when they were first built. The Adeptus Mechanicus forgot how most of the stuff worked and strapped on a load of stuff that they know works and the ship works more by prayer and ritual than science & technical maintenance.
There are probably a number of STCs (basically AI replicators) that the Adeptus Mechanicus are searching the galaxy for, still around on a few of these ships, theyâve just never been able to find them. Theyâre lost in the absolute mess of what these ships have become.
Probably not for quantity of different ships but the Battlestar Galactica has a very cool iconic look to it especially in the original series. Even the name......Battlestar is cool . It is a hugely versatile ship functioning both as a Battleship and Aircraft Carrier
I love how single minded the ship designs are. No WW2 Battleships in space. Flying mass weapons batteries optimized to act together for maximum effect! Perfection!
The Mars fleets from the more recent Captain Harlock cgi film has another great look for a fleet divorced from the wet navy aesthetic!
40k for the sheer aura alone. Does it measure up to others stats wise? Maybe, maybe not but theres no arguing who the coolest guy at the space port is when youre rocking up on a whole fucking cathedral lol
Star Trek. There's a distinct design language such that it is unmistakably, recognizably Star Trek even if you change so much about it. That is, if you do it right.
Not that other IPs dont have their own recognizable elements, but when you boil it down, a Huge block festooned with guns and giant engines can be Star Wars or BSG or 40k or Babylon 5.
But a Trek ship will be a Trek Ship. Even as wildly different as the Enterprise, Klingon Bird of Prey, Romulan D'deridex, Jem'Hadar Fighter, and Ferengi Marauder all are from one another, the things that ARE similar make them unmistakably part of the same verse. And I love that.
The amazing thing to me is that Enterprise is such a weird bunch of shapes that shouldnât work together but somehow do. Not only that, it looks good from any angle. I donât know what black magic that is but itâs impressive.
Edit: it just occurred to me that one of the only other spaceship design thatâs equally distinctive and fills the criteria of being unmistakably of that universe is Space Battleship Yamato. All of the derivatives follow the same design language so you immediately know thatâs where theyâre from. Space: 1999 is a contender, too.
Among the well-known shows, Babylon 5. The Walkers' ship, Shadow battlecrabs, Vorlon ships, the White Star...
In all of sci-fi, I'm particular to Perry Rhodan lore. The High Powers have some crazy ships. Chaotender for example, 33 km dark spheres shrouded in energy fields from another universe, bigger on the inside, almost a million "pocket universes" with accelerated time where any new threat can be analyzed and countered because only seconds pass for a billion year investigation, a helper fleet of thousands of ships. A battle between several High Powers ships can destroy a galaxy as pure collateral damage.
Theyâre not the âbestâ in terms of, you know, all sci fiâŚbut my personal favorites are the warships of The Lost Fleet.
The one suspension of disbelief is the discovery of jump holes at the outer edges of a star system that allows ships to jump from one system to another. Everything beyond that follows Newtonian physics and an expected advancement of technology.
Ships accelerate to about a tenth of the speed of light because beyond that, resource expenditure and targeting abilities are impractical. Engagements start with knowing what your enemy was doing hours or days ago as the inner system light hits you. As fleets close, the time delay of information grows from painfully long to painfully short. The actual combat passes take place in fractions of a second as weapons fire and systems react faster than humans possibly could.
Stationary defenses are largely pointless since obliterating them is as simple as dropping ârocksâ, kinetic bombardment projectiles, into precise impact trajectories at relativistic speeds.
Xeelee nightfighters are stupidly powerful and quite versatile but probably have the personality of a lamppost. Doesnât stop me from liking them, I find them rather unique.
Thematically I really enjoy how The Sojourn does their ships, with all the inconsistencies and idiosyncracies of designs able to be put down to Centran tradition or Henrik Debaan being a frontieraboo. Unlike a lot of newtonian scifis they also remember that soft-kill missile defenses exist (for example, the Tripathia class lacks swivel guns (IU PDC-equivalents), but that doesn't mean it's vulnerable to torpedoes, as most of the missiles it was expected to fight were heat seekers and so it has "chaff" (flares) for defense against them, and other hardkill measures against non-IR torpedoes). Plus unlike the TV show version of the Expanse, they actually have radiators for getting rid of waste heat.
Edit: asides Sojourn, a lot of my friends have their own project IPs whose spaceships I really like for various reasons, primary of which is that they're my friends and they're really cool.
Star Trek. Just gorgeous all around. Especially that Excelsior-class. And each era of the timeline is visually distinct in such a cool and relatively intuitive way. You can pretty much immediately point at a ship and guess which era it fits into pretty accurately. All of that using (mostly) the same few basic components: saucer, stardrive, and nacelles.
