What makes a 'cool' spaceship? Is it the way it looks? What it does? Who the pilot is? Can it just be one thing - a recognisable silhouette, an iconic cockpit…?
We all know which ships are cool, but why?
It might be informative to ask: which spaceships are not cool, and why?
The Nostromo is an industrial factory. Not cool.
The Sulaco is a little cooler, but not much.
Is it the unintegrated, semi-designed nature of industrial assemblages that makes things uncool?
In Battlestar Galactica, very few of the civilian ships are cool in any way. Again, the common factor is that they look like their designers started with functionality and didn't bother much after that.
So, I'm going to say that ships -- vehicles, really -- are cool when the designers are spending more of the resources on non-essential and even anti-functional features. Rather like the advertising plumage of birds.
Speak for yourself, I think the Nostromo and Sulaco look pretty cool! Yes, the Nostromo is a flying factory, but it intuitively makes sense. You don't really know exactly what all the pipes and tanks are for, but you know what it does.
What's uncool is Firefly's Alliance Cruiser. You can't tell what the heck it's supposed to do, or how. It just looks like some buildings, and they just show up and ... that's it.
The Crimson Permanent Assurance it ain't.
@isaackuo @dashdsrdash @thisnorthernboy
In fairness to the Alliance Cruiser, it looks like a committee was given "make it look like a flying city" as design directions and implemented that using all the least potentially offensive or risky decisions they could possibly take.
Which is, I wager, within a *millo* of the actual Alliance ship design process.
Mission accomplished.
