And a holo deck that later was [del]stolen[/del] borrowed by Star Trek.
The Omega class destroyer is probably based on the Alexei Leonov in 2010. There are too many similarities to be a coincidence.
I’m not complaining though, I like both. More logical than the Discovery design, IMHO.
Why? In the Bab5 universe they have artificial gravity.
Some alien races had that technology, but not the humans.
I was thinking the exact same thing.
As scr4 noted, the humans didn’t have that technology until very late in the show. Basically, the humans were more powerful than most of the other alien races in the galaxy, but the few that were more powerful than the humans could basically kick the snot out of them (as the Minbari did during the Earth-Minbari War before the show takes place).
The humans get most of their interstellar technology by buying it from the Centauri (a decadent interstellar empire who loved art and toys and trinkets, three things with the humans could produce in abundance), later augmenting it with weapons technology purchased from the Narn Regime (who in turn stole it from the Centauri). Throughout the show, Earth makes various attempts to aquire advanced alien technology, with varying degrees of sucess (or spectacular failure, hence there no longer being an Earth research station on Ganymede)
At the end of the 4th season of the show, the Earth Alliance is bribed into joining the newly-formed Interstellar Alliance by being promised advanced artificial gravity technology, which they begin implementing on their newer ships some time after the 5th season of the show (the pilot movie for crusade featured two new Earth-built ships with artificial gravity, the Warlock and the Victory class destroyer. (I can’t provide a link for the Victory because Google and Wikipedia both randomly decided to take a break on me).
Eh, incomplete thought: What I was getting at was that the human starships, before they got artificial gravity, either operated with the crew in constant free-fall (and secured at their stations by safety harnesses) or used rotating sections to generate artificial gravit with centrifigal force (which a NASA engineer once told me doesn’t work well for people in their experience because it induces uncontrolable nausea if the person tries to move while in the spinning section, aside from the mechanical complexities of having a big spinning section on a space ship or space station.)
Does G.I. Joe count as sci-fi at all? Cause I wanna nominate the Trubble Bubble.
I thought the AE-35 unit was actually fine, and HAL was just using it as a pretext to get the astronauts to do an EVA.
Why have a spinning “section”? Why not just spin the whole ship? (And don’t let anybody look out the windows – that would make them even more nauseous.)
Duh, because while a ship with a rotating midsection is cool, a ship that just spins like a space dreidel would be goofy. 
Granted, if you make the ship badass enough, people will be AFRAID to mock you for your dreidel ship 
From a practical fanwank POV, I would say that having the whole ship rotate would make things like docking and fighter launch/recovery operations problematic. The hanger bay for the Omega Destroyer’s compliment of Starfuries, Thunderbolts, and Shuttles appears to be located in the forward non-rotating " Hammerhead" section. (We’ve never seen the inner workings of an Omega, aside from the bridge and some un-named compartment with a computer uplink, presumably near the cargo bay, wherever that is).
It is worth pointing out that until the Omega Destroyer, Earth had no apparant interest in trying to generate artificial gravity on their ships, being perfectly happy to let everyone just strap themselves into seats placed at odd angles all around the ship. I think the explanation was that the Omegas were designed to go on explorations/patrols that could last as long as a year at a time, while the older ships tended to go on shorter missions. There’s an even bigger ship called the Explorer, nearly as big as Babylon 5 itself, which features a rotating section that takes up most of the ship (instead of the Omega’s non-rotating forward section, the hanger bay, or at least the exterior entrance to it, on the Explorer is in a non-rotating hub similar to Babylon 5’s landing bay
The treeships from Dan Simmons’ Hyperion.
As I understand it, the nausea comes from the Coriolis effect, which become weaker as the rotating section grows larger. Your NASA acquaintance is hampered by having to deal with real life, where we can’t yet build a rotating ring a kilometer across in space.
Pffth, give me some duck tape and a crapload of popsicle sticks, and I’ll build you a spinning ring a kilometer accross!
I’d love to nominate Unicron, except he’d eat me (and my planet) for calling him a “vehicle.”
I nominate the very first starship - The Skylark of Space (and its even larger successors.)
The Pan Am spaceplane in 2001 is pretty cool too - mostly because it looks like it’s got decent legroom.
Linky be blanky.
CYBERDOODY!
Well, try this one–
http://www.bwtf.com/newsarchive/ultimate/primelg.jpg
Ah.
Much better!