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

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

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.

FTL is usually a conceptual magic black box to a large extent, but it's not uncommon for it to have distinctive architectural/aesthetic implications. Examples include:
-Star Trek warp nacelles
-The 'ship-in-a-hoop' designs you can see in a number of properties but for an easy visual Sword of the Stars human ships have this.