What Starship would scare the crap outa a populace the most?

[PREDATOR490]

Can an SSD actually pull an ID4 style hover off ?

The only instance of a SSD being that close was the Lusankya and that required a special boost to take off. Can a 19km SSD enter Earth's atmosphere and maintain a hovering position WITHOUT falling to the ground or roasting / flattening entire cities with it's engines / repulsor fields ?

That said, if the SSD can do it then I would go for that over a Shadow Crab. The sheer size and magnitude of a 19km warship covered in weapons sitting above the White House would be far more panic inducing than a much smaller Shadow. I imagine it would be capable of intimidation if the weapon batteries can be seen swiveling towards targets from the ground as well. Squeeze off a few warning shots to glass the typical monuments and you will have made the point rather clear.

[Kodiak]

The Vorlon "World Destroyers" seemed pretty terrifying, especially when they DID block out the sun. Also, that big black cigar from ST IV (the one with the whales?) was pretty terrifying.

[Anguirus]

I don't care what the ship looks like, if it flies over to the Moon and burns "FUCK YOU HUMANITY" into the near side, people will freak out.

(Non-English speakers will have to resort to local news or Google to get the message, of course)

[Ohma]

I dunno' about an SSD though, at least compared to say, an ID4 ship. An SSD looks like a really crazy ass huge ship, but all the hangars, openings and lights kind of soften its look a bit; still giant flying death machine, but probably controlled by beings who you could theoretically negotiate with. An ID4 ship looks like a big, dark, disk; the only time you'd really get to see inside -from below- would be if it were about to blow up your city.

[Shroom Man 777]

Those Vogon ships were also great at scaring the piss out of people, to the point where they placed bags over their heads and waited to die. So, yeah. They've been tried and tested and proven to work very effectively.

[Lord MJ]

The Borg Cube terrified me when I was a kid.

[Junghalli]

What about V'Ger? That impenetrable glowing AU-wide cloud would certainly be intimidating from a helpless inhabited world watching it get closer and closer, until it completely envelopes them and fills the night sky. Especially if they were technologically sophisticated enough to realize just how ridiculously huge it was.

It's not exactly a ship, but that giant space amoeba from Star Trek would be pretty freaky too. First the sky turns absolutely black, and then you've got this planet-sized thing which looks like a piece of spoiled pizza hanging in your sky.

[Samuel]

I don't care what the ship looks like, if it flies over to the Moon and burns "FUCK YOU HUMANITY" into the near side, people will freak out.

(Non-English speakers will have to resort to local news or Google to get the message, of course)

Do skull and crossbones- more international.

What about V'Ger? That impenetrable glowing AU-wide cloud would certainly be intimidating from a helpless inhabited world watching it get closer and closer, until it completely envelopes them and fills the night sky. Especially if they were technologically sophisticated enough to realize just how ridiculously huge it was.

It's not exactly a ship, but that giant space amoeba from Star Trek would be pretty freaky too. First the sky turns absolutely black, and then you've got this planet-sized thing which looks like a piece of spoiled pizza hanging in your sky.

If you want sheer size... what is the biggest space ship? V'Ger seems the biggest, but I think there is anime that beats it out somewhere.

[NecronLord]

That said, if the SSD can do it then I would go for that over a Shadow Crab. The sheer size and magnitude of a 19km warship covered in weapons sitting above the White House would be far more panic inducing than a much smaller Shadow. I imagine it would be capable of intimidation if the weapon batteries can be seen swiveling towards targets from the ground as well. Squeeze off a few warning shots to glass the typical monuments and you will have made the point rather clear.

How about a Shadow Death Cloud? Darkness, with just the suggestion of a framework visible inside it. And thousands upon thousands of mile long missiles, pointed at you.

[Ford Prefect]

Bodolza's flagship from the film Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Do You Remember Love. Apart from it being stupidly enormous, it looks like it has a gigantic eye. There's a great shot of it in the film coming up over the horizon like a moon sized eyeball, staring at everyone on the planet with the intent to kill.

[SAMAS]

Especially when you realize that said eye packs a Wave Motion Gun.

[Bilbo]

That said, if the SSD can do it then I would go for that over a Shadow Crab. The sheer size and magnitude of a 19km warship covered in weapons sitting above the White House would be far more panic inducing than a much smaller Shadow. I imagine it would be capable of intimidation if the weapon batteries can be seen swiveling towards targets from the ground as well. Squeeze off a few warning shots to glass the typical monuments and you will have made the point rather clear.

How about a Shadow Death Cloud? Darkness, with just the suggestion of a framework visible inside it. And thousands upon thousands of mile long missiles, pointed at you.

While the cloud would be scary as hell that would be all we knew about it. In Bab5 the ships of that time could not penetrate the cloud with sensors till they moved into the cloud. So odds are we would have no idea other than this planet enveloping cloud, which would be scary as hell.

Once it started to fire. Well hell at that point its not scare time its dead time.

[Lord of the Abyss]

For sheer visceral scariness, I have to agree about Shadow vessels.

A different kind of scary would be the mobile version of Earth from With Friends Like These. Picture it; you look up in the sky or at the monitor and see a planet coming after you. Not a metal sphere that you can't really get any sense of scale of, but a planet that looks like a planet.

The Ringworld has a starship mode, using it's sun as a fusion drive. Having something that huge pass by would be damned intimidating; another sun, and the Ring it so huge that even quite a ways away it would cover a good chunk of the sky. For that matter, I don't know if it could do so and maintain stability, but it would be even more impressive if it flew through the Solar System so that Earth passed through the Ring, between it and it's star. You'd be able to look up and see it arching across the sky, horizon to horizon.

[Phantasee]

I didn't think the Ringworld actually took its sun with it. It used it to power up it's QII Hyperdrive, but then it went off into hyperspace alone, looking for another star.

