Endearingly ugly ships like Serenity are nice, and I'm all for talking about them, but... What are some ship designs that just look good? Things that look like someone put in the effort to think about form and function and have them complement each other in a beautiful way?
It's not a spaceship, but as an example of what I mean, let's take the F-104 Starfighter:
This one looks like it's going just over Mach 1 when it's standing still. Some versions are even shiny- if no one paints them. But the sleek, gleaming appearance is a perfectly natural product of the logic of the design: it's a Mach 2 interceptor designed to climb to high altitudes in a hurry, so it's streamlined with big engines and no surplus weight to slow it down. And yet it manages to look good, even though the form followed the function every step of the way.
If you don't agree, fine, it's a matter of opinion. But what aesthetics do you just think work for spaceships? Function over form, fine, but it's not like you can't get both at the same time in the imagination of an artist.
What looks good? Golden Age rocketships that land on their tailfins? Big assemblies of habitat rings? Surreal multicolored stuff out of the work of Chris Foss? Alien ships that look like a complicated, graceful latticework? Something I haven't thought of?
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- PeZook
