Mysterious Ships in Science Fiction

[@The_Brainsturgeon]

What I loved about the Dune films, is that it kind of invokes Clarke's Third Law. Technology in Dune's universe is so advanced, space ships don't need to look like space ships anymore and can be these abstract forms.

[@Kingdoms_and_Kobolds]

Spaceships can be any shape, they aren't limited by aerodynamics unless it's a smaller SSTO like a fighter or a shuttle. The issue isn't technology, it's imagination and practical application of technology to make it believable, form following function. If it uses thrusters, then there will likely be a defined front and back. If it uses a more exotic form of propulsion it may have no need to follow such a design principle.

[@The_Brainsturgeon]

@@Kingdoms_and_Kobolds That's kind of what I was getting at. Because the technology is so advanced, and the ships don't require to be aerodynamic, have wings, or have thrusters to fly (probably relying on some kind of super advanced anti-gravity drive). Because of that, the ships can have any shape.

[@senioravocado1864]

​@@The_Brainsturgeon true but space debris like piling up are theorized to weigh down and slow down huge ships a fair amount with time, so a long cigar shaped craft can be the most optimal for reasons not mentioned from where I heard it ages ago, which parallels the huge FTL capable ships that carries FTL incapable ships around

[@DMSProduktions]

Even a COW BELL baby!

[@The_Brainsturgeon]

I've got a fever... And the only cure... Is MORE COWBELL!

[@SerialSnowmanKiller]

Honorable mention to the Shivans from Freespace. When you first encounter them, they don't communicate, they have shields (and you don't) your weapons can't penetrate, and your sensors can't even get a proper lock on them. Every time you learn more about them, they pull more surprises out of the ether.

[@LordInsane100]

Technically, you have weapons that can overcome their shields when you first encounter them. It's just that it almost requires a specific weapon setup you probably don't have, and is hard enough that just destroying _one_ Shivan fighter is enough to get you praised in the debriefing.

[@alphaone5406]

I always found the SD Lucifer more dangerous than the SJ Sathanas, what got me is why the Lucifer was the only Shivan cap ship with shields.

[@PersonOfNoConsequence]

@@alphaone5406 Lucifer is great for kicking around species that don't have beam weapons. Once those became the primary heavy armament of GTVA ships, the Shivans had to pull out something new.

[@UniversalCipher]

And don't forget about the Sathanas; apparently, they're a mass production substitute to the Lucifer.

[@SerialSnowmanKiller]

@@LordInsane100 I think the only weapon you have access to at that point that can actually hurt them is the dumbfire rocket. They're very effective, but you can't carry very many of them. Without a primary weapon that can punch through shields, you're limited to taking down maybe half a dozen with good aim.

[@hemagso]

My favorite misterious spaceship come from the a book: "Rendezvous with Rama". A 50km cilinder with no visible means of propulsion ticked all the mistery checkboxes for me.

[@nallelcm]

i came here looking for a Rama mention

[@trapperjohn6089]

@@nallelcmme too. I want to see that pedal plane. I wonder if, true to the book, they will start the movie with the crew of the ship getting the call to investigate Rama while they are in the middle of their “end of voyage orgy.”

[@trapperjohn6089]

. It had some kind of apparent damage down the side of it, that discolored it. But they never say what caused it and they never determine if it had a collision that put it off course or what

[@jeff7.629]

The Ramans do things in three.

[@EnishLord]

Also a good example of how trying to explain things does not live up to expectations. (Looks at the rather lame squeal books, particularly the last one.)

[@maxcorrice9499]

The heighliners in the new dune movies have an extra layer of mystery because they’re never seen working, which subtly matches what’s in the book

[@JezOnYT88]

You do see them working in the final episode of Fune Prophecy.

[@reliantncc1864]

The difficulty with Heighliners was never their FTL capability, which was fairly well understood. The problem was how to avoid the navigational hazards of traveling at such high speeds that you can't see what you might hit until after you hit it. That required precognition, which was the power of the Navigators.

[@J_n..]

Can they be Seen working? Or ist this beyond our capabilities?

[@zerrodefex]

The shot shown here in this video puzzles me greatly as I can't tell if that planet seen through it is even in the same system as the planet it orbits, giving the impression that the Heighliners are mobile wormhole generators.

[@cmedtheuniverseofcmed8775]

Another good example is what the early Homeworld games did. You would find derelict vessels that were sometimes millions of years old. Its purpose was unknown, and you would never learn anything else about it. Sometimes, you would find floating monoliths and debris that were so large that they could almost expand solar systems in sheer size. Who made them? Who knows....and that's exactly the point. :)

[@judet2992]

Nagarok moment

[@PraetorPaktu]

Homeworld mentioned \o/

[@mpetersen6]

Do not tempt the Junkyard Dog. And don't forget all the fantastic mods and battle spaces. And the most important ship in the game. Salvage Corvettes.

