LogFAQs > #964594466

Depends on the intended use of the ship.

A ship designed to exit or enter atmosphere in any way would absolutely benefit immensely from being as aerodynamic as possible (to the point of it likely being necessary). A ship designed to stay in space 100% of the time wouldn't need to worry about that, but would still need to avoid being built in an entirely ridiculous design because as DrPrimemaster pointed out, inertia and stress points are also a factor. The last thing you want is for your primary engine to fire and just rip straight away from the rest of your ship because you hired an art student to design it.



Firewood18 posted...

Unless it was built in space.

But then it would also need to be able to dock in space.

It's the Star Trek problem. When you make the Enterprise too large to feasibly enter atmosphere and land on a planet, you need teleporters or transport shuttles to explain how the crew get on and off when visiting planets.

In a realistic scenario, you'd either need orbiting spaceports at both ends of the trip or some other means of entering atmosphere (like transport shuttles with docking capability) if you build a ship that can fly in space but not in air. Or it would need to have a function where it never needs to enter atmosphere (ie, mining airless asteroids for minerals, then transporting them to another airless factory world for processing).

Otherwise your ship is mostly useless if it can't actually interact with any planet that has atmosphere of any kind.