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

[Phil Masters]

Originally Posted by FF_Ninja

To give you a point of reference: I don't see any functional or physical inconsistencies or design flaws with the typical Star Trek and Star Wars faire.

If you're going to be using media references and are trying for some kind of approximate plausibility, The Expanse is a much, much better bet than Trek or SW. That merely has insanely powerful and efficient reaction drives and no radiators, which is a miracle of plausibility by media SF standards.

Originally Posted by FF_Ninja

My plan is to design an entire hierarchy of new ships for futuristic Earth, starting from the earliest space-fairing vessels, gradually incorporating FTL into the design (haven't settled on what FTL actually looks like in this setting), and building on that form factor over time.

FTL is usually a magic black box that gets you between locations. A much more important question is usually whether you're going to have magic reactionless thrusters and artificial gravity. Ladle enough miracle-tech on and quietly forget that space has a third dimension and you can have spaceships impersonating WWII battleships and fighters, and your spaceships will look nothing like anything built with current tech.