[@UniversalCipher]

Gotta love HW1 and Cataclysm's mystery ships. Shame the HW2/HW3 ones seem... off with retconnian BS.

[@cmedtheuniverseofcmed8775]

@@UniversalCipher You're not the only one who feels that way. It went completely downhill by HW3 (from most reports, the story and direction were so bad that it made HW2 look like a godsend in comparison). I never even bothered playing it because I want to leave HW2 as the end of the series, with at least some form of good note. HW1, Cataclysm, and Deserts of Kharak had a solid story to it.

[@Battlemode-l9p]

Wanna make viewers get interested in your Sci fi movie? -Use large big Boi ships -Don't show the ships entirely or too often -hide scavy stuff in the dark to make it more interesting and more scavier -mention ships often

[@blshouse]

Or, remember that the ship can be more than a scene location; it can be a character in the movie. Smaller hero ships live and die by this.

[@TheHungarianMan]

I would also recommend the Ship of the Light beings from Titan A.I. ! They were not only unusually shaped, but made out of an uncommon material.

[@recurvestickerdragon]

the Drej were an interesting one, because we were given a preview of their appearance unmasked, then learned more about their motivations, and later saw details of how their energy tech works. source: that was one of my favorite movies as a kid, and I watched the VHS over and over until it literally stopped working

[@marcussinclaire4890]

One of my favorite movies!!

[@KuK137]

@@marcussinclaire4890 Too bad writer ruined it by idiotic end scene, that was Jar Jar grade "funny" that was absolutely uncalled for :(

[@darthhunter69]

the reveal of the thargoid Titans was slow and mysterious, and entering the maelstrom cloud for the first time felt like such a cinematic experience, it was super cool. not to mention that thargoids are generally very mysterious and unknowable

[@benjaminhayward5921]

o7, CMDR!

[@darthhunter69]

@benjaminhayward5921 o7

[@UnfortunatelyBio]

Makes me think of the movie Titan AE, and the main villain aliens and their ships. since they're not carbon based and instead are energy based their ships are a confusing crystalline like structure and i always thought that was cool

[@jacktribble5253]

This is a really good device for storytellers who can't adequately explain how the ships in their story actually work. So many SciFi enthusiasts are physicists or similar, you don't want to blow it with potential fans.

[@blshouse]

If the characters and story are engaging enough, fans will overlook the handwavium.

[@KuK137]

@@blshouse Yeah, plot and good writing trumps anything else. Sadly, there are idjit hacks though who think they can cover garbage writing with 'rule of cool' (cough abrams cough filoni cough travissty cough kja to name just SW examples) which never works and just taints everything they touch, if you see someone using that tired shyte Babylon V quote "x does something at the speed of plot" as an excuse they are most likely such terrible hack because good writers don't leave gaping holes ruining immersion in what they produce...

[@FGMagala]

Ships are characters in themselves, and sometimes just seeing one is worse than realizing you're trapped in a room with a monster, because you know it's got something the monster doesn't. Whether that's being so ancient yet still being in relatively one piece, or the fact that there may be nothing you or your entire civilization can do to deter it. And yet, for all you know, until it shows its hand, the ship might be benevolent, or even benign. A ship can be all things, and continue to be so if the writers choses to. When done well, ships make the ultimate characters, especially when the mystery is leveraged.

[@TheWarmachine375]

1:10 Palpatine: "But he doesn't have *UNLIMITED POWER!"*

[@Mercurius19]

One of my favorite instances of this is the Mugan from Gurren Lagann. Throughout the first half of the show all the ships and robots are drawn in regular 2D animation and follow the basic conventions of how you'd expect a mech to look, but now all of a sudden these weird unnatural meshes of 3D polygons show up out of nowhere and start wreaking havoc with almost no way to stop them. It really makes the show feel so tense and hopeless for a good few episodes and then in turn so cathartic when the good guys finally find a way to reliable fight them off.

[@UniversalCipher]

And then there's that "How Good is my Trumpet" track tracking blaring on one of their big attacks.

[@TheGeekAvenger]

I think with written media you have an even stronger tool than light to build mystery, absolute control of perspective. A good example of this is a chapter in the Old Man's war series that is secretly from the perspective of the aliens (I think the rreay). They describe the brutality of the grotesque "alien" army attacking them. The line that sticks out in my head is describing the backwards knees and large eyes. And only near the end of the chapter is it revealed they were describing humans. It is the sort of thing that could never be pulled off in visual medium.

