The Scimitar was pretty cool, but I'd have liked its core hull to be less boxy, as it seemed too much of a departure from the curves of Romluman design.
The Shadow Ships aren't shaped like anatomical spiders, but something about them totally sets off my arachnophobia, and I'm speaking as an Australian with a huntsman currently residing in my dunny.
The Unknown: Which you covered well with the 'alien' feel here. I will add a note that any vessel that displays a break in the established rules of your settings technology will be intimidating. A Bird of Prey doesn't concern the Enterprise A. A Bird of Pray that can fire while cloaked, is an immediate and dire threat. Similarly, the USS Vengeance from Into Darkness's display of shooting a ship out of warp instantly establishes the vessel as a dire threat even if it were smaller than the Enterprise. (Which it very much is not.)
The Known: Where something follows established rules and design conventions, and just at a glance can evaluate for yourself as intimidating. Example: Take a weapon system that has a distinctive look to it, and comprises the 'spinal' mount of ships in the setting. A vessel of significant size, dotted with turrets of those weapons, is going to provoke a double take concerning it's scale, and immediately present itself as threatening. Similarly, a familiar design converted for combat effectiveness can achieve intimidation See the 'recreation' of the 'Warship Voyager' from Living Witness, which takes a familiar design and adds on to it in a manner that immediately conveys menace with it's single visual.
The Hive Dreadnought from Destiny The Taken King is an insanely huge terrifying looking ship, that is so menacing and deadly… The fact that it is 5000 km in size is just wow… First time I saw the Dreadnought I was just speechless… It is one of the biggest ships in Sci-fi… Dang Bungie knows how to make cool and menacing stuff…
I like Oryx's dreadnought from Destiny for its terrifying aura and looks. It's first introduced by showing a Warsat, recognisable as about the size of a car. The Warsat falls away, revealing that it's hidden within the shape of a huge rock which is larger than a house. The rock continues to fall away, with the tiny Warsat inside it, and that's when the dreadnought appears. The rock gets smaller. And smaller. and smaller. And it still doesn't hit the dreadnought. And when it finally does, it creates a tiny explosion that doesn't even scratch the hull. That intricate chitinous detail, with a few recognisable pieces and a heavy, blocky shape makes this thing a menace the moment it's on screen.
That's not even talking about the ship's weaponry. In its first cutscene, we see it facing of a fleet of the largest ship class we know in destiny canon until that point, the Ketch. These things look tiny in comparison, despite their large size, and meanwhile their whole assault proves fruitless, as even their leader's strongest attack fails to dent the armour. With a single swing of his sword, Oryx activates its weapon, indicated by a long, burning line of blue fire. A few seconds later, it fires, and the blast effortlessly destroys everything in its path, annihilating the strongest fleet of ships we'd seen in destiny canon without even sustaining damage.
All this is, is more star trek ripping off other sci fi ip's like how DISCO does, all the fuggin' time. This new ship the Shrike, just looks like a slightly pointier version of Captain Dylan Hunt's ship the Andromeda Ascendant; from the early 2000's Roddenberry show, called "Andromeda". so is the shrike also considered a "glorious heritage class" heavy cruiser like the Andromeda is?
I think sound design is the biggest thing. The moment the Vengeance from 'Into the darkness' caught up to the Enterprise was incredible and it's just a bigger, darker enterprise with a totally different sound. Also I'm surprised the D'Deridex Romulan battleship wasn't mentioned here. I always felt they were menacing as hell and I think it also has something to do with the sound of their decloaking. Like a shriek from an alligator or something. Although that ship even looks scary without the sound imo
You should have mentioned the collector ship from Mass effect 2. Its gigantic size, asteroids being incorporated in its design and its insectoid interior
for me its ships boiled down to their purest essence, battleships that understand their role is carrier massive artillery pieces meant to puncture anything and everything, battlestar galactica, the deadalus class, exude a threat of spartanism. normandy and the way her crew use her, as a rapid assult vessal slinging an oversized gun with precise lethal strikes. whilst we know its on ourside , the existance of such a ship in the hands of our enemies would be terrorfying, the pluasuibilty that cerberus could field one or more of them against us, that a deadalus has been hijacked i beleive more than once and when the mercury class battlestar pegasus turned up it was our hero ship, but bigger , better more advanced and clearly capable. the omega class destroyers are a part of this, the biggest ships humanity built for war in B5, i beleive. these things i beleive cannonically had missles, beams, and excluding the excaliber class cruiser prototypes who had more of a minbari design to them with flowing hull structure making them look more beautiful than menacing, omegas were capable of securing a system by itself.
