By Joshua Tyler
| Published 4 seconds ago

Space science fiction is a lot of things, but it’s never more thrilling than when it takes place in a tiny, fragile dispenser of death. Starfighters are one of the best parts of space adventures, and while its likely that in real space combat they might not actually be all that useful, this doesn’t matter when it comes to enjoying good storytelling.

Just because it might not work doesn’t mean they have to be unrealistic. The best starfighters use real space physics to zoom around dealing death and destruction.

If you’re a space jock going into battle, what’s your ride of choice? We’re about to answer that question.

These are the best sci-fi starfighters.

5. SA-43 Hammerhead in Space: Above and Beyond

Space: Above and Beyond was developed specifically to be a series about space fighter pilots, so they had to get their fighter craft right. They did, and the result was the SA-43 Hammerhead.

1990s special effects weren’t quite up to the challenge of bringing the ship to life, but the design is undeniably great. The Hammerhead’s design blends the aesthetic of real world, modern fighter craft with that of the less aerodynamically limited environment of space. It’s beautiful.

Capable of flying both in a vacuum and in the atmosphere of a planet, the Hammerhead isn’t as realistic as some of the fighter craft designs on this list, but its realistic enough. In space, the ship often swoops and turns like a jet might in the atmosphere, though it is maneuvered with small attitude thrusters which help it turn and rotate.

Each Hammerhead carries two rail guns mounted on swiveling gimbals. So if a fighter comes up behind you, swing your guns to the rear and shoot backward.

One of the ship’s most unique features is the way it launches and docks in space. The cockpit detaches from the ship and pops up into a pressurized hanger bay on its mother ship. When a pilot wants to launch, he gets in the cockpit and it’s lowered and reattached to the frame of his Hammerhead.

In addition to the show’s CGI version of the ship, the Space: Above and Beyond team also built full scale models at an air base in Australia. Those full-scale models were eventually shipped to the US, and the unproven myth around them is that a Russian soldier spotted them and took photos, thinking they were a new type of American tactical fighter. If it’s so realistic it can fool Russian spies, then the Hammerhead belongs on this list.

4. T-65 X-Wing in Star Wars

There are several different variations of the X-Wing used in Star Wars, but none has topped the T-65 used in the original Death Star trench run by Luke Skywalker and Wedge Antilles.

Unlike most of the other sci-fi starfighters you’ll see on this list, there’s nothing realistic about an X-Wing. The same is true for every ship in Star Wars. They ignore Newtonian physics in favor of banking and zooming around like World War II snub fighters pushing through an atmosphere. That’s not a flaw; it’s an intentional choice George Lucas made to create as much excitement around his starfighter dog fights as possible.

The standard Star Wars X-Wing is a multifunctional craft. It only seats one human, but most X-Wings also carry an astromech droid to serve as their navigator, and in a pinch to conduct repairs on the go. It’s capable of both space flight and atmospheric flight.

When not in combat, the X-Wing’s S foils, short for strike foils, or stability foils, are usually kept closed. In this configuration, the starfighter is less deadly, but easier to pilot, particularly in an atmosphere. When in battle, S-foils are locked in attack position, creating the X shape which gives the ship its name.

X-Wings are one of the few types of starfighters capable of hyperspace travel on their own.vThey also boast heavy shields, four laser canons, and two proton torpedo launchers.

Star Wars is filled with amazing Fighter designs, but the X-Wing is the franchise’s best. It’s so good that it’s worth ignoring Lucas’s choice to skew the ship’s design more towards fantasy than science.

3. Gunstar in The Last Starfighter

The Last Starfighter is an under-appreciated 80s gem and a groundbreaking landmark in special effects, as one of the first films to make significant use of computer-generated animation. Unfortunately, even with all the Cray Supercomputers they used to render it, that computer animation doesn’t hold up and isn’t very good. Because of that, modern viewers might not have noticed just how cool the movie’s hero ship, the Gunstar, actually is.

It’s one of the best-looking starfighter designs ever imagined, and if you are having a hard time figuring out why I’d say that, based on this image, then take a look at the concept art show in the video included with this article.

Gunstars don’t just look good, they’re incredibly realistic. They take full advantage of real space physics and function the way a spacecraft actually should.vThey’re also armed to the teeth with wildly powerful primary weapons and a special secret weapon called Death Blossom, which blasts everything it has at the enemy all at once.