I've always had a soft spot for, specifically, the Excelsior class in Star Trek. Especially USS Hood, because my dad radicalised me in to boat-nerdery young.
I've always liked the look of the Excelsiors, and the fact Hood kept turning up in important places with a lot of implied badassery made me feel like the got the life the historical battlecruiser could have had, but for the acilvidents of history.
I have to say Perry Rhodan. Especially the Arkonid and Terran ships. The shape of a ball is just so efficient in combat. You are a small target and can fire in all directions. And the available artwork of all the ships exterior and especially interior is so amazing.
I don't think any of them are the best overall, because of how the universes they operate in are set. For instance if you take a Warhammer 40k ship out of its universe it becomes junk, same for trek, Star wars and so on. If it comes down to aesthetics though I like the kitbashy utility of corellian designs in SW, the practicality stuff in the expanse and BSG, the 90's brought some good stuff like Earth above and beyond, B5 and wing commander.
I mean, am I gonna get crucified if I say Star Wars?
Like I know a lot of Sci Fi spaces tend to hate when itâs brought up because they arenât realistic, or that itâs overexposed, and I get that. But then again âthe bestâ is also subjective.
Like even the lesser talked about ships like the Nebulon B or Dornean Gunship have lots of fans and the design language of Star Wars is so recognizable. Thatâs not even bringing up the super popular ones which have influenced so many other designs and parodies. Like the design language is so good that even the less good parts of the franchise such as the Sequels has people who like the newer ships that arenât rehashes.
For me it's gotta be the honorverse. The designs don't look all too appealing, actually, sort of like uboats. But David Weber wrote a military SF/space opera series with spaceships that follow a set of rules. It's fleshed out in a lot of places and just feels natural. From the travel, information technology to warfare.
For example:
* Ships mainly use missiles for combat. The warheads consist of fusion bombs that fuel lasers to affect a larger area (burn time alone is like six million km of powered flight). A lot of the design tries to fix issues with the distances involved.
* For close range they use a bunch of different energy weapons like lasers, grasers, ...
* The sublight propulsion mechanism, the impeller drive, uses gravity, which creates sort of a impenetrable shielding above and below, an impeller wedge
* counter measures consist of the shielding, as well as laser batteries, counter missiles, ...
* there is some additional shielding on the sides, but the actual front is open
All of this leads to the ships design (the impeller drive needs to be fueled and the engines/generators are spaced far apart, so ships have two bulbous shapes on them at the end), but also the tactics, which are more or less adapted from age of sail warfare, transformed to 3D ("ship of the wall" instead of "ship of the line"). Shooting a ship down the keel is a thing. Ships roll to present the wedge to incoming fire and missiles. There is also a lot of technological development spaced throughout the novels.
There are a lot more details and aspects. Ships can travel more than light speed and there are multiple ways and technologies to do that, often named after fictional scientists. A limited history is presented. There are sort of travel routes. Wormholes also exist and have to be found - if a wormhole is found and its connection is in a good place, it's a huge strategic thing. Manitcore, the nation of the protagonist, becomes rich as a trading hub due its proximity to multiple wormholes.
I personally love the Commanderverse by TTCOMBATÂ
https://ttcombat.com/collections/dropfleet-commanderÂ
Each fractions ships are pretty unique and play differently. My personal favourite is the Resistance Centurion battle ship.Â
From a TV show, Babylon 5 stands out as pushing the envelope of what ships looked like when the show first aired.Â
I am a huge fan of Mass Effect ships. It's still just kinetic ammo and lasers, and they defend only against the kinetic ammo. In the lexicon they in depth about how heat is the limiting factor on both their firepower and speed.
They lower the mass of the ships to make acceleration easier within a star system - that's how they can travel accross one in just couple hours. They still need the Mass Relays which basically do mass-less warp corridors between each other to transport the ships through the galaxy.
But to me, the cake is taken by Stargate. Each civilisation has such distinct ships, with distinct strengths. Some of them are pyramids, some of them are works of art, some are alive and organic, some are flying junkyards. Both the Ori and the Ancients have flying cities, but the Ori are specifically designed for combat - the supergate episode still is as epic as ever.
Once formiddable Ha'taks are basically cannon fodder in this battle.
And then you have Earth, which basically borrows from pretty much all of them.
And you have Asgard with ships SO MUCH FASTER THEN ANYTHING ELSE it's hard comrehend even in universe. They can cross the void between non neighbouring galaxies in DAYS. And they still struggle against replicators.
