Nice, looks familiar to some designs I seen around here though.

Sorry, thats gonna be unavoidable, at least to a certain extent, when talking spaceships. Especially my spaceships, which are intended to fit into the Traveller universe (with 35 years of Traveller artwork to drive from - I -hope- I've done pretty good at keeping the feel of Traveller without directly ripping off anything.). I'm not looking at prior art and saying to myself "I wanna do my version of a Gaould Hatesh fighter!" and then making a flying space wedgie that looks almost like one - if anything along those lines is derivative, its subconscious, trust me.

Almost every one of my designs has reminded someone of something else they once saw ... Going with basic shapes - cube, (borg) sphere, (borg) cylinder, (Rendezvous with Rama, all the rockets of the 1900's on), pyramid, (Stargate) etc. spaceships are gonna start to look derivative - Mechwarrior uses spheres and cubes, Cameron likes to start with helicopters - at least for anything that's 'gunship' styled, Traveller Imperial cruiser scaled ships look like flying bricks (as above) and/or Star Wars flying wedges, Traveller K'Kree ships look like flying balls or flying saucers which look like District 9 ships, which look like Independence Day ships which look like Original V ships, which look like ... well - ships look like other ships.

Only the 'organics' these days are usually 'unique' looking, and after a couple decades of people lacing together webs, or doing fish or bird or flying wing inspired vessels, (or squid if you're a Bab5 fan), things start to blur together.

Open frame vessels are kinda neat, but of less practical use for a 'spaceshippy universe hundreds, thousands of years in the future', and to me look really retro - Prior to sputnik's launched, almost everything that wasn't a generic rocket was open frame fuel, engine, command module and strut configuration - which is what we did with our clunky little lunar lander eventually. Trust me, if I did one from the components that I thought had to go into it, it'd end up looking a lot like the others that came before.

Eve-Online for awhile had some 'unique' feeling ships, mostly because they went with the "Symmetry doesn't matter in space." and pushed it about as far as it can go - Too disperse and there's structural problems, or you're too fragile for combat, or you're wasting too much mass in swoopy-melty curves (Gallente) or frail 'space-sails' (Minmatar) that serve little function other than looking neat. Eventually they started getting derivative too - one of the prettiest Gallente destroyers looks like the lovechild of a WW2 Corsair and a Northrop YB-49 after you made half and half aluminum and copper and let it oxidize for a year.

On top of just overall design, there's going usually recognizable elements such as turrets, (Galactica), flying bridges (Robotech, modern naval warships), aerials, whiskers and radar nurnies, etc. until the technology reaches a sufficient state to become 'magic'd' back inside the hull without a visible physical presence. There's also familiar color schemes - if I go white with red stripes - which is a fairly simple, and popular scheme, it doesn't necessarily make it a Rebel Alliance vehicle - red and white's attention grabbing, catches the eye, which is why Lucas went with it in the first place. Its also the UNSpacey fighter color scheme from Robotech ... and Austria, Canada, Denmark, Georgia, Hongkong, Indonesia, et al.

Yeah, it's really hard to be innovative in spaceship design XD Not that that's a bad thing.

Often the spaceships that look most different are the ones that are based on coherent engineering principles - but that often doesn't equate to looking cool XD

Do you know Winchell Chung's spaceship design pages, 'Atomic Rockets'?

http://www.projectrho.com/rocketstub.html

Yep, have glanced at them, but I've refrained from completely diving in on purpose - I don't want to go -too- retro, which is a major push that seems to be coming from a lotta angles - including my own household sometimes (LOTS of enthusiasm for tailstanders ... in a universe with decent grav plates and intertial compensators) and the grognards on the Traveller boards, who I suspect want more rockets because they grew up (or wished they'd grown up) in the 50's and 60's, and read LOTS of the classic scifi when everything was rockets - to show us whippersnappers who like anti-grav and think Syd Mead is 'nifty' don't know nothin' about real and proper hard scifi - like any of that matters in speculative -gaming- at the end of the day. You picks your milleu/genre/universe/whatever and try to tell a good story and have fun.