Of course, using Death Blossom comes with a cost: you run out of weapons, and your ship is left dead in space. If it was easy, it wouldn’t be fun.

It’s worth noting that in The Last Starfighter, the term “Starfighter” actually refers to a Gunstar gunner, not the ship itself. Now, we think of “Starfighters” as spaceships, in no small part thanks to The Last Starfighter, though that’s not what the movie intended.

2. Colonial Viper in Battlestar Galactica ’04

The 2004 Battlestar Galactica reboot series is about a lot of things, but chiefly it’s about what happens aboard a carrier hauling around starfighters as they attempt to escape the Cylons. That means the audience spends a lot of time in the show’s fighters, and so we’re lucky they did such an amazing job of making them cool.

The starfighters you see the Colonials using in BSG are called Vipers, and there are a couple of different varieties. When the Battlestar Pegasus shows up, later in the show, they add their shiny new Viper Mark VII’s.

The starfighter you probably associate most with the name is the Viper Mark II, the type of craft kept aboard the elderly and about to be decommissioned Battlestar Galactica when the Cylons attack. The Viper Mark II is outdated and old, but capable, and it serves the Colonial fleet well as they fight their way to Earth.

BSG has the best fighter-launching system in science fiction. It’s both incredibly thrilling and extremely practical if you’re a carrier looking to launch its fighters quickly. Vipers are propelled down a tube and expelled from the Battlestar at high velocity, giving them a shot at getting clear of the ship without being blown up if it’s currently under heavy fire.

Landing is a little more conventional. Vipers fly in and set down in one of its Battlestar mothership’s landing pods, where they are later reloaded into the ship’s launch tubes.

Vipers are also some of the most realistic fighter craft ever used in science fiction. They work on real space physics, with the ability to use maneuvering jets to turn 180 degrees and face backward while still continuing to move in the same direction. Taking full advantage of realistic space physics in some way, is something all the ships on this list have in common, except the ones from Star Wars.

1. Starfury in Babylon 5

Babylon 5 is the greatest science fiction franchise that modern viewers ignore. It’s held back from current-day relevance by the show’s early-90s level computer-generated space battles. That’s a shame because amongst all that computer-generated imagery are some of the best starship designs in all of science fiction.

The best of Babylon 5’s ships is, without question, the Starfury. The Starfury was an Earthforce standard for decades. It’s the ship Jeffrey Sinclair rode into certain doom at the Battle of the Line. It’s the ship Babylon 5 originally comes equipped with, complete with this insanely cool launching sequence, dispensing Starfurys, like the station’s firing infinite death into the cosmos. Starfurys may be the most realistic starfighter on this list, and also the most deadly.

Babylon 5’s starfighter was co-designed by Ron Thornton and Steve Burg. Their intention from the start was to use the ship as a means to showcase how Newtonian physics could be portrayed in space combat. It’s something that could not be done with practical models. It could only happen in CGI, and they wanted to take full advantage of being the first to use it on a television show.

Newtonian physics gives Starfurys a huge advantage over less realistic starfighters. You wouldn’t want to try and take on a Starfury in a slow-banking X-Wing. The Starfury uses attitude jets to maneuver but also its four powerful engines, which allow it maneuverability unmatched by any other science fiction vessel.

Fly up behind a Starfeury, and you may find yourself in front of it instead. You’ll only have a millisecond to look into the eyes of your executioner after the starfighter’s pilot uses space physics to spin his ship around 180 degrees and blast you in the face with the Starfury’s four forward-facing pulse cannons. All while maintaining his original speed and course.

The Starfury is a ship purpose-built for battle in space. It can’t enter an atmosphere, because that’s not what it’s designed to do. It also can’t generate its own jump-point, though the ship can use pre-existing jump gates to enter and travel through hyperspace.

Starfurys are often in battle and get blown up a lot, so they’ve built in a mechanism that allows pilots to get out of them fast. Hit the panic button, and the entire cockpit ejects from the engine assembly and floats off into space.

Later in the show, Babylon 5 adds a new type of starfighter to its arsenal. They’re a Starfury variant called Thunderbolts and they’re easily distinguished from the older models by their long noses.

Thunderbolts are designed to fly in the atmosphere as well as in space, so I guess, in that sense, they have some advantage. Yet, tThe original Starfury’s unobstructed view and likely better-turning radius would make it my starfighter of choice.

Babylon 5’s Starfury is the best sci-fi starfighter. Beat it if you can.