Spaceship Design: What makes sense, and what's nonsense?

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

The video game Children of a Dead Earth claims to be rigorously realistic in almost all respects and the ships look pretty cool IMHO. Incidentally, the warships in that game tend to have pointy noses even though they're not intended to fly in atmosphere. Rather, the game is trying to model the benefits of using sloped armor.

Sloped armor won't be terribly relevant against beam weapons, or against kinetics at space combat speed (it basically increases defense by the same amount as it increases weight).