I prefer my spaceships to look like real working environments not just a lot of brightly-lit, stupidly-wide corridors and acting areas for the cast to perform in. (Every and any iteration of the
Enterprise and anything with ventilation ducts big enough to crawl down are just that. So are the White Stars and most of the rest of Babylon 5 for that matter - though at least Bab 5 had a maintenance squad to make just off-screen sparks every other episode - what
did they find to weld all the time?
The
Eagles from Space 1999. Had a weird combination of sleek aerodynamic cockpit and utilitarian girderwork that made them seem credible somehow. Cheap and easy to make too. They must have knocked them up by the dozen given the number that seem to get exploded or lost every week.
Firefly - of course. Now there's a ship that looked lived in. I saw an episode of
Enterprise the other week in which our heroes encountered a slowboat - a cargo ship with a generations of family living on board - and the ship looked like any other corridor with doors. No attempt to make the thing look like people
actually lived in it. Just a couple of shots of kids playing hide and seek. Firefly's set designers/dressers did a hell of a job.
Toybox from Planetes - a real housebrick of a craft held together with spit and duct tape, and one of the few credible zero G realisations on TV - the 'Fishbones' from that show were nice too.
The Valley Forge from Silent Running.
The Galactica (the 'new' one) - I've never liked the ubiquitous slidey doors that seem to come as Hollywood standard for all spaceships. The Galactica had door handles.
and just because utilitarianism isn't everything:
The United Planets Cruiser C-57D from
Forbidden Planet.
Ikari XB-1 - a spaceship so pointlessly huge it allowed one character to bring a piano on board as part of his personnel weight allowance.