[Lord of the Abyss]

I didn't think the Ringworld actually took its sun with it. It used it to power up it's QII Hyperdrive, but then it went off into hyperspace alone, looking for another star.

I don't recall offhand if it took it's sun or intended to make a new "sun" using the Bussard ramjet principle ( what it uses for an STL drive ); but if one was travelling on by it would have a sun or a fair imitation. It would have to, for life support if nothing else.

[Neko_Oni]

I think things like ID4 destroyers, Star Destroyers and similar sized vessels that can enter the atmosphere are best for terrifying the populace. They strike the right mix of fucking huge yet not so fucking huge that we lose all sense of scale. Plus they can come in nice and low, hovering silently for maximum terror effect.

Things like inhibitor swarms disassembling a planet, death stars/planetoids in orbit, they would cause more of a intellectual terror. Hell in the Redemption Space books the populace of one of the planets is not terrified at all. They just kind of mentally block out the smear in the sky where their local gas giant used to be.

[Starglider]

If you want sheer size... what is the biggest space ship? V'Ger seems the biggest, but I think there is anime that beats it out somewhere.

V'ger scales to somewhat smaller than the first death star (based on the shots of Enterprise flying over it). ~100km is still big but it isn't a particularly threatening shape and it lacks the ability to get close and personal the way the ID4 ships do.

[Junghalli]

V'ger scales to somewhat smaller than the first death star (based on the shots of Enterprise flying over it). ~100km is still big but it isn't a particularly threatening shape and it lacks the ability to get close and personal the way the ID4 ships do.

I think he might have been thinking of the big glowy cloud around it - wasn't that supposed to be a couple of AU wide?

[Starglider]

I think he might have been thinking of the big glowy cloud around it - wasn't that supposed to be a couple of AU wide?

Perhaps, but to the average person that's roughly as scary as the aurora borealis, i.e. slightly spooky at best. Also it's not clear if the ship can actually maintain that inside a solar system anyway, as it had clearly dissipated by the time it got near earth.

[Junghalli]

Perhaps, but to the average person that's roughly as scary as the aurora borealis, i.e. slightly spooky at best.

Personally if that thing was coming at us I'd find it more than "slightly" spooky. Consider:

1) It's ridiculously huge. You can see this every time the moon passes in front of it. Especially when it was really close, so it totally filled the night sky, but you could still see the moon in front of it.

2) You don't know what's inside of it. Any space probes you try to send in get destroyed by the glowy plasma death balls.

I'd think that combination would be rather scary. I'd find it quite a bit freakier than a simple huge ship. At least with a huge ship you sort of have some idea what you're dealing. With the V'Ger cloud there could be anything in there; it's a complete unknown, except that whatever it is it doesn't want you to be able to get a look at it.

[Oskuro]

No contest: The Beast Planet from Shadow Raiders.

[Crossroads Inc.]

No contest: The Beast Planet from Shadow Raiders.

I think it gets an award for the ONLY Evil Ship of DOOM™ NOT to be defeated by the goodguys.

[PREDATOR490]

The added bonus of having a ship directly overhead is the 'looming' presence it generates. Blotting out the sky so it is always night, the thrum of the engines keeping everyone up at night and knowing they are under a big fucking spaceship. Being able to see the actual guns like on an SSD tracking targets on the ground would be even more terrifying.

I dont think your going to get a bunch of idiots dancing on a rooftop with 'Welcome to Earth' billboards once they see large turbolaser batteries swiveling at them. Although with that in mind, I am also reminded of ID4's newscasters telling people not to shoot at the ship because it might cause an 'interstellar war' and I imagine the chances of some nutcase popping off weapons at a looming ship to be increasingly likely.
Some guy decides to go Rambo and shoot at the ship = weapon battery just swivels at him in contempt and turns the area into a massive crater.

I dont see that being as effective with ships in orbit. The various militaries are going to be trying to calm the panic and thus deny as much information getting to the public about swarms of missiles hanging overhead in shrouded clouds. Even when that information does get out, you will have all kinds of stupid people claiming it is a hoax, simply not being able to comprehend the idea or just ignoring it. Thus ship hanging overhead cannot be ignored and it really presses home the idea of 'we are your Gods now and Big Brother is watching'

Placing the ship(s) over known monuments / capital buildings like ID4 did makes for a solid point of intimidation, especially since the respective leaders are going to be issuing statements about 'not panicing' while you can possible see / hear the ship right above them. Watching those leaders scurry out of the area or into protected bunkers is going to cause even more panic / unrest when people see their leaders racing for the hills.
I would lean towards the White House, if only because it means I can pump my fist when it gets blown up before I die... *cough*
I mean, having a ship looming over the most powerful nation's capital building is wonderfully intimidating especially when that country happens to have lots of people carrying guns that can EXACTLY do the Rambo thing and get the planet turned to glass, oh I meant 'start an Interstellar War'

[Junghalli]

I dont see that being as effective with ships in orbit. The various militaries are going to be trying to calm the panic and thus deny as much information getting to the public about swarms of missiles hanging overhead in shrouded clouds. Even when that information does get out, you will have all kinds of stupid people claiming it is a hoax, simply not being able to comprehend the idea or just ignoring it.

Unless the orbiting ship is so huge it's clearly visible with the naked eye from the surface, like the Death Star.

[His Divine Shadow]

In this, we choose from Sci-Fi ships that are not simply lethal, but simply by looking upon them would make anyone immediately piss their pants and begin to pray to whatever god they have. Now we aren't just going for lethality, if we were we'd jump straight to ships like the DeathStar and those Culture ships everyone keeps talking about.

For this we want to find those special ships that simply scream "FEAR ME!"

Dahak when he sheds his rocky shell.