Hey everybody, Daniel from Spacedock here,
back to share another of my personal top five
lists with you guys, we’re focusing on fighters
this time so that’s just standard mainstay
fighter craft and heavy fighters, no dedicated
bombers, fighter-bombers, interceptors or
anything like that. bear in mind none of this
is based on tactical superiority or anything,
just my personal favourite designs.
STARFURY THUNDERBOLT – BABYLON 5
In fifth place, the Starfury Thunderbolt from
Babylon 5, I love the conventional Starfury
Aurora but this one edges it out for me, just
because they’ve managed to make the ship
aerodynamic with added control surfaces so
it can operate in atmosphere, but without
losing the omni-directional thrusters to arrest
momentum in space, it’s very rare for a
fighter to have both of those things in one
streamlined design, and the Thunderbolt manages
it whilst still looking really cool. It also
served a great purpose in the story, starting
out as a nice way to visually separate the
Earth Alliance Rebels from the Loyalists,
and to make the older rebel fighters look
like underdogs, and later becoming a great
way to visualise how advanced and powerful
the ISA and Earth Alliance had become, as
the thunderbolt started to become the primary
fighter design for those factions.
ALPHA NIMBUS V-WING – STAR WARS
Now here we have what I see as a tragically
underappreciated fighter, largely due to its
limited screentime, the Alpha Nimbus V-Wing.
I just love this design, it’s so compact
and streamlined, and it just seems like the
perfect middle-ground between expensive high-end
fighters and totally expendable ones like
this ship’s successor the TIE Fighter. The
V-Wing carries an Astromech droid, it’s
compatible with hyperspace rings and it has
a set of heat radiator panels to offset its
extremely powerful engines. In fact, I think
it’s worth saying that this ship would not
be out of place in a far more realistic sci-fi
setting, it’s got blast shields around the
thrusters as well as those heat radiators,
and it seems to have an extremely light frame
that would lend itself well to a fully-newtonian
flight model, all you’d need to do is add
some RCS nozzles to this ship and you’d
have something strongly akin to a Colonial
Viper or a Starfury. Like many other designs,
I think this shows the kind of seriously impressive
units the Empire could have been using, if
not for their dedication to the Tarkin Doctrine.
VIPER MARK 7 – RDM BATTLESTAR GALACTICA
Might get some flak for not picking the Mark
II here, and I must say I am a huge fan of
the Mark II, and I prefer its normal paintjob
to that of the Mark 7, but as an overall design
the Mark 7 just edges it out for me. It just
seems really believable that this is the end
result of refining the viper design in model
after model for decades, I mean if you look
at the bulky Mark 1 Viper which is just a
direct adaption of the TOS Viper then move
over to the Mk2 and the Mk3, you can see how
they are just progressively making it sleeker
and lighter and more compartmentalised. The
Mark 7 has all three of its engines in a tight
shielded cluster at the back, taking up far
less space than its predecessors, and allowing
for the addition of a third KEW Cannon on
the ship’s dorsal hull, I just generally
prefer the lower profile of this fighter and
the smooth transition between its wings and
its main body. It’s also worth pointing
out that this ship has a similar narrative
role to the Starfury Thunderbolt, in that
it sets aside the Pegasus fighters from the
Galactica’s In the early stages, and it
represents a limited and important asset throughout
the whole show, with them only having the
one Mark 7 that Apollo brought aboard for
season 1, and then suddenly being able to
produce mark 7’s later on aboard the Pegasus,
to slowly phase out the Mark 2’s.
F-302 FIGHTER INTERCEPTOR – STARGATE
Here we have the F-302 from Stargate, the
ship that set the design style for the Tau’ri
fleet. I love this design to bits, the whole
shape of the fighter is just fantastic with
the angled wings, it’s quiet unashamedly
a semi-newtonian plane-in-space kind of design,
but it does it so well and every time it’s
on screen it just looks amazing, and it never
gets old seeing these things fly out of the
launch bays of a Daedalus class. I think it’s
fantastic how so much Tau’ri history is
tied up in this design, it’s clearly heavily
inspired by the Goa’uld Death Glider, which
makes all kinds of sense, but it also shows
the ingenuity of the Tau’ri in how it uses
the unstable Naquadria Hyperdrive as a tactical
asset rather than just writing it off, the
ship was designed to be an interstellar craft,
but when that fell through they didn’t just
ditch it, they adapted it, turned its problems
into advantages, and created a sublight fighter
that can soundly defeat ships like the Dart
and Death Glider, in spite of the fact that
those fighters have been refined over thousands
of years, and the 302 is literally the first
successful combat craft developed by the Tau’ri.
INCOM-SUBPRO AGGRESSIVE RECONNAISSANCE 170
STARFIGHTER (ARC-170) – STAR WARS
I’m sure many of you were expecting the
X-Wing here, but while I of course love the
T-65, I’ve always preferred another ship
from the Incom family, the ARC-170. There’s
pretty much nothing about this design that
I don’t love, it’s just fantastic, the
angled nose is great, I love the way the cannons
are underslung on big brackets it makes them
seem so much more weighty and powerful, I
really like the long rectangular canopy and
the tail-gun, and I think the whole ship just
looks really fierce from any angle, with those
huge intake drums and the double-s-foils on
each wing. The ARC is kind of the quintessential
heavy fighter, it’s got big powerful cannons,
torpedo launchers, and a rear gunner to keep
it safe from interceptors, it’s also great
for long-haul recon as its name suggests,
as it carries a class 1.5 Hyperdrive and an
R4 series Astromech Droid. My only regret
is that this ship wasn’t used for the whole
war, for me the best style the republic ever
had was in those last six months when they
had V-Wings and ARC-170’s and they’d finally
got rid of the last of those hideous V-19
Torrents and the kind of bland clone versions
of the Z-95. Either way though, this ship
got a lot of cool scenes in Clone Wars, certainly
more than the V-Wing, and it’s just great
to see them scrambled from Venators and dogfighting
with Vulture Droids.
