Spaceship Aesthetics

Some brief and glib sound-bytes re: Future-Tech Aesthetics (see also: Chapters 2 and 3 in ye olde design document)

Avoid archaisms
- If we haven't been doing it that way since World War II, we probably won't be doing it that way 1200 years from now. Sometimes the game environment demands this of us (e.g. engaging targets at a range we can actually see them - modern airplanes routinely do better than that now). However, even if eventually succumbing to such constraints, we should fight against such outcomes with our Gauss rifles, and not greet them warmly in our biplanes launched from our massive conning tower.
Components should do something...
- Random widgets and greebles for surface textures are one thing, but it's preferable that larger portions of a vessel and their corresponding components not all be watermelons in vise grips (for watermelon reference, see: The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension).
... Except when they shouldn't
- Some groups or individuals want something that just LOOKS important or impressive to the untrained eye, even if it doesn't actually do anything. Luxury vehicles should be ostentatious. The decorating approaches of self-absorbed dictators should be vainglorious. After all, it's not just a watermelon in a vise grip, it's a gold plated watermelon in a platinum vise grip (malleable metals that they are be damned).
Technological advance != magic
- A component that does its job while at least loosely obeying the known laws of physics is usually better than one that violates them utterly, even if the former is inconvenient and/or boring. Moreover, some technologies will advance at very different rates and in very different manners than others. Try to think about what sort of advancement curve one is positing, and whether that renders absurd results when taken out to 1200 years. In particular, be very careful with exponential curves, which are generally unsustainable. Otherwise, one may take a real or plausible technological advance to a magical level of applicability.
  - Related - You can't solve the halting problem
  - Try to differentiate between problems that cannot, by construction or reduction, be solved under any circumstances (e.g. the halting problem is undecidable - by definition, no algorithm can be written for it, and no computer can compute it) , and problems to which it is highly implausible that we will find some viable solution to (e.g. the traveling salesman problem is NP-Hard, and thus only tractable for large inputs if P=NP). If we've rock solid proven it to be impossible, then the snowball effects of introducing a solution are probably far more massive than desirable, undercutting much or all of our knowledge base. It's a fine premise for a more surreal endeavor, but not for this universe.
Some *magic* likely required
- No matter how hard you try, sometimes you'll need to invent an impossible component or technology, like a "jump drive", or whatever other gremlin-powered weirdness provides FTL. As per the sentiment of the previous point, there is much to be gained from abusing as few magical technologies as possible - if you can stretch out one magical tech to cover all of the low-plausibility required components, even if only tenuously, the magical tech is already magic, so it's already wrong - just define it to work that way.
Don't claim the *magic* actually works outside the game
- This is an aesthetic no-no. If we can extrapolate (even somewhat wildly) from modern, reputable research, then it wasn't magic in the first place. If it does something magical, and you think you can extrapolate from modern understandings of reality, you've probably done something wrong, and it's almost certainly still just as magical as any other whatnot we could have chosen that no one in their right mind would defend as being reality based.
It's more important that we see some sort of recognizable component than it look exactly as it should given its real-world properties
- Symbolism and iconography can be your friends. It's more important that it is clear that a spaceship has radiators and retro thrusters and so forth and that an observer (with some practice) can pick out the same component types across a set of similarly designed vessels than that each component necessarily looks exactly like what it would be if it were real. That said, if "reality-based" extrapolated visuals are at all interesting for a given component, it's probably worth at least basing the abstracted final product on some real aspects - in the long run, the more we match with the real world, the less we have to police our creativity to avoid continuity gaffes.
Aliens won't share our design priorities ...
- And neither will future humans - but they'll be closer to our own.
... But they won't put their toilets on the outside of their ships
- Just because aliens or future humans won't see things the same way we do today, doesn't mean they'll be differentiate themselves by just being crazy. Presume that, no matter who designed it, the ship works. Thus, it will have the necessary components. It will have them in some reasonable configuration that allows them all to be utilized to some degree. It may not be optimal, but it will work. Beyond that -- now that is where the artist can go to town defining the distinguishing aesthetics of a given group's creations.
Spaceships are large, expensive, not profoundly dense, and dangerous to operate
- They're big. Really big. Forget what you've seen in George Lucas land with regard to those little one man jobs with the pilot sticking his head out to ask for directions. There are dinky little ships, but they're strictly for short trips - pinnaces and maintenance ships and puddle jumping whatnot. However, the big ones aren't solid chunks of metal - if that were the case we couldn't build more than a couple of them. There's no drag worth mentioning (solar wind << engines) so there's no need to worry about the aerodynamics. Vacuum is a nice insulator, and it's nice to keep the crew quarters far away from the fusion reactor. Likewise, lots of surface area --> better heat dissipation. While we may gloss over it for game purposes, it's worth at least sometimes remembering that your reaction drive is a weapon of mass destruction (see Niven's first Man-Kzin war story re:Angel's Pencil) Using your main engines on an inhabited area of the planet is going to be nothing short of criminal. Of course, you probably wouldn't be landing in your actual ship proper anyway, because it'd likely be a one way trip - and even if it isn't it's a boondoggle to pay for the fuel to get a big ship out of a gravity well repeatedly :). Long story short, an interstellar spaceship is not a car analogue, not everyone has one, not every government will let particular people own one, you can't park it in your garage, you can't refill it on pocket change, and people don't want you flying it near their house.

Example info: "Insights on the Aeran Ascendancy", excerpt from the big document

Aeran Portfolio Example

feel free to ignore particular craft descriptions, they are included for completeness, not completed-ness :)

Components