[@BoredomItself]

Personally I'm the most fond of setups where you have a standard style for ships, with maybe some differences between factions, but then you have some mysterious ship show up and it uses a wildly different design philosophy the denies the rules set forth for space ships prior. Particularly I'm most interested in the idea of ships needing large radiators, but the mystery ship not having them, nor any implication of them being hidden but expandable.

[@witchofengineering]

Yes. I kinda am trying to write a thing, and like the first two stories are hard-ish sci-fi. Then the third also is hard-ish sci-fi, except the antagonists, who seem to straight up ignore physics. It is explained later, but I imagine if I ever actually manage to write it and put it somewhere, it will be a shock to the audience.

[@ILoveMyMalinois]

No mention of the Laconian ships from the later Expanse books? - 'Heart of the Tempest', 'Voice of the Whirlwind', 'Eye of the Typhoon', etc. etc. Those would fit this very well.

[@IamMeHere2See]

Every description I’ve heard has me wondering if those are taller/longer than they are wide, as their initial description had me imagining a single vertebrae flying flat-end toward us. Later, I imagined them as a series of vertebrae.

[@ILoveMyMalinois]

@@IamMeHere2See exactly the same here! I've been dying for some clarification on what they actually look like. The little glimpse we got at the end of the TV show was very cool but doesn't really fit with their book description

[@zrbytegmail]

​@ILoveMyMalinois wasn't that just the shipyard and not one of the ships?

[@nddragoon]

i love the laconian ships. the first time one enters the ring space in persepolis rising is thrilling as hell even if the last 3 seasons arent coming anytime soon im sure in my heart that there's concept art for what they officially look like and i would actually kill to see it

[@IamMeHere2See]

@@nddragoon The one upshot I tell myself to cope is that the last 3 books take place 20-30 years in the future (can’t remember exactly), so it would be appropriate for the original cast to age.

[@Frizzleman]

Another type of mystery ship might be the reavers in firefly and serenity. Considering what we do know about their “culture” it’s miraculous the ships are able to fly at all especially considering they all seem strapped together hunks of junk lol

[@rayzerot]

Wait are we talking about the reaver ships or Ork ships from Warhammer 40k? Haha

[@DecentOfAngles]

I think one of the more interesting examples of this I've seen in written fiction would be UECNS Nemesis from The Last Angel series, as while every description of her makes her feel very familiar in design (for good reason), she simultaneously feels incredibly alien due to how the Broken crew members of the exploration team view her rooms and hallways, especially when compounded by the other limited perspectives we get from Thinkers or Tribunes. Which are all in agreement with how alien (and somehow wrong) Nemesis is. Throughout, there's this creeping sense of dissonance, that really adds to the tension in the early chapters as more layers of the mystery are peeled back for the characters. And that dissonance resonates throughout every aspect of Nemesis' introduction. She's larger and more heavily armed and armoured than all but the largest ships known to our cast of characters, and she is filled with technological wonders (and horrors) beyond the comprehension of (almost) anyone involved. With chairs, doorways, steps, ladders and desks, not designed as one would normally expect to see in the Compact. She feels wrong. She feels human.

[@TheOneWhoMightBe]

This is the second TLA comment I've seen on YT today. I approve. Burn with us!

[@be-noble3393]

When it comes to mystery ships The Cygnus form “The Black Hole” will always be a favorite.

[@kevinkeeney9418]

"What if we made a space ship out of a giant greenhouse?"

[@Frizzleman]

Love this channel so much these semi weekly videos have been such a huge source of inspiration for my own creative outlets and it’s always an instant click when you guys pop up in my feed.

[@robwalsh9843]

The First Ones in Babylon 5 had some genuinely cool designs.

[@TheOneWhoMightBe]

ZOG!

[@ytgray]

@@TheOneWhoMightBe Zog? What do you mean zog? Zog what? Zog yes, zog no?

[@ATRStormUnit]

The UFO leaving in episode 10 of Dandadan was pretty cool as well.

[@bessie8612]

A great example of this is Destiny from Stargate Universe, where the characters are thrown onto the ship across the universe from their home galaxy knowing almost nothing about it, having to slowly uncover more and more systems that give them access to the ship’s knowledge and by that learn its mission. We would have known even more if the show wasn’t cancelled criminally early

[@wayneralph945]

I loved all the Stargate shows, but Atlantis was my favourite.

[@mattmmilli8287]

It’s too bad it went full woke mode with the stupid body swapping family drama. I bet would have lasted longer if they did not do that and kept things Stargate 😮

[@bessie8612]

@ Lol what

[@merafirewing6591]

​@@mattmmilli8287 there's nothing woke about it at all, I watched it multiple times and there's nothing I could even find to prove your point.

