Its no secret, I'm a big fan of Science Fiction and I love ship design. I've kind of wanted to do this for a while where I counted down the top ship designs by franchise. Basically on some of these decisions it could even be one side or the other in terms of franchises. I have decided that I would take designs from Books, Comics, Video Games, TV series and Movies. I'm not looking at the realistic functionality of them, but the ship designs over all. I'll break this down into 3 postings. Tonight we'll start with 10 through lets say 7. Without any further ado, here we go.
10. The Wing Commander Series
One of my favorite Science Fiction video game series, though I don't consider the terrible movie to be part of it. Spread out over multiple video games and novels, we had a conflict of design philosophies by each of the three main sides involved. The Human Confederation had very efficient looking ships that kind of mirrored ships from other series. The Kilrathi ships were built to be purely intimidating all knife edges and non symmetrical designs, and the Union of Border Worlds had to steal and build home made ships.
For the Terrans, my favorite designs came in the Wing Commander 1 and 2 games, while the ships in 3 and 4 and Prophesy were cool looking ships they couldn't match the slick looking ships of the first two. The Hornet was a light fighter, with little in the way of weapons, but built for recon and speed. On the other side the Raptor from Wing Commander was heavily armed and armored and designed to tear about enemy ships in head of attacks.
The Hornet 
The Raptor
For the Kilrathi, as Video Game technology advanced they were really able to focus on a different design Philosophy. The Venerable Dralthi medium fighter had 4 variations with the last one being all knife edges and guns.
Dralthi IV
In Wing Commander 1 the toughest fighter to take on was the Jalthi, which featured 8 missiles and 6 heavy guns. Even in your heaviest fighter, if it got you in its sight, the first barrage would rip your shields down and the second would reduce you to atoms. It was slow and sluggish, but it was the definition of intimidation when you and your wing man came upon 4 of them circling like birds of Prey.
Jalthi
Union of Border Worlds Banshee
A home built Ugly Fighter that carried 4 fast firing lasers. It was always surprising that it could handle itself in a dog fighter, its design was ugly like a beat up alley cat but there was something appealing about it.
Banshee
9) Space Above and Beyond
A criminally cancelled series with a great story line and cast, but its ship design was top notch. You could argue that the Hammer Head fighter is an iconic design, and it looked like it should have been a Marine Fighter. It wasn't really designed to out maneuver anything, but it had a chin mounted cannon like you see on modern helicopter desings and a 360 degree dorsal mounted turret to keep enemies off of its tail.
The Human Carrier was a very cool looking design, that borrowed heavily from 20th century carrier designs, and the enemy Chig fighters just looked completely alien and were extremely maneuverable, giving them an early advantage in the war.
John F. Kennedy Carrier
Hammer Head Fighter
Chig "Ace" Fighter
8) Independence Day Aliens
I'm going to ignore the sequel, even though the ship design was fighter wise cool. But the original movie seemed to capture a design element that defined the alien culture. Their main city destroyer ships were all menace, but they were extremely industrial looking as well which makes sense, since they were a purely space fairing race and built around the idea of Grasshoppers that would strip a field before moving on. They were also built mainly to house and fire their massive stellar converter weapon.
Their fighters were extremely alien looking and even came with a unique engine noise. There was something terrifying about a massive swarm of these locust looking fighters ripping into everything around them.
Alien City Destroyer
Alien Raider
7) Buck Rogers in the 25th century
This one clocks in at number 7 because of one ship design that was so well done that it got you over the cheesiness of the rest of the series. The Thunder Fighter was designed by the late great Ralph McQuarrie, the interesting thing about this design was it was the original design for the Viper from BattleStar Galactica fame. There were some other very cool designs. In the second season which was terrible they added on Hawk as a character, and his customized fighter was very cool The Draconian Marauder looked like what it was a pirate fighter built for raiding.
ThunderFighter
Draconian Maurader
Hawk Fighter
Coming Soon 6 through 3. What are some of your Science fiction Star Designs that made you drop your popcorn in the theater, or beg your parents to buy a model of it for you for Christmas?