defiant class being the quintesential design philopshjey of this, its guns, torpedos, phasers, armour, engines and thats it. internally its power supply, generation, distribution and when it remembers, a sleeping quarters and a bridge. theres nothing excess about it. and all that in a 5? deck package of death. its desgined for 1 thing and 1 thing alone, to fight the borg and survive and it did that. and any lesser ship than a cube 1 on 1 it can seemingly take. its assilable sure, but knowing that it took a brandnew state of the art energy damping weapon from the breen to cripple her, she still sruvived long enough for the crew to evac, not immediatly destroyed. even the galaxy class our former hero ship never showed itself capable of that.
for the love of god… would you please explain why spaceship designers insisit on making windows a part of the hull for space faring vessels. I get it… humans like seeing outside. but if you can replace a "window" with a camera and a "viewscreen" that accomplish the exact same affect, why make real "windows" a thing?
– Nebulas are not dense cloud objets that we suddenly came out from. They are made of very sparse particles that block light just because they are very large and photons that pass through all the length of it eventually hit one single particle somewhere. Sci-fi would be so boring if we were to show celestial objects as they really are. – Nebulas also are not "bright". We need to take several minutes of camera pose to stack up images until we get enought light to make it visible on the picture.
I like the design of the Narada, but not because I find it necessarily menacing: it's a ship designed by a terrorist, with terror in mind over practicality, and it shows. In reality, the ship is actually just a mining vessel with next-generation phaser banks and torpedo arrays glued on, with a ton of extra spiky bits to obscure the utterly ordinary truth. Your observation that it was "defensively" spiky was spot-on: it's like a physical manifestation of its captain's time-shredding, planet-destroying angst, lashing out at whatever hurts him. It's Starship Hot Topic and I kinda love it.
Shadow vessels are one of the only things in sci fi that reliably give me goose bumps even all these years later. They were so masterfully built up, just rumors or blurry footage early on, or very brief appearances. But the other thing was the sound design. Obviously there isn't really sound in space, but in the show they even acknowledge this by saying that the noise Shadow ships make is actually somehow inside your head. It's somewhere between nails on a chalk board, strange animal noises and a ghost.
The design is actually a sleeker version of the Breen Chel Grett-class Battlecruisers seen during the Dominion War. These also had forward mounted nacels with an undermounted deflector dish that resembles an eye. The fact that "rogue" changelings were in possession of a warship is already strange, but the fact it seems to be of Breen design suggests they are actually working for the Dominion.
With so many DS9 references throughout the series, from obscure details like Jack being conceived on Kasperia Prime (first mentioned in DS9) to the central plot being about Founder POWs seeking revenge there may be some merit to the theory that Jack Crusher is part-Pah Wraith just as Ben Sisko was part-Prophet. It would certainly explain his eyes turning red when using his powers and getting visions. Having the Dominion allying themselves with the Pah Wraiths would make sense.
Check out the new Confiance Class Frigate breakdown over on #TheSojourn channel!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iszuFttwogM&ab_channel=TheSojournAudioDrama
Guinevere Cross Section available here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/sojourn-visual-39895325/
Brilliant synopsis!
The Scimitar was pretty cool, but I'd have liked its core hull to be less boxy, as it seemed too much of a departure from the curves of Romluman design.
The Shadow Ships aren't shaped like anatomical spiders, but something about them totally sets off my arachnophobia, and I'm speaking as an Australian with a huntsman currently residing in my dunny.
