I have to vote with Mizrael. The show Starlost wasn't very big, a Saturday morning type show as I remember, but the ship was huge! I remeber reading the "bible" for the show and it was made up of a large number of habitats that measured on the order of 3 miles (or maybe kilometers) across.

mike

 

Quote - sounds like all the bases are covered. There was a Japanese cartoon (in America it was called Starship Yamato)..which was the size of a large battleship...wait.. it was a large batteship..;) I'm not sure if it predates Star Wars, tho..

The Argo was designed to resemble the WWII battleship Yamato, so, yes, it was the size of a battleship.
 
The other EDF (Earth Defense Force) battecruisers were actually larger than the Argo. And the ships with the dual wave-motion guns were much larger. In fact, by the time of the "Comet Empire" series, the Argo was one of the smaller ships in the fleet!
 
The Comet Empire was actually a massive starship within a moon-sized ship, which was then covered with a comet-like shielding.
 
P.S. In the US, the series was called "Star Blazers". Season 1 was "The Quest For Iscandar", season 2 was "The Comet Empire", and season 3 was "The Bolar Wars".
In Japan, the series' title was translated to be "Spacebattleship Yamato", "Be Forever Yamato", and "Arrivederci Yamato". Sorry, I don't know why the last series was translated into Italian!
 
--John

Yeah, I'll go with Star Lost. One of my favourites growing up. If memory serves, there were dozens domes, each housing a different culture. Each dome was roughly the size of a carribean island.

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Never saw Starlost. Was it a UK or a US show? Did Harlan Ellison write it? I seem to remember that name in connection with his, somehow.
OMG DIOLMA! Pedantic?! Just a bit! "Space ship" vs "space construction" is really splitting hairs. Especially since just about anything in space MUST have some cabability to maneuver. Even orbiting stations would need attitude jets to make minor course corrections and keep from eventually de-orbiting due to atmospheric drag. Remember Skylab? (Pedants in da house! Woo hoo!)

I remember Silent Running too. I saw it as an adult back in the 90s. Great movie, great concept, and the sensibility was just about 180 degrees from modern day science fiction. (The hero of the movie is an ENVIRONMENTALIST? He feels REMORSE and GUILT over killing? He HUGS a ROBOT?! Who are they going to get to play him in the remake - The Rock?)

Does anyone remember Dark Star? Didn't that also involve a gigantic ship?

Attached Link: Starlost

I'd forgotten about Starlost, but it wasn't on very long to be memorable. It was developed by Harlan Ellison, whose creative career in the last decade seems to be more devoted to suing anybody who makes a movie that remotely used an element that could have come from one of his tales. Ellison successfully sued for the Terminator series as being based on his Outer Limits episode, Soldier, because it involved a soldier traveling back in time. Luckily, for Harlan, HG Welles isn't around to ask him where he got the time travel idea. The Starlost ship owes a lot to Silent Running. I don't recall liking Starlost. I wanted to because there wasn't much TV scifi back then, but it was so dreadfully boring. The concept was fine, but it was badly executed.

Even cooler trivia about Battlestar Galactica was using stock footage from Earthquake to show Cylon ships ravaging earth. A Cyclon ship comes swooping down, shooting rays, and a clever cut shows the rays hitting a building being demolished from Earthquake footage. As clunky as it sounds, it was very impressive.

Black Hole was after Star Wars, but the ship's design is more like the spindly Silent Running without the biospheres.

I don't recall the Darkstar ship as being big. Then, everybody's helping me remember shows and films I'd forgotten about, so I'm not going to count too heavily on my memory there.

Speaking of taking geekdom to new levels, there's an easter egg on the Aliens DVD showing a guy that created a poweloader costume for a Halloween contest. On a whim, he went to James Cameron's office and, without an appointment, put the costume on in the parking lot and was hired on the spot

"I don't recall liking Starlost. I wanted to because there wasn't much TV scifi back then, but it was so dreadfully boring. The concept was fine, but it was badly executed."

Funny..Ii remember similar feelings.

Darkstar was't large at all.. maybe Mill Falcon sized.

I'm surprised there are no 50's Sci-Fi movies with large spaceships I can recall.