[@mattmmilli8287]

@@merafirewing6591 yeah right they started to introduce pure drama parts left and right with the body switching from earth. They wanted to become battlestar galactica so bad

[@MrKawaltd750]

You kinda bypassed Rama and 2001 monolith, but we'll let that pass until another épisode....😊

[@mattp1337]

I love when sci-fi designs reveal just enough to be certain the aliens rely on physics we don't understand, like the weird thrusters of the Necromongers in The Chronicles Of Riddick.

[@AngemonOfLight]

I remember first seeing a Shadow ship in B5: A dark spider-like shape in hyperspace. Kid me was terrified and mystified at this unexplained thing.

[@blacksage2375]

Spielburg explicitly wanted to avoid flying saucers with Close Encounters so yeah he either invented the trope or really really popularized it.

[@Fantastic_Mr_Fox]

For the algorithm! Spaceships, science fiction, mystery

[@thereddye]

I LOVE SHIPS I just thought I should tell you all

[@silvialanfredi7388]

I quite love ships too

[@glennlaroche1524]

Me too!!!!

[@UniversalCipher]

Of course, there's a difference between a Lumity and a Korrasami... wait a minute...

[@Sillimant_]

There's a book I read called Marrow. Despite all of humanity's advances, nothing is known about the almost unfathomably massive ship that just turned up one day and was made into a hotel that orbits the Milky Way. I don't think they ever actually find out the original use of the ship, it's been a while since I read it. As you'd expect, shenanigans happen that start the plot, and we end up traversing parts of the ship little explored and unknown with the protagonist. Brilliant book

[@ImmortalTreknique]

For the mighty algorithm goblins 🖖

[@Ionut-bg6vw]

Take my response

[@davidcox4436]

All hail, the algorithm goblins!😂

[@Jaydee8652]

By algorithms kindly claw!

[@HunterDrone]

actually an audio drama CAN do that, as long as it's radio-play style not audiobook style, via background sounds that go unexplained until you're supposed to realize they mean something.

[@johnathan651]

Did anyone else notice that in the Aquila Rift episode of LDR, the crew vanish one by one, and no one says anything... Each loop starts like they never existed, and their cryopods are down for maintenance. And shattered and empty when he really woke up. The implications of that were the most terrifying part of the whole episode for me.

[@mooniejohnson]

Yes! Glad I’m not the only one who noticed. That whole episode was brilliant.

[@Alexandragon1]

Thx for the video! Happy New Year!

[@Alligator81]

In Babylon 5, one of my favorite aspects of the series was the Vorlons. The fact that (initially) nobody knew what he looked like outside of his encounter suit only made him seem more alien. The little snippets of information we did get teased the audience’s imagination. The same is true for their spacecraft, which followed some of the points made here. Sometimes what you don’t see, or know, is more compelling than what you do. Also, what about *Thargoids* in Elite Dangerous?

[@glennlaroche1524]

K but the creepiest thing by fAr about the B5 Shadow ships was that skrEEEEEm they made as they moved.

[@pavonian7531]

For me nothing beats the first reveal of the Stranger in Outer Wilds. From noticing the anomaly in the satellite images, flying out into deep space and seeing the impossible eclipse in person, cautiously approaching as it grows to envelop the sun and finally passing through the cloaking field into the shadow of this planet sized alien megastructure that has been hidden here all this time only visible through the few lights shining off the bizarre spiky hull and the glow shining out from the docking bay with the creepy music playing. It might not be that different to other examples but the fact that it's the player discovering all this on their own accord experiencing it directly with no hand holding is crazy. Pretty cleaver how for all future visits you approach from the sun facing side making it much more well lit, signifying how it's now less of an unknown.

[@VolcanicSpacePizza]

Really the entire DLC just runs on mystery factor, and it does it damn well too.

[@hosannaamane6031]

Been a while, welcome back Spacedock

[@anthonyklanke1397]

The hidden technique worked really well for the demagorgon in stranger things 👍

[@SyndicateUprising]

The thargoids in elite dangerous were really creepy for a while

[@AndyHerbert254]

SG1 passively followed this for every nemesis, though less in a mystery way and more in a development way going from weak to effective against the enemy, and additionally we learned more and more about the gouaould and ori and some about the replicators (don't forget the wraith SG Atlantis) as the show progressed. Now imagine if the borg ship's interiors were never revealed (minus some closeups of Picard in Best of Both Worlds), though for story reasons the drones would be known. Voyager's borg arc would have to change to get 7 of 9 into the crew somehow, but otherwise I think it could've made the borg even more mysterious. Imagine in First Contact not knowing what the inside of a borg ship looks like, and what sort of reaction you might have throughout the movie seeing glimpses of the technology wrapping itself around the ship until the climax when Picard enters engineering and the entire room has been changed.

