Hey everybody Daniel from Spacedock here, a while back I did a top five video to celebrate
my first year of activity and that was incredibly well received so I thought I’d start doing
them a little more often.
First up though I’d just quickly like to say a big thanks to everyone who’s pledged
to support Spacedock Planetside in the last couple of weeks, it’s a huge help and I
can’t wait til it’s ready to go and I can get started on the new show, if any of
you watching are unware of Spacedock Planetside you can find more information at the link
below.
Ok now without further ado, back to one of my all-time favourite franchises for my top
five Mass Effect Starships.
NUMBER FIVE.
First up in fifth place we have a ship that was given unfortunately little screen-time,
the Alliance SX3 Interceptor.
Now this ship was brought in as part of a fleet-wide refit the alliance underwent following
the battle of the citadel, and replaced an older fighter called the F61 Trident.
Personally, I think this is just one of the coolest looking fighters in science fiction,
such a fantastic adaption of established alliance styles into a smaller craft, it looks incredibly
sleek and nimble, and the smaller versions of the classic alliance Sublight engines look
fantastic.
I’d loved to have seen more of these across the series but what I’d really like to see
at some point is a Mass Effect dogfighting game, a great opportunity to add loads of
new ship-canon to the series, in fact I actually had an idea a while ago that you may have
seen me tweet about so if anybody from Bioware is watching or knows anyone from the company
listen up, imagine a dogfighting game which follows the SSV Hawking, which is the ship
that we know Cortez served on right, and it delves into the conflict with the Batarians
during the Anhur Rebellions and the events surrounding the Skyllian Blitz, flying sorties
against the Batarians, flesh out the history of Cortez’s character even more, in fact
you could even expand on that and keep going long after Cortez leaves, maybe your character
ends up CAG after he turns it down, and then we follow the ship all the way through to
the battle of the citadel and eventually the reaper war, start out fighting Batarians in
your F-61 Trident, wind up fighting reapers over earth in your SX3, Bioware could even
just rattle a game like this off on the Freespace Open Source Project with a tiny team for minimal
cost and put it up as a 20 quid download, would be a great addition to the universe
and make a bit of money for em in the process.
Damn we got off track a bit here, yeah the SX3 is awesome.
NUMBER FOUR.
Ok in fourth place I’ve put the Destiny Ascension, now I’ve always thought the Ascension
was such a great way to adapt the culture and styles of the Asari into a warship, it
looks like a cathedral or something, it’s this vast, towering monolith with a smooth
curving hull, and Its huge open segment in the centre running all the way through the
vessel.
The whole thing just feels powerful, you can see it cruising past the viewports on the
wards in ME1 and it just looks vast, even with the enormity of the citadel behind it,
it really does remind you of how powerful and advanced the Asari really are.
It was also great to see it again in ME3 albeit briefly if the council are alive, though we
don’t see on screen, I’m going to imagine the Ascension managed to deal the reapers
some serious damage in that battle.
NUMBER THREE.
Up for number three is UT-47A Kodiak Drop Shuttle, that’s the refit we see in ME3.
This is one of my favourite shuttlecraft in sci-fi, it just looks so utilitarian and straightforward
in its design, and everything we hear about it in the codex about how it was tested on
Venus and stuff is just incredibly cool, the thing is clearly just an absolute brick, the
AK-47 of shuttlecraft, this thing will go anywhere and suffer though anything and just
keep plodding along.
I prefer the A variant because it’s pretty much just a direct improvement on its predecessor,
it adds some mass accelerator cannons and nice new alliance paint job, as well as a
retractable machine gun turret in the troop compartment.
I’m really glad they brought so much more attention to the shuttles in ME3, we get lots
of cool briefings in there, we get to see the cockpit more often and see the auditory
emulators and the holographic windows, and we even get to joyride one around the citadel
in the DLC.
Fantastic little shuttle design, and I’m really glad we’re getting a new Kodiak in
Andromeda.
NUMBER TWO.
So, in second place we have the mainstay cruiser of the Systems Alliance following the fleet-wide
refit.
Now there is unfortunately no clear class name in the canon for this vessel, for a long
time it looked like it should be Geneva Class based on many articles in the Codex which
use this term to describe standard alliance cruisers, but then somebody at Bioware put
a scene into ME3 where your ship spotting with Cortez and notice the SSV London, a ship
the Codex calls a Geneva Class Cruiser, and the in-game asset for it is the same one used
for all the human freighters, so that threw all logic out the window and now we have no
idea, a lot of fans say York Class but with no canon answer I’m in no place to state
anything as fact.
But whatever this class is called, it’s damn cool, I just love the angular design
of alliance warships, the way the central spine with the big accelerator batteries is
flanked by huge sheets of slanted armor to deflect damage, it looks tough and functional
and I’m a huge fan of it.
I wish we’d got to see the inside of these at some point and to be honest, more than
anything else I’d just love to see a mass effect cross section book or some online equivalent
just to give us all the facts and names for all these amazing designs, because they really
deserve to be fleshed out.
NUMBER ONE.
Here we are first place, and it’s probably a fairly predictable one but it just had to
be the Normandy SR2.
This is one of my all-time favourite sci-fi spacecraft, I’m talking like top-three,
this ship is just gorgeous, it’s design is a work of art, where its predecessor was
a little small, this one is just this perfect size for a recon frigate with a couple of
shuttlecraft and plenty of internal space.
My favourite version is the Alliance refit from ME3, partially because I love the alliance
blue colours but also because the refit adds so much cool stuff, after ME2 we’ve now
got the Thanix Cannon and the Silaris Armor etc., but as well as that we have a war room,
a better location for the armory, a refit for the shuttles and a general improvement
to the visual style of the interior.
I’ve spent many many hours touring this ship across more playthroughs than I dare
to count, and the vessel just captures the starship experience in a way no other design
has.
I should also say, this kind of recon-frigate sized vessel is right in the middle of what
I’d call the best range of size for hero-ships in sci-fi series, it’s in here with the
Rocinante and the USS Defiant and some other ships in the same kind of area, large enough
to have an extensive and well-designed interior so you can make it feel like a home for your
characters and let the audience become attached to it as a location, but small enough that
you can make it’s helmsman seem like a badass and put it through all kinds of crazy manouveres,
big enormous carriers are cool, and people like me and I’m sure most of you can watch
them lumber around going about their business with total fascination, but I think if you
want to give the average audience a kind of hero ship that they will really love, this
is the way to go.