Thanks. New - and very demanding - job and computer failures, nasty times. Hopefully, things are leveling out a bit, but it's likely to still be pretty intense until July.
A society's technology tends to reflect that society's attitudes. That rule of cool applies to individualistic societies; weren't too many cool-looking cars over the other side of the iron curtain, way back when there was one. For that matter, most utilitarian vehicles like buses tend to look more like bricks than spacecraft, as do most corporate-run 18-wheelers, with maybe some small bow toward streamlining in the interest of cutting fuel costs. A society that leans heavy toward the utilitarian's likely to have ships that lean heavy toward the utilitarian.
That's what I like about the Borg ship - it LOOKS like something a strictly utilitarian culture that disdained individuality would fly. The original Enterprise looked functional with a big bow toward grace, like, "We're building in space, we don't need it to look like a jetplane; mount the engines away from the ship for safety, let's give it a section that can separate and carry the crew away nice and comfortable-like if the ship gets scragged and the crew needs to escape. Oh, but make it look nice." The Klingon ships look like some Klingon artist said, "These things survive on shields and firepower, not bulk of armor; let's make it look fast and threatening, put the important people up here where they can survive to fight again if the ship gets scragged." But both of those always struck me as borderline impractical: concentrate your fire on one weak point, and you can cut the command section or an engine away. Only thing that likely saves them is the difficulty of concentrating fire on specific points of a distant target that's doing it's best to not get hit. Borg is, "Yeah, find a weak point; I dare you."
Almost nobody deliberately drives a "functional" car.