[@Vinemaple]

What a great choice of topic for the channel And I love how you transitioned it into the more generic trope of "don't show too much."

[@90lancaster]

Dead Space and Event Horizon have a mystery - suspense vibe along with the Horror too. I guess you could say the base you explore in Doom 3 does too. Maybe even the Riddick game/s.

[@hectorrubio7141]

Happy new year SpaceDocks!!

[@SnazBrigade]

i think a fun expansion on some of these tropes is having all this build up with dark and unknowable things hidden from the audience (and maybe also the characters) and then subverting it a little at the end, but not too much. Almost Vger-y. where we spend the whole movie building up to 'what the fuck is this immense nigh infinitely powerful being?' and then we get to the center and its a little probe from our past who has come home (admittedly he's been working out a bit). I really want to see more media take the approach of tricking the audience almost and using as a plot point that a lot of things that are unknown are inherently frightening, but when you take a second to really look, you'll find out they're not. Id love a movie about UFOs and how the government's of the world prepare for the worst and then when you finally get to it expecting some horrible eldritch nightmare, it's like, a small crew of socially awkward scientist types who didn't do a good job of hiding as they watched us peacefully. Even make them look as non-threatening as possible, like, they're a bunch of ewoks, or 6 inch long cephalopods who have to travel in wheeled fishbowls when outside the ship

[@padawanmage71]

What was horrifying about the Shadow ships in Babylon5 was the fact a LIVING, SENTIENT BEING was the actual CPU of the ship! That was one reveal that almost made me throw up 🤢

[@trapperjohn6089]

I want to see a movie version of rendezvous with Rama

[@hectorrodriguez9382]

I believe Denis Villeneuve (Dune's director) was working on that.

[@mike7652]

Here's one for Al Gore's Rhythm. Also, great video topic!

[@sw-gs]

Dune Heighliners are explained, but in apocrypha to the move like artbook. They work in different way than those in books: instead of transporting ships inside they always travel in pair with one jumping between between systems and connecting a subspace portal to it's twin ship. Ships then fly inside first Heighliner and exit second one in another system.

[@DESTRUCT0NAT0R]

You can kinda see that too in the clip. There's a planet partially visible in the background through the center of the heighliner, but it isn't on the outside of where the ship we see is.

[@judet2992]

That explains why you can see part of a Neptune like gas giant in the back but not the rest and Arachis isn’t a moon.

[@DESTRUCT0NAT0R]

@@judet2992 it's a really cool and somewhat subtle detail.

[@CantankerousDave]

Except that means that both endpoints have to travel to their destinations the slow way. Which would take decades or centuries or longer.

[@sw-gs]

@@CantankerousDave They are not. They are still using Holtzman Drive to travel between planets, only how ship transports cargo is changed in movies. Principle is the same: Navigator jumps with ship into target and connects to another an singularity to another ship creating mobile space gates. Which is pretty clever, because even if someone would stole ship and used it to travel between space to bring fleet, it wouldn't work without sister ship. Event Horizon is even seen in scene where Harkonnen are attacking Atraides at night. When camera goes up and shows Heighliner on orbit spitting Harkonnen fleet, ship is distorted and partialy hidden.

[@enisra_bowman]

tbf, i've seen the Original Aliensuit and it's still impressive

[@90lancaster]

Star Trek TOS had one - oh and Dark City might count too.

[@Amexel]

I’m a big fan of MASSIVE GEOMETRIC SHAPE spaceships for something mysterious. The Traveller from Destiny is still great in this regard.

[@TheOneWhoMightBe]

Although it's not a ship, Ramiel (screams in geometry) from Evangelion kind of fits.

[@kettch777]

The Rana ships from the Rendezvous with Rama series by Arthur C. Clarke. Even once you're told about the inside, it's still a mystery.

[@kelvinchewjw]

I favorite mystery ship reveal, the macross DYRL saturn shadow reveal, just from seeing the SDF1's lights from the shadow slowly revealing the full size of the ship as it emerges out of the shadow and panning shots of the ship's civilian sectors and military control centers and launching valkyries

[@JBTriple8]

Happy National Sci-Fi Day yeah the Dune Designs put both movies top tier also the Bene Gesserit Ship evokes Close Ecounters vibes also no clear images exist online of it.

