Nice post, it seems like all the ship customization happened sometime after they arrived, all the generation ships seemed to look the same. Can only guess that the ships passed through some kind of space radiation cloud that has a unique affect on the design processes of the brain.

Not to go to far back, but I liked the simpler ship designes in Frontier, lots of classes, most were simple and functional looking. But seeing as the game is not based on realistic flight models anything is possible.

Then again look at weaponry, you have guns out today that can track an incomming artillery round and knock it out of the air, combat computers that can track and engage over a dozen enemies at a time. Ballistic targeting computers, the list goes on. Yet the best they have to offer hundreds of years in the future is a target lead crosshair.

All in all, I enjoy the game and will continue to pirate the free trade lanes for a while, and see what happens with Elite 4, hehe