Cool Starship: Difference between revisions

[[File:berkey_450-resized.jpg|link=Sector General|frame| Try as you might, your ships will never be as cool as John Berkey's.]]

To be even cooler, the cool starship may also be a [[Face Ship]] or come with [[Escape Pod|escape pods]], [[Frickin' Laser Beams|lasers]], [[Faster-Than-Light Travel|faster than light drive]]<ref>If it really is a ''star'' ship, i.e. designed to cross interstellar distances, then it had better have a faster-than-light drive if you don't want to wait several thousand years to get where you're going</ref>, and [[Teleporters and Transporters|transporters]]. If enemies try to board it, you may need to activate the [[Self-Destruct Mechanism|self destruct mechanism]].

** ''[[Super Dimension Fortress Macross]]'' -- Originally intended as a parody of ''Mobile Suit Gundam,'' and the ''Macross's'' is topologically similar to the ''White Base.''

** ''[[Martian Successor Nadesico]]'' -- Another topological homage to the ''White Base'', as well as a play on Uchuu Senkan Yamato. See [[Yamato Nadeshiko]] for more info.

* ''[[UFO Robo Grendizer]]'': The titular [[Humongous Mecha]] was both a giant robot and a starship. Grendizer could [[Combining Mecha|combining]] with a flying device to form a [[Cool Starship]] allow [[Faster-Than-Light Travel]] between planets. Vegans' spaceships also count.

* The Bay Tower Base, and later the Orbit Base from ''[[GaoGaiGar|Yuusha-Oh GaoGaiGar]]'' are multiple [[Cool Ship|Cool Ships]] connected to a hub, which can deploy and serve various purposes. Three of them transform into the handle of a [[Drop the Hammer|giant hammer]] in the OVA.

** Also the J-Ark, a [[Cool Starship]] whose bridge detaches from the ship and turns into a [[Humongous Mecha|Cool Robot]] that can then recombine with the rest of the Ark to form the even ''[[Up to Eleven|Cooler]]'' Robot King J-Der. It's also piloted by Soldato-J, one of the biggest [[Badass|Badasses]] in the series, for even ''more'' cool points.

* The Ship of ''Starlord'', simply called "Ship", a sleek, highly maneuverable starship-- which is actually a sentient shapeshifting [[Energy Being]] who is in love with her pilot.

* Centauri's car in ''[[The Last Starfighter]]'' took the angular wedge design of the DeLorean, turned it [[Up to Eleven]], then made it a ''[[Transforming Mecha|transforming]]'' [[Flying Car]] and [[Cool Starship]].

* The ''Messiah'' from [[Deep Impact]]. An ambitious [[Orion Drive]]-powered spacecraft, theoretically capable of interstellar travel (but put to emergency use as a comet-buster). Oddly, the coolest thing about it -- how the Orion drive actually ''works'' (it throws nuclear bombs out the back of the space ship and rides the blast waves) -- was never mentioned in the film.

* In the classic ''[[Skylark Series|Skylark]]'' series by [[E. E. "Doc" Smith]], Doctor Richard Seaton and friends trade up through a series of increasingly powerful spacecraft. He discovers a substance that catalyzes the conversion of copper to energy and linear momentum, then makes contact with a succession of alien races and gains galaxy-turning scientific insights. The original ''Skylark'' is a forty-foot steel-hulled sphere, refitted with the alien metal [http://www.rogermwilcox.com/arenak.html "arenak"] into ''Skylark II'', then replaced with the mile-long blimp-shape of ''Skylark III'' using an even stronger metal, "inoson." He finally constructs the gargantuan ''Skylark of Valeron'' (his wife being tired of numbers) out of thin air and raw computation (having discovered the secrets of Sixth Order Forces and time manipulation), a ''thousand-mile-wide'' sphere. Its size wasn't ego -- he simply needed that much room for mechanisms to lock onto Earth after being thrown to the far side of the universe.

* Subversion? The cool ships in the "[[The Ship Who]]..." series tend to be middle of the road, completely average ships. Not too junky, not too edge of the tech. Mainly because it's too expensive. And the ships can't afford it (yeah, the ships are alive -- each ship is controlled by a "brain", a human born with incapacitating disabilities raised as a "shellperson" and trained to control ships, space stations, or cities, who are cybernetically connected to the ship/station/city systems). Oddly, few have weapons.