[@ctw30002000]

I would like to add the Lanky ships from Marko Kloos' "Frontlines" series. They are the vessels of a mysterious alien species who are essentially multi-storey high mute creatures, a little bit like the Coverfield monster, that compete with humanity for planetary real estate. Their ships are not built but it is implied that they are grown. They are cigar-shaped, blackene and pitted giants, no means of visible propulsion. They seem to be too thick-skinned for conventional weapons to harm, like their masters, but they can be killed by hypervelocity missiles (almost light-speed, accelerated by using pulse nuclear detonations as thrust).

[@daisukeds85]

Made this video before watching Dune: Prophecy didn't you? There's a shot of a Highliner folding space in that series.

[@Blackout5871]

When I was a kid, the reveal for Star Trek TMP's Veeger ship was just confusing. Whatever they were showing was covered in way too much fog, and I couldn't tell where the Enterprise was in relation to it. I thought it was somewhere inside the frigging thing. I'm so glad they went back and redid the sequence.

[@clayongunzelle9555]

The point you made about leaving some things to viewer's imagination is so important, in the modern age of media that is almost lost because of endless spin offs sequels and prequels

[@jorgea5426]

Recently read "Dark Forest" form the rememberance of time trilogy (Spoilers ahead) We never get to know much about the Trisolarians, and other aliens are even more mysterious. In the chapter with Singer, the alien that destroys the solar system, we get very vague terms about the aliens.

[@MsZeeZed]

The big reveals about Ridley Scott’s career is the more he tries the worse the result. His best work seems to have come about due to time & budget pressure, as long as a few geniuses have been working on the material ahead of time. Give Ridley ULTIMATE POWWER and a project turns to nothing much PDQ 🤷🏻‍♀️

[@UniversalCipher]

Not to mention the fact that Alien and Aliens were basically refined by his fellows Dan O'Bannon and James Cameron respectively. In short, Scott's real good at visuals and aesthetics, but storytelling... face it, it's the other people who made the works alongside that made them great, kind of like how Marcia Lucas and her creative control is the real mother of the Star Wars Original Trilogy, not her then-husband George's.

[@kensaiix]

props for the names in the top left

[@xwolpertinger]

Poor Love Death + Robots alien getting slandered, it just wants to help!

[@leonp7235]

So I'm not weird? The aliens heart was breaking at the end, because it wanted to make the humans happy but just didn't understand them well enough to give them anything but pleasure. Right?

[@jamesthemuchless]

I always loved the first reveal of the Ori ships from Stargate. The soft, rounded lines and the big glowy bit that seems to be the power source gave it a very different feel from the rest of the ships in the series. In that first confrontation before the action actually starts they create a ton of suspense with the sort of beautiful mystery of their appearance.

[@CantankerousDave]

Problem was, the design gave you zero sense of scale.

[@casbot71]

As well there's the original Stargate movie as a stand-alone - without the TV series. I saw that at the cinema in it'soriginal run¹, and while the Goa'uld Ha'tak mothership was shown in full daylight, it still had the mysterious ship feel. The details revealed by it being out in the open just added to the mystery because it had so much ancient Egyptian design language. That mystery needed for the mothership to be seen clearly enough for the audience to go "Wait... thats like the old Egyptian stuff I learnt back in school as a kid??" It built on the half remembered stuff from history classes in school. ¹yes, I'm that old... biologically speaking.

[@therealshadow99]

In my Guardians of the Stars setting, about 4 stories in there is an encounter with an alien ship that is dark sphere with spiney arms reaching out in front of it. It's actually an intense climax for the story and the heroes don't so much win as the aliens get 'bored' and leave after dealing insane levels of damage to the rag tag fleet of the heroes. For 10 more books there is no sign of any actual aliens outside a few scattered artifacts until a scout vessel finds a derelict alien ship and the heroes are sent in to research it as the only ones with experience dealing with aliens, but very little of the vessel is actually seen... Instead a small part of it juts out from a gas giants ring...

[@DrakeAurum]

All those examples, and yet no mention of the prototypical Mysterious Object of cinematic science fiction, the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

[@thekaxmax]

Wasn't a ship

[@DrakeAurum]

@@thekaxmax Well, not just a ship. It's kind-of a ship, a gateway, a beacon, a teacher, a remote stellar manipulator, maybe a living being - it's whatever it needs to be.

[@PltOffPPrune]

+1 for Event Horizon!

[@robertb6889]

Babylon 5 shadows was my first thought.

[@Kalebfenoir]

I still feel like V'ger was one of the best things in Star Trek. So mind-numbingly huge that it was hard to comprehend. I still feel like its size gets grossly understated in the wikis and stuff. Like saying it was 79 kilometers long - which is BIG in Star trek. But it took the Enterprise 12 hours to cross its hull at 'low impulse', which is still very fast. Pretty sure the aperture they entered later was more likely 79km across. LoL.

