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Nina's right on that last count.
Favourite spaceships? Hard to narrow down. I loved a lot of the I-War ship designs, in particular, the Under New Ownership, a Navy destroyer captured by a bunch of pirates and covered in graffiti tags, including one over its entire top surface which says "TO THE NAVY - CATCH ME IF YOU CAN".
The UNO is over 500 metres long, to give you a sense of the scale. That's a big paint job.
I think, though, my favourite ever spaceship (and it took me a while to realise it) can be seen in this picture:
Herge drew that well over a decade before anyone landed on the moon; before anyone had really been in space. And yet he got a great deal of the physics right. Launching the whole rocket and bringing it back was a costly approach, but... give the guy a break! Inside, out, it's a perfect model spaceship. Secure, chunky, aerodynamic in that 50s' way that would become fashionable, and mainly full of fuel and supplies. The rocket Nina drew is the first one we built; Herge's rocket is possibly the best rocket ever dreamed.
I also love the spacecraft in Wells' The First Men In The Moon; an orthogonal ball of blinds that shield or let pass the emissions of a gravity-defying substance. It's so Victorian, but brilliant. |
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Moya.
To me, this sums up sexy, sleek rocket designs of the 60s. It's a space bullet full of thrust and action and fits the tone of Thunderbirds perfectly. I also love the rails working up from the boosters, they really look like they were put on to make it look cooler [which they were, really] which suggests a kind of functional decadent elegance about it. 