** Even the ''Lusankya'''s death was incredibly epic - the ship was damaged during a long siege, and so it was slowly stripped of weapons, and a reinforced spar full of explosives constructed along its 8km central spine. In the final battle of ''[[New Jedi Order|Rebel Dream]]'', it ''rammed an enemy [[That's No Moon|worldship]]'' and exploded, wiping out the attackers' command cadre and allowing the garrison to evacuate from what was ''supposed'' to be a suicide mission.

* The page image is a [[Cool Starship]] from ''A Maze of Stars''

* Scott Westerfeld's '[[Succession|The Risen Empire]]' and 'The Killing of Worlds' are full of [[Cool Spaceship|Cool Spaceships]]. [http://s3.amazonaws.com/adaptiveblue_img/books/killing_of_worlds_book_two_of_succession/scott_westerfeld Pictured here] are the Rix battlecruzer (top) and the Lynx (bottom).

* In Arthur C. Clarke's ''[[The Songs of Distant Earth]]'', the ''Magellan'' is powered by zero-point energy. It can keep accelerating 'til it's travelling just a hair shy of the speed of light. To protect itself from the interstellar medium -- which at 0.999''c'' is more like a constant shower of cosmic rays -- the front of the starship is one huge long chunk of ice, which slowly wears down over the course of a voyage and has to be replaced.

* The ''Troy'' class Battle Globes from the ''[[Troy Rising]]'' series. A nickel-iron asteroid, hollowed and inflated to 9km in diameter, with walls 1.5km thick, acting as [[The Battlestar|home-port and carrier]] to ''Constitution'' class cruisers, and hundreds of assault shuttles. Plus an armament of tens of thousands of missiles, and laser emitters capable of throwing a petawatt or so (and more to come). Two-point-two ''trillion'' tons of death. {{spoiler|And they fitted ''Troy'' with an [[Orion Drive]] to make it mobile}}. So far, they've built two of them, with a third on the way...

** The über awesome city ships that the Alliance have, a collection of skyscrapers floating through space, [[Rule of Cool|just because you can]]. They were designed to be a sort of counterpoint to ''[[Star Wars]]'' Star Destroyers, tall as opposed to long, and made to resemble office buildings to reflect the bureaucratic nature of the Alliance. <ref>And because space is a virtual vacuum and [[Fridge Brilliance|you don't need to streamline ships in space.]]</ref>

** Many of Starfleet's ships have a Fridge Coolness factor to them: before the ''Defiant'', Starfleet weren't really into actual warships<ref>That would be ''why'' the Defiant isn't officially classified as a warship</ref>, and so their ships had other primary purposes (exploration, mostly). Didn't keep them from going up against ''dedicated'' warships and winning...

* Needless to say the Gerry and Sylvia Anderson series ''[[UFO]]'' abounds with them. SST's, tilt-fan aircraft decades before the Osprey <s>got off the ground</s> crashed, jet-powered seaplanes, [[Military Mashup Machine|submarine-launched jet fighters]], Lunar Modules piggyback-launched from VTOL carrier aircraft, bug-like Moon Mobiles that travel with an eerie ''[[Sound in Space|wooo]]'' sound <ref> Any time you hear an eerie sound in a Gerry Anderson series, it's produced by composer Barry Gray on his 'Ondes Martenot' synthesizer</ref>, Interceptors with a [[Nuke'Em|Big Fucking Nuke]] in the nose. [http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=MuXIBOqBitg What more could a teenage fanboy ask for?]

** The Blackstone Fortresses. Enormous and fantastically ancient mobile starbases built to slay [[Eldritch Abomination|Eldritch Abominations]] and armed with cannons that shoot [[Negative Space Wedgie|Negative Space Wedgies]]!

* The ''[[Starfire]]'' hex-map-based wargame was ''all about'' combat between fleets of starships. The units varied in size from tiny one-man fighters all the way up to Monitors four times as large as a space battleship, armed with quasi-inertialess ion engines, nuclear missiles, [[Antimatter]] missiles, [[Frickin' Laser Beams]], [[Tractor Beam|Tractor Beams]], [[Deflector Shields]], and a host of other deadly hardware.

* ''[[Halo]]'''s Pillar of Autumn was a Halcyon-class cruiser. According to the novels, this class of ship had been retired years previously and were destined for the scrap yard. They were slow, under armoured, had very few weapons, and were generally considered a joke among the fleet. The Autumn itself was in bad shape and could be accurately described as a junk-heap. This made it the perfect candidate to ferry the resident [[Super Soldier|Super Soldiers]] on their top-secret mission, and as such was refitted with top-of-the-line reactors and experimental weapons. That's right, a techno-miracle disguised as a rustbucket.