[@Gaarafan007]

maybe the physical ship was that large, but I seem to recall the cloud that accompanied it was multiple AU in size, like it would cover most of the Sol system.

[@Kalebfenoir]

@Gaarafan007 my thought is in line with the original dialogue describing the cloud as being like 82 AU across, which would make it as big as the solar system out to the Kuiper belts. And that it shed the field as it got closer to the Sol system so it wouldn't disrupt the system... but also that the ship itself was several thousand km long, which would account for the time it took for the enterprise to cross it in so many hours. It pulls up to Earth, bigger than any known structure, and... waits. It has to be HUGE. These days in other ST shows like Voyager, you got things like Borg Nexi that are huge... but they aren't mind-breakingly, impossibly huge. V'ger should always be something so big you can't admit it's that big. Like it's length is the distance between Earth and Mars or something.

[@Gaarafan007]

@@Kalebfenoir I watched a Trek Culture video recently about stupid things from that movie, and number 1 was the Klingons attacking the cloud. They tried to put the size into perspective: If the cloud was the size of Earth, the Klingon ships would have been smaller than a human red blood cell. Why would you attack something so mind bogglingly huge?!

[@enisra_bowman]

@@Kalebfenoir they retconned it to a more realistic 2 AU, still enormously large but more believeable than 82

[@Kalebfenoir]

@enisra_bowman I still like the 82 AU cloud, since it was big enough to be a threat across entire sectors, including nudging into the Klingon empire on its way. The ship though... it should be a 4 digit kilometer long thing at minimum. Something longer than the Moon's radius, but maybe not it's diameter. It doesn't feel like a 100km ship or shorter. If they flew over it at more than 400kmph (wish they gave proper speeds to Impulse) as an example, they'd clear the ship in 15 minutes. Not 12 or 24 hours of travel. The faster their impulse is, the longer that ship has to be by exponential growth to make the time work.

[@iain-duncan]

In my opinion, High Charity had a good vibe of being impossible and unknowable even when you were staring its inner workings right in the face. The game introduces you to the covenant capital from up above, where you can really get a feel for the insane vastness of the city, but quickly your fascination with the idea of such a massive city in space, or even just a city that massive at all, turns to horror as you realize that all those uncountable numbers of people are going to die cold and alone.

[@seatspud]

Rare comedic example: the UFO in Cheech and Chong's Next Movie. The aliens came for weed!

[@recurvestickerdragon]

dude: where's my car

[@corporategunner5972]

My favourite example of the trope, though technically not a spaceship in the tradtional sense, would be the RX-104FF Penelope from UC Gundam's Hathaway's Flash. It opts out the lights in favor of an alien-like sound made by it's prototype flight system. Combined with it's unconventional deaign, at least compared to the earlier Gundams in it's timeline, as well as it's impressive speed, the use of powerful beam weaponry, and the movie's battles being set up at night. Giving it a sense of mystery and otherworldly despite it's origins being established early as it came out from the setting's ubiquitous MS manufacturer; Anaheim Electronics.

[@matteste]

Another contender could be the Turn machines from Turn A Gundam given how both are steeped in mystery and have the potential to end the world.

[@Joel-re9kt]

You could mention about the alien ship encountered by Prometheus in SG-1 episode Grace

[@recurvestickerdragon]

haven't yet watched, but the subject matter always makes me think of the something or other vagabond from the sw expanded universe books

[@steemlenn8797]

It's not only the lights when you open the ramp, it's also that they always come out very slowly.

[@steemlenn8797]

X4 has the mysterious fast cylinder ships too. But they don't appear in te game. It's the creators of the gate system and sometimes they fly through them faster than anybody else can. (And their ships juuust fit into the rings, which also shows you how big they are, because every other ship is a lot smaller, even a XL carrier.)

[@philrm99]

Brilliant 😊

[@filanfyretracker]

the Sentient Murex ships from Warframe might fit into this category too.

[@aceofspadesguy4913]

One note about books, in a book you can be even MORE mysterious or more grotesque because the audience can neither see nor hear what’s happening, only what you tell them, and their imagination will embellish whatever you write. Authors (at least ones I’ve been reading lately) will very often “hide” a known character in a scene by using descriptors rather than a name, ie: “the tall man in a black cloak,” you can’t do that in visual media, and even audiobooks can ruin the effect because you can often recognize voice the narrator uses for that character. Obviously it shouldn’t be overused, but the authors I’ve been reading/listening to use it to great effect when painting scenes.