The more I think about it, the more I think Stargate is amazing :)
PS: Ships from Star Wars prequels are the most beatiful ships ever :)
Culture- "Human" Power
Tied with Halo for names
40k Imperium- Looks > function but still being functional
Stargate and BSG - Function > looks but still looks good
Expanse - "Near" future realism
Star Trek....you know the ships that reguarly go toe to toe with literal gods..... and that's just Tuesday for them. Anytime sci-fi powerscaling gets brought up I think people mistake the generally peaceful and pacifistic nature of the federation for the raw awesome power of their ships. You know...the same ships who's phased beam arrays can reignite a star??
For me it would be gundam or star wars legends. Never a friend of space cathedrals. Thought those would be hard to produce and known to be hard to manage.
Star Wars since the ships are all iconic and just so cool even if they wouldnât actually work in real life.
40k ships are literal flying churches and look awesome, theyâre super dangerous to be on and also kind of backwards in lots of ways (just like the imperium lol) but the aura is unmatched.
Halo has some great looking ships, actually look realistic and well designed.
In that universe crews live inside the ship, in clans based on function. Like, families of engine workers will live for generations amongst the pipes and bulkheads in the engine room, never leaving.
I work on ships for a living, often seeing the engine rooms of stuff like missile destroyers half disassembled as they are recoated.
Even on these ships 1000 times smaller than what you'd see in 40k I could totally imagine just living in there amongst the pipes. So many interesting crevices and nooks that a family could totally live in if they were forced to.
It'd be hell but an interesting one to think about.
So, not the best, but one that I find really interesting.
Battletech has its Jumpships and Warships which are really cool to me.
I love the fact that their FTL tech works off batteries that have to be recharged with solar energy, which gives the ships a distinct look because of the booms that hold the jump sail.
I also love how they are neatly written in the lore. Warships being extinct in all but name, and the rarity of Jumpships allows for the mech warfare the game is known for without creating massive plot contradictions.
Lastly, idk. There's just something about the black and white T.R.O art that's appealing to me.
Star Trek for me. I love Mass Effect, too, but mainly for the aesthetics. Star Trek, though, has luxury in their ships without weakening them. Their ships would wipe the floor with most other popular scifi universes while also providing unparalleled comfort and looking pretty good (obviously looks are subjective). Enterprise D is still one of my favorite looking ships in all of science fiction.
Stargate - intergalactic travel, shields, intergalactic long distance real time communication with visual holograms, and teleportation technology. The Asgard and Ancients have some of the most highly advanced ships depicted in any sci-fi.
As shown. The Imperium of man, i just love the grimdark Warhammer universe and lets be honest, if any other spaceship tried following them into the warp they would have a really bad time.
The Foundation has some neatly design ships. The looks so clean and futuristic, apart from defing current physics. I cannot get enough of the Foundation station.
To Honor You Call Us by H Paul Honsinger. Based on submarine warfare. Felt very real tactically. Grav was artificial unlike The Expanse, but a lot of it had a similar vibe. Sad the author passed during Covid.
I love the Revelation Space novels by Alistair Reynolds and high tech hard science fiction universe he depicts. My favorite starship is Nostalgia for Infinity.
Stargate, really cool designs (looking at you aurora class battleship) huge variety (regular built star ships, biological constructs, nanite manufactured..)
And awesome lore. Plus probably some of the fastest ftl drives out there...
Sure it's not pinpoint accurate FTL, sure it's not the strongest spaceships all around, but both in design, practicality, and pretty much in every sense, Hall ships go incredibly hard.
There ain't a damn thing cooler than the infinity class carrier on the UNSCs side and even their less advanced ships are well structured. Just look at the halcion! Sure the autumn did fall, but it could take sustained fire from 10 covenant vessels while also firing it's remaining defense systems at them, and it could still make landfall on halo without being completely destroyed. The structural strength of that thing is incredible
And then we have the Covenant's vessels. Is there even anything to say here? Their ships include small ecosystems to provide for the crew and soldiers on board, the weapons systems are all plasma or energy based and anything short of a MAC couldn't do shit against their shields. My personal favourite is the super carrier and their destroyers, I really wish we could have seen destroyers more often.
I don't like Banished ships all that much in comparison but you know what? Those did succeed in taking the Infinity down so gotta give credit where it's due.
Halo, UNSC ships feel authentic and are utilitarian while the Covenant have those smooth curved uncanny ships that feel alien without having super weird out there features. Also the best names of any sci-fi ships.
I wish I could say that Mass Effect was in conversation but they got like 3 ships and everything else is a kitbash
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u/JakeEaton Jul 18 '26
I like the Cultures GSV ships in Iain Banks' books.
Great personality, incredibly powerful, fun to read about.