Beautiful ugly spaceships

[Batman]

Um-there is no definition 3b but yes I think we do. The Viper is sleek. The Turkey and the Starship are not. They're visually attractive airplanes, I'll not deny that (I'm something of a Tomcat fanboy myself), but sleek, no. The Rafale is sleek. The Blackbird was in a seriously oversized way. That massively popular 'looks like a flying manta ray with rudders' version of the alleged F-19 from the 1980s was.

[Terralthra]

Click on "Sleek (adjective)". The default page is the verb.

[Batman]

Thanks. Also reinforces my point, as that's exactly the kind of sleek I'm talking about. Which Wars OT ships aren't. None of them.

[LadyTevar]

Throw in Stargate X304s

OH yes. The 304's have a definite vote. They have a wonderfully military look to them. The Ha'taks look showy bu the Daedalus and her sisters look all buisiness.

The x304s had very nice lines, but the Promethius is still my favorite. Blocky, a little unfinished as she was still a testbed, but real as any Naval vessel on the ocean.

[LadyTevar]

Um-there is no definition 3b but yes I think we do. The Viper is sleek. The Turkey and the Starship are not. They're visually attractive airplanes, I'll not deny that (I'm something of a Tomcat fanboy myself), but sleek, no. The Rafale is sleek. The Blackbird was in a seriously oversized way. That massively popular 'looks like a flying manta ray with rudders' version of the alleged F-19 from the 1980s was.

When you said Viper I was thinking the BSG Colonial fighter You have to admit both old and neo versions of the Colonial Viper were sleek aerospace designs perfect for their roles, although the n-BSG addition of multiple vectored thrusters made their Vipers far more effective.

The Blackbird, however, will always be my standard of WOW when it comes to air or space planes.

[Simon_Jester]

Um-there is no definition 3b but yes I think we do. The Viper is sleek. The Turkey and the Starship are not. They're visually attractive airplanes, I'll not deny that (I'm something of a Tomcat fanboy myself), but sleek, no. The Rafale is sleek. The Blackbird was in a seriously oversized way. That massively popular 'looks like a flying manta ray with rudders' version of the alleged F-19 from the 1980s was.

When you said Viper I was thinking the BSG Colonial fighter

Jeez, Lady, where do you think they picked the nickname up from?

[Batman]

The oBSG Viper was awesome, as was the nBSG MK II (which essentially was the oBSG Viper). The Mk VII stunk. I was however referring to the plane officially called the F-16 Fighting Falcon (which I also suspect you already knew ).

And the Blackbird just owned. It looked awesome (yeah, okay, maybe I'm prejudiced because it's black), it's got a peak speed of around Mach 3.5 and the only reason it can't go any faster is it'll start melting if it tries, and it's got multi-thousand mile range at that speed. Heck that thing would've been an interceptor if the Soviets could ever have been bothered to build a bomber needing it to intercept (and still resulted in Phoenix).

[Skylon]

Babylon 5's Starfury comes to mind. It's really pretty damn ugly, but beautiful in the way it obeys physics.

[PhilosopherOfSorts]

With the possible exception of the A-Wing, name me one OT Wars ship that actually looks sleek.

The Lambda-class shuttles, the Nebulon-B escort frigate, the Slave I (modified Firespray 31-class patrol craft), hell, even the Gallofree medium transports (Hoth escape) and the Mon Cal cruisers from the Battle over Endor, especially the Liberty-type.

The Neb-B isn't sleek at all, its ugly as hell, I think it looks like it has major components missing, like its something the Rebels stole from a boneyard and were unable to fully rebuild.

[Shroom Man 777]

[Connor MacLeod]

Whats that from? reminds me of EA ships from Babylon 5. Which are other ships I kinda like for their design.

Shroom I'm also disappointed you havent commented on the phallic looking starship designs. Usually you're right on top of that from the gate.

[Shroom Man 777]

It's the Sulaco mang.

[Connor MacLeod]

Ah. Havent seen aliens since I was a kid. when I think of Aliens I tend to think of the Nostromo too.

[KhorneFlakes]

The Sulaco is beautiful. She's like an ugly, mean old space gun coming to kick your ass. Too bad she ended up with a fairly suckish armament. I always thought she looked more like a space battleship than anything else.

Also: Gorg Battleship from Nexus: The Jupiter Incident. The game sucked, being unfinished, but the ship designs were kewl.

[Connor MacLeod]

BWS intrepid



TCS Concordia

[Havok]

[Connor MacLeod]

[Shroom Man 777]

I thought they were quite sleek and pretty first time round seeing them actually. It doesn't have the so-ugly-and-mean-it-looks-cool thing going on with the later Space Hinds.



Mangdalores.

[Connor MacLeod]

Imagine the cross thingy in the middle spinning around really fast.

[charlemagne]

The ship from "Starhunter":



This thing was supposed to be a former luxury liner.

[Shroom Man 777]

[Havok]

That's in one of the HMs I had Shroom. Love the aesthetics of that universe.