[@noneedtoknow07]

You also have the Reavers in firefly. You don't ever really get a good look at them you just know they are wrong.

[@souplike.homogenate]

7:23 - BEYOND THE AQUILA RIFT from LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS It's cool. Go watch it. Unless you are an arachnophobe. Then don't.

[@TotallyNotAFox]

While we are at it: "Sonnie's Edge" is awesome, too

[@josh113866]

2 seconds shown of Event Horizon?! I'm a happy camper!

[@Em.P14]

oh god, the hello tom moment in love death and robots ... so fucked up xD

[@KissTheGreat]

Just getting into the video so don’t know if it is here yet, but the later ships from the expanse books deserve a mention, the Laconian ones.

[@knghtbrd]

Hoojiwana, I kinda feel a need to highlight something you said in a previous video on this channel (and apologies if it was Daniel or someone else) about it being a bit silly when properties will simply have ships with tentacles or whatever weirdness and not have identifiable things like engines and whatnot. It seems to run counter to what you're saying here-seems to, though I don't think it quite does. The difference, I think, is that with something like the ships in Dune … we don't see them, we don't understand these staples, and we don't understand how they work. Not seeing these elements doesn't mean they're not there or that they're magic or something. And I think you can find examples of it being done well and done poorly both in Babylon 5. Some of the ships do have like random tentacles on them for who knows what reason. But that spidery-looking Shadow vessel design, a ship that just seems to stretch out and blot out stars for a moment, that screams in your mind as it passes by, and that just ripples in and out of hyperspace while everyone else has to open a portal in and out-that was a mysterious ship in 1996! The difference is between bolted on weirdness and something simply beyond our understanding.

[@Americanbadashh]

7:40 Comics can do this as well with page turns. It's a big feature in some famous horror manga.

[@SuperExtremeTNT]

dune prophecy (part of the VN dune universe) shows the big highliner actually arriving in a system, I would recommend a watch just for the space ships in it

[@wayneralph945]

Can't help but thinking that instead of being clever Colonial Marines fighting Aliens in various settings would have made more money.

[@thekaxmax]

Different story being told

[@lucaskobain]

The Anubis class ships in The Expanse were tremendously spookie. Human made ships, stealth and black and armed, all side weres different.

[@Secondconvex]

Babylon 5 thirdspace! The ships that came from the portal were cool.

[@schannoman]

Oblivion did a decent job in the first acts as well of keeping the mystery of the ship

[@Randiezorzorzor]

@Spacedock, are you gonna cover the Star Wars Skeleton Crew and its Onyx Cinder ship, latest episode was pretty neat when it comes to sci fi ships.

[@Pretender6]

@5:30 its the reason that i would argue that Pacific Rim would feel like the 3rd movie of a trilogy, 1st movie was godzilla with a jaeger prototype, 2nd movie being a war propaganda movie at the height of their in-universe popularity with first decommisions shown at end scenes.

[@goldenfiberwheat238]

7:56 what is this clip?

[@j.wicker6170]

The book series "Area 51" had bad aliens called "The Hive", they had a ship (used to invade planets) called a "Battlecore". That ship was 6000mi long.

[@krisgonynor689]

Fun fact" The Lady Jessica (from Dune) is the daughter of the Reverend Mother - at least according to the Dune Encyclopedia. Her son, Paul, never reveals that fact to her, even though he can channel all of their common ancestors so knows that is a fact.

[@Razorgeist]

The Enterprise-J is sort of like that too.

[@matteste]

Although mechs rather than spaceships, the Turn A and Turn X from Turn A Gundam stand out to me given both the setting and that even within it, there isn't much known about those. Also helps that their design is just really alien for the series.

[@Poipole_lover]

Okay, so since I was inspired by how by the 25th century in Star Trek, Starfleet is actively working on faster than warp(or F.T.W.) drives, so I wanted to write a book where it takes place in the 2250s and humans finally have left Earth and spread out to the other planets due to how advanced technology had become, and so because of the technology, the Earth Space Fleet(or E.S.F.) can focus on only making two classes of ships. The first class of ships is called the Archangel class, which is similar to resupply ships and civilian and military freighters. And then there's the Diablo class ships. Diablo class ships are the warships of the military(mostly made up of Destroyers, Cruisers, and Battleships), and these warships have Folding Drives which folds the space between point A and point B and brings the two points together. Frigates, Corvettes, and Fighters don't exist since they are not big enough to have armor to survive weapons like particle accelerator cannons, railguns, and missiles(and they are not big enough to contain or have the power to use the Folding Drives).

[@seraphwithatank6535]

I agree, the borg count in the early days