In general there are two things to leverage:
The Unknown: Which you covered well with the 'alien' feel here. I will add a note that any vessel that displays a break in the established rules of your settings technology will be intimidating. A Bird of Prey doesn't concern the Enterprise A. A Bird of Pray that can fire while cloaked, is an immediate and dire threat. Similarly, the USS Vengeance from Into Darkness's display of shooting a ship out of warp instantly establishes the vessel as a dire threat even if it were smaller than the Enterprise. (Which it very much is not.)
The Known: Where something follows established rules and design conventions, and just at a glance can evaluate for yourself as intimidating. Example: Take a weapon system that has a distinctive look to it, and comprises the 'spinal' mount of ships in the setting. A vessel of significant size, dotted with turrets of those weapons, is going to provoke a double take concerning it's scale, and immediately present itself as threatening. Similarly, a familiar design converted for combat effectiveness can achieve intimidation See the 'recreation' of the 'Warship Voyager' from Living Witness, which takes a familiar design and adds on to it in a manner that immediately conveys menace with it's single visual.
"LOOK AT ME, I HAVE BIG SPIKES AND ME SCARY!"
Borg: Cubes
The Hive Dreadnought from Destiny The Taken King is an insanely huge terrifying looking ship, that is so menacing and deadly… The fact that it is 5000 km in size is just wow… First time I saw the Dreadnought I was just speechless… It is one of the biggest ships in Sci-fi… Dang Bungie knows how to make cool and menacing stuff…
The shrike ship looks a lot like a Shivan juggernaut from freespace 2.
Freespace 2 came out in 1998.
I like Oryx's dreadnought from Destiny for its terrifying aura and looks. It's first introduced by showing a Warsat, recognisable as about the size of a car. The Warsat falls away, revealing that it's hidden within the shape of a huge rock which is larger than a house. The rock continues to fall away, with the tiny Warsat inside it, and that's when the dreadnought appears.
The rock gets smaller.
And smaller.
and smaller.
And it still doesn't hit the dreadnought.
And when it finally does, it creates a tiny explosion that doesn't even scratch the hull. That intricate chitinous detail, with a few recognisable pieces and a heavy, blocky shape makes this thing a menace the moment it's on screen.
That's not even talking about the ship's weaponry. In its first cutscene, we see it facing of a fleet of the largest ship class we know in destiny canon until that point, the Ketch. These things look tiny in comparison, despite their large size, and meanwhile their whole assault proves fruitless, as even their leader's strongest attack fails to dent the armour. With a single swing of his sword, Oryx activates its weapon, indicated by a long, burning line of blue fire. A few seconds later, it fires, and the blast effortlessly destroys everything in its path, annihilating the strongest fleet of ships we'd seen in destiny canon without even sustaining damage.
The deflector dish gave me Enterprise D vibes
All this is, is more star trek ripping off other sci fi ip's like how DISCO does, all the fuggin' time. This new ship the Shrike, just looks like a slightly pointier version of Captain Dylan Hunt's ship the Andromeda Ascendant; from the early 2000's Roddenberry show, called "Andromeda". so is the shrike also considered a "glorious heritage class" heavy cruiser like the Andromeda is?
Is it just me, or does the Scimitar look almost identical to the player ship in Descent?
The shadow craft from B5 reminded me of a cross between a sea urchin and a tailless whip scorpion
We need to see the Shrike fight something equally imposing like a Scimitar.
Fire Patrick Stewart and put his fee towards the battle scene.
The Kilrathi ships from the Wing Commander series are the fist time I can remember blade like sharp edges being used to create a sense of fear.
Shadow craft are still lightyears ahead of the rest, truly 👽 in design, I'm sick of a human centric approach in sci-fi toward Alien 🚀
I think sound design is the biggest thing. The moment the Vengeance from 'Into the darkness' caught up to the Enterprise was incredible and it's just a bigger, darker enterprise with a totally different sound. Also I'm surprised the D'Deridex Romulan battleship wasn't mentioned here. I always felt they were menacing as hell and I think it also has something to do with the sound of their decloaking. Like a shriek from an alligator or something. Although that ship even looks scary without the sound imo
You forgot about LEXX… the ship that is alive and eats other ships….
