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.