I love the nostalgia of the serials, and Buck Rogers and Flash Gordan stuff, creeping even into some of our more recent entertainment (Sky Captain, Lucas's Naboo designs, Tom Paris's Delta Flyer etc.), but in trying to build my gaming universe and space opera, I'm much more of an either modern 'aerodynamic/organic' or an 'antigrav + no atmosphere = death of aerodynamics in practical merchanter starcraft design - ie. flying bricks, than big foreward curvy fins and circle plates ringing the nose-cone kinda guy. Plus, I loved the Traveller idea of Dynamic Controls (L-Cars for Trek fans when its 2D) as a universal control system way over the knobs, wheels, banks of unlabelled switches and a warehouse full of dials, any one of which could be crucial to the survival of your ship at a given moment in a retro universe.

Compact designs are easier to armor for less weight. Space wedgies could feasibly deflect glancing impacts or disperse explosive damage somewhat. Spheres need less surface armor to protect from space/radiation/micrometeorites, flattened sphere or square boxy configurations make it easier to load and offload cargo to a ground port or even a docking extension. Much as I don't like a lot about the Firefly universe (Don't get me started), their ship design, as far as merchanter craft go, is wonderful for space opera. Large loading ramp to cargo bay, VTOL engines (if you don't have A-Grav, next best thing) - and just enough external aesthetics for the PC's to not puke when they see it the first time.

Starwars ships are the epitome of 'wtf is THAT bit for?' but it seems to work - I guess I've always just assumed that all the 'bits' and the odd designs were all solutions to FTL and A-Grav - Different solutions - there's no consistancy of design, except within companies or racial products - which means that physics has offered a -lot- of different engineering solutions to those problems there.

Millenium falcon's ostensible 'primary' mission as a tramp trader is weird - its a disk without any cargo access - just a narrow walkup ramp and a room in the back apparently - all small packages even when its legitimate I guess. Trade Federation's all curves and melty bits, punctuated by basic shapes (sphere, cylinder, pyramid, box), Corellian designs all have insane numbers of external bits - and their purpose built cruisers have huge gaping exposed regions surrounded by bits that are behind heavy armor plating (Empire too, to a less obvious extent), Tie Fighters have incredibly huge blindspots for tactical and dogfighting fightercraft (and don't tell me that cheap vector graphic targetting system makes up for it.)

Heh I didn't mean it as a bad thing. o.o

He rather reminds me, of the USS SARATOGA, SCVN-2112 from Space: Above and Beyond[/b]. That and the [i]NGS Vigilance from Heavy Gears.

I know Heavy Gear and Pod 9's other neato, more pseudo Gundam to HG's pseudo Votoms game, Jovian Chronicles, but its been years since I've cracked any of their covers and mostly I only remember the mecha, not the ships (though I don't think they had A-grav ... they used a midsection wheel for artificial gravity iirc).

Space above and Beyond's, sadly, one of the few shows I somehow completely missed. I remember it had funny looking Travelleresque hammerhead fightercraft and an open frame freighter (I think), and the rest is a grey CGI blur in my memory.

It was an interesting show.
The only real brain-bug, is the use of the fighter pilot main characters as infantry.
Of course, they were US Marines, and every Marine is a rifleman; or so the creedo goes.
Although I expect in practice ít's a little different, but that's neither here nor there.

I was rather fond of the series, amongst others. The appropiatly named 'Hammerhead' fighters were very very nice.
They never quite dealt into quite what sort of FTL method the Saratoga used, suffice it to say that only the military had that privledge.
Atleast the aliens were quite alien, in that they had a rather unfortunate reaction when given water. As opposed to the rubber-forehead aliens of yore. Who could eat and drink the same foods as terrans.