You also got the Nomads ships in Freelancer, that look like space jelly fish…
You should have mentioned the collector ship from Mass effect 2. Its gigantic size, asteroids being incorporated in its design and its insectoid interior
for me its ships boiled down to their purest essence, battleships that understand their role is carrier massive artillery pieces meant to puncture anything and everything, battlestar galactica, the deadalus class, exude a threat of spartanism. normandy and the way her crew use her, as a rapid assult vessal slinging an oversized gun with precise lethal strikes. whilst we know its on ourside , the existance of such a ship in the hands of our enemies would be terrorfying, the pluasuibilty that cerberus could field one or more of them against us, that a deadalus has been hijacked i beleive more than once and when the mercury class battlestar pegasus turned up it was our hero ship, but bigger , better more advanced and clearly capable.
the omega class destroyers are a part of this, the biggest ships humanity built for war in B5, i beleive. these things i beleive cannonically had missles, beams, and excluding the excaliber class cruiser prototypes who had more of a minbari design to them with flowing hull structure making them look more beautiful than menacing, omegas were capable of securing a system by itself.
defiant class being the quintesential design philopshjey of this, its guns, torpedos, phasers, armour, engines and thats it. internally its power supply, generation, distribution and when it remembers, a sleeping quarters and a bridge. theres nothing excess about it. and all that in a 5? deck package of death. its desgined for 1 thing and 1 thing alone, to fight the borg and survive and it did that. and any lesser ship than a cube 1 on 1 it can seemingly take. its assilable sure, but knowing that it took a brandnew state of the art energy damping weapon from the breen to cripple her, she still sruvived long enough for the crew to evac, not immediatly destroyed. even the galaxy class our former hero ship never showed itself capable of that.
for the love of god… would you please explain why spaceship designers insisit on making windows a part of the hull for space faring vessels. I get it… humans like seeing outside. but if you can replace a "window" with a camera and a "viewscreen" that accomplish the exact same affect, why make real "windows" a thing?
the Shrike was kinda lame, ships like Soveriegn and the borg cube are truly terror-inducing, because they are so alien.
Look at the Tyranids or Dark Eldar from Warhammer 40K
thargoids intercepters from elite dangerous are spooky
– Nebulas are not dense cloud objets that we suddenly came out from. They are made of very sparse particles that block light just because they are very large and photons that pass through all the length of it eventually hit one single particle somewhere. Sci-fi would be so boring if we were to show celestial objects as they really are.
– Nebulas also are not "bright". We need to take several minutes of camera pose to stack up images until we get enought light to make it visible on the picture.
I like the design of the Narada, but not because I find it necessarily menacing: it's a ship designed by a terrorist, with terror in mind over practicality, and it shows. In reality, the ship is actually just a mining vessel with next-generation phaser banks and torpedo arrays glued on, with a ton of extra spiky bits to obscure the utterly ordinary truth. Your observation that it was "defensively" spiky was spot-on: it's like a physical manifestation of its captain's time-shredding, planet-destroying angst, lashing out at whatever hurts him. It's Starship Hot Topic and I kinda love it.
Shadow vessels are one of the only things in sci fi that reliably give me goose bumps even all these years later. They were so masterfully built up, just rumors or blurry footage early on, or very brief appearances. But the other thing was the sound design. Obviously there isn't really sound in space, but in the show they even acknowledge this by saying that the noise Shadow ships make is actually somehow inside your head. It's somewhere between nails on a chalk board, strange animal noises and a ghost.
The design is actually a sleeker version of the Breen Chel Grett-class Battlecruisers seen during the Dominion War. These also had forward mounted nacels with an undermounted deflector dish that resembles an eye. The fact that "rogue" changelings were in possession of a warship is already strange, but the fact it seems to be of Breen design suggests they are actually working for the Dominion.
With so many DS9 references throughout the series, from obscure details like Jack being conceived on Kasperia Prime (first mentioned in DS9) to the central plot being about Founder POWs seeking revenge there may be some merit to the theory that Jack Crusher is part-Pah Wraith just as Ben Sisko was part-Prophet. It would certainly explain his eyes turning red when using his powers and getting visions. Having the Dominion allying themselves with the Pah Wraiths would make sense.