[Havok]

Always been a favorite of mine. Goes against all the norms.

[Shroom Man 777]

That's in one of the HMs I had Shroom. Love the aesthetics of that universe.

You can't go wrong with a guy that goes,


Dune had to be made. But what kind of spaceships to use? Certainly not the degenerate and cold offspring of present day American automobiles and submarines, the very antithesis of art, usually seen in science fiction films, including 2001. No! I wanted magical entities, vibrating vehicles, like fish that swim and have their being in the mythological deeps of the surrounding ocean. The 'galactic' ships of North American technocracy are a mouse-gray insult to the divine, therefore delirious, chaos of the universe. I wanted jewels, machine-animals, soul-mechanisms. Sublime as snow crystals, myriad-faceted fly eyes, butterfly pinions. Not giant refrigerators, transistorised and riveted hulks; bloated with imperialism, pillage, arrogance and eunuchoid science.

I affirm that next to the soul the most beautiful object in the galaxy is a spaceship! We all dreamed of womb-ships, antechambers for rebirth into other dimensions; we dreamed of whore-ships driven by the semen of our passionate ejaculations. The invincible and castrating rocket carrying our vengeance to the icy heart of a treacherous sun; humming-bird ornithopters which fly us to sip the ancient nectar of the dwarf stars giving us the juice of eternity. Yes! But far more than that: angelic splendour! We dreamed of caterpillar-tracked hotrods so vast that their tails would disappear behind the horizon.

The camouflage of this pirate ship is useless the powerful sensors of her attacker. Valuable spice leaks out, as the ship drifts lifelessly away from the scene of a conflict.

We saw ourselves enmeshed in these huge masses hurtling a dizzy train of planets from a dark world bound for a galaxy drowned in starry milk. We saw ourselves inside minute ether- dwelling sharks crossing seven thousand universes in one Terrene second, leaving a sound- wake freezing into a trail of hallucinatory pearls. Trains to carry away the whole of humanity; machines greater than suns wandering crazed and rusted, whimpering like dogs seeking a master. And great wings sucking the marrow of comets. And thinking wheels hidden behind meteorites, waiting, camouflaged as metallic rocks, for a drop of life to pass through those lost galactic fringes to slake thirsty tanks with psychic secretions. All this and more I wanted for Dune.

[Shroom Man 777]

cont'd

Then, suddenly, in a bookshop in the pages of an English magazine I found splashed III a thousand colours what I had believed impossible to -depict. These spaceships that pleased and moved me were Chris Foss'. I covered the studio walls where I was preparing the film with his works. All masterpieces. I hired various sleuths to track him down. You see, in those heady days I had power! I had a multi-million dollar commitment behind me: a commitment that remained unfulfilled. I had it in my power to call upon the best brains of our generation to collaborate on a project that was to give a messiah to the world. Not a human being, but a film. A film that would be our master. Dune had made me its apostle; but I needed others, and one of these was Chris Foss.

What the hell would this mutant be like? Because he had to be a mutant to draw like that! These were not drawings. They were visions! Would he be some neurotic old man? A maniac drug addict? Would one be able to talk to him? Then Chris Foss turned up, completely English with his tap-dancer's shoes, his tight suit as worn by Casanovas in sophisticated dives, with a tooth of quick-gold (I thought it was a diamond), with a yellow shirt of imperial silk, the blinding tie of an aesthetic hit-man, with a child's smile so penetrating he could turn into a hyena. Yes: Chris Foss was a true angel, a being as real and as unreal as his spaceships. A mediaeval goldsmith of future eons; a being who carried his drawings with the same ultra-maternal care as the Kaitanese Kangarooboos carry the children born of their self-insemination.

Chris arrived very nervous and mistrustful. He was afraid that we would impose a style on him, that we would limit him. But when he realized that he had total freedom he fell into ecstasy. He bought himself a special glass drawing-board which made his paper transparent, so that the lines seemed to float in space. And he plunged into his work for hours, millennia. He would go for long walks in the small hours to a little plaza where lepidopterous creatures with human skin and prehistoric perfumes would entwine their pink tongues with long, transparent hairs around his British member. I also saw him slake his physicoemoto- intellectuometaphysical thirst with alcohols seeping like tears from eyes slashed open in the aggressive air of a hotel corridor.

And thus were born the mimetic spaceships, the leather and dagger-studded machines of the fascist Sardaukers;- the pachydermatous geometry of Emperor Padishah's golden planet; the delicate butterfly plane and so many other incredible machines, which I am sure will one day populate interstellar space. Chris Foss knows that today's technical reality is tomorrow's falsehood. Chris also knows that today's pure art is tomorrow's reality. Man will conquer space mounted on Foss' spaceships, never in NASA's concentration camps of the spirit. I was grateful for the existence of my friend. He brought the colours of the apocalypse to the sad machines of a future without imagination.


Alejandro Jodorowsky on Chris Foss. I think these words, as deranged and delirious as they may be, have some bearing on the aesthetics of the starship. Because I like the ring of these words.