** The ''Long Night of Solace'', the Covenant Supercarrier in ''Halo: Reach'', counts, partly due to its impressive entrance (one-shotting a UNSC Frigate from out of nowhere), and partly because of its sheer size - the thing is completely fucking '''huge''', around 27 kilometers long from the looks of it <ref>and from comparing it to the ~300-meter Covenant Corvette</ref>. Covenant Supercarriers are the largest warships ever made by the Covenant, and only about a dozen of them are known to have existed throughout the Human-Covenant War. As a comparison: [[Mass Effect]]'s Citadel is about 47 kilometers long. A Covenant Supercarrier is more than half of that length, and is about a dozen kilometers wide and at least half a dozen kilometers "tall". It carries enough firepower to take on half of the Reaper fleet singlehandedly and win. A trio of them would defeat the Reapers by themselves. They also carry hundreds of thousands of troops (and all of the armored vehicles, aircraft, gigantic cloaking-teleporting-jamming pylons, and more). One wonders how even the Covenant build these, let alone in significant numbers.

** You can also [[Design It Yourself Equipment|mix and match parts from ships with (roughly) identical roles and performance capabilities]], and then give it a custom paint job, to make your own, personalized [[Cool Starship]] that still fits the setting.

** Apparently it's [[Cool Starship|so cool]] it needs a second mention here, apart from being the first videogame entry. The {{spoiler|Sajuuk}} from Homeworld 2 is a very cool one as well, packing the most powerful weapon in the game. In addition, remember the thingy that enabled the Mothership to make such long-range hyperjumps? {{spoiler|Sajuuk}} has ''three'' which means it can hyperjump during battle with absolutely no cost. Let's recount: a super-heavily armored, 5km long and 1,500,000 ton ship with a [[Wave Motion Gun|Phased Cannon Array]], medium-range nanite cannons, quite fast self-repair and slow speed offset by the ability to execute tactical hyperjumps with no resource cost.

* The ''[[Free Space|FreeSpace series]]'' turns the [[Cool Starship]] into an art form. Both games feature several classes of massive capital ships that are thousands of times the size of the player's fighter, armed with not one but ''several'' [[Wave Motion Gun|Wave Motion Guns]] apiece, including a fleet of 80 alien juggernauts that, together, ''blow up a star''.

* ''[[Star Control]]'' had a number of these, but the crowning example has to be the ''Vindicator''<ref>You can actually name it whatever you want, but that's its default name</ref>, the protagonist's starship from ''Star Control II''. Properly equipped, it was far and away the most powerful ship that could be fielded, outclassing even the mighty Ur-Quan Dreadnoughts... and it was just a [[Precursors|Precursor]] utility ship, not even designed for combat!

* Each player class in [[The Old Republic]] gets their own [[Cool Starship]] around the late tens of their character level, give or take, and can use it to fly [[Star Fox]] style missions as well as transporting themselves around the galaxy.

* There is so far nothing in existence that can be called a true "spaceship", i.e, a space-equivalent of an oceangoing vessel, which could be loosely defined as a reusable space vehicle <ref>Oceangoing ships are reusable - they can be resupplied, and make the same trip several times, or travel to different destinations. A one-shot exploratory craft could be more accurately described as a probe, than a ship.</ref> capable of practically traversing interplanetary or at least cislunar distances <ref>I.e, they're not limited to the harbor of Earth orbit.</ref>, and not necessarily aerodynamic in any sense or designed to land anywhere<ref>I.e, the vehicle stays in space, although it can deploy landers or shuttles to planetary/lunar surfaces - similar to ocean vessels, which never intentionally come ashore, but can carry small boats or hovercraft which do.</ref>. And a true starship - a spaceship which can practically traverse the huge distances between stars - is much farther off. The International Space Station was built and space and stays in space, but it doesn't go anywhere, and even the Apollo command modules were one-shot non-reusable deals. So technically, this trope is not yet [[Truth in Television]]. That doesn't stop the following quasi-examples - unmanned probes, surface-to-orbit launch craft, and realistic proposed spaceships which we could (but have not yet) built - from being cool.

* ''Voyager 1'' and ''Voyager 2'' -- so far, among humanity's ''only'' starships, together with Pioneers 10 and 11, as they've recently left the Solar System. Bonus coolness points for the fact that they're still working after ''thirty years'' in space, plus ''Voyager 2'' being the unique probe that has explored the four outer planets.