Attached Link: http://www.planit3d.com

The largest pre-Starwars space vehicle, was...well...there are two correct answers actually, and you can find 'em both in the  "Trivia and Quizzes" forum over at PlanIt 3D 'cos someone set this question there very recently in the "Calling all Movie Buffs part II" thread.  One is from 1938 and the other from 1967. My guess was  "The Moon" from Space 1999, but that was deemed too small.[](http://www.planit3d.com/source/viewforum.php?f=42)

to whomever asked for Jupiter 2, Tony01701 has a model on his site. Also, would the monolith around Jupiter count as a spaceship? just wondering.  It's been mentioned before, but the ship(s) from When the Earth Collides (there was a sequel book, which just brought current fights between the Russians, Germans, etc., against the US ship on the new planet..too much baggage for nowadays..;)

As to who might play the environmentalist on a remake of Silent running, I don't know why, but Will Ferrel popped into mind..;)

Nope, Tony doesn't have one there, but he does have a robot for a $25 "donation"

There is a J2 over at rendervisions for about $10 though.

 

there was this really wierd series i saw a long time ago on very late night tv, like the arc 2 or something like that.  it was a spaceship that housed these civilizations from earth that was going to crash into a sun.  the people lived in huge domed environments  that stuck off the side of a long middle piece, and didn't even know in many cases that they were on a space ship.  there were a lot of wierd social structures...i specifically remember one where the society was a midevil society enduring a plague.  the adventurers were attempting to get through the domes to get to the controls to keep the ship from crashing in a long storyline.

 

that thing was probably pretty big.  i don't know if it is a 70's or 60's thing.

 

doh! o okay starlost...

 

helps if you read the entire thread...

 

Has anyone mentioned  Battlestar Galactica?

Quote - "Close Encounters" !!!  That was the movie title that escaped me!   I knew it started with an "E" though.  I can't remember any of the movie except for the part about the huge decending space ship towards the end.

Dig this for a piece of music and movie trivia...

David Bowie's album, "Ziggy Stardust", released in 1971, features a track titled "Starman".  The chorus of that particular song is a direct steal from "Somewhere Over the Rainbow".

Fast forward a few years to "Close Encounters" and you'll note that the plot of the movie is almost exactly based on Bowie's song.  And at the end of the movie, the mothership and the ground contact crew play a duet of...

"Somewhere Over the Rainbow".

"Okay, now this first thing is just going to look like a used bandaid, and it is, but the rest of the stuff don't make no sense without it, so you know, bear with me...
...Um, okay, this is a number 6 from somebody's address. Or.. is it a 9? You don't know! Ah, this is gravel, okay? Gravel. This is uuh... that's more gravel. Okay, oh, this is a shell. That.. to me, this is just me talking; it looks like a helmet for a mouse. Now, that sounds crazy, right? But, if you ask the mice about it they don't say nuttin'. I mean, they run the other way. At first I was just fishing with the helmet thing, but then from the mouse reaction I got, I.. got a little more.. concerned..."

;-)

I know that it was obviously post-Star Wars, but I'm surprised that no one has mentioned Spaceball 1. 

For anyone who hasn't seen Spaceballs, the opening scene was a parody of the opening scene from Star Wars.  Spaceball 1 passed by the camera just like the Star Destroyer, but every time you thought the end of the ship was near, another section started and it just went on and on for about 2 minutes.  When the end finally did pass by, there was a bumper sticker saying "We brake for nobody."

 

Ouch... I passed all the posts just to put there a note about the Spaceball's looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong ship... OK never mind...

I guess that leaves out 'Jews in Outer Space' from history of the world part 1..;) Yeah, I guess you'd have to go pre-77 for any submissions on this..;)

First season Star Trek - There was a giant spaceship in "The_Corbomite_Maneuver" episode:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corbomite_Maneuver

Quote - First season Star Trek - There was a giant spaceship in "The_Corbomite_Maneuver" episode:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corbomite_Maneuver

That's Balok's ship, the I.S.S. Feserious.  Around 200 times the size of the Enterprise, and still a lot smaller than the "correct" answer according to our "expert" at P3D.