I don't mind the "strange" ship design, after all as you say aerodynamics means squat in space - but as Nanaki observes, we simply lack models. They just need to give us more to choose from.

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Edit:
Files in \Data\XMLSchema\ appear to be ignored; in the modding thread I tried to create a new item (game crashed), then modify an existing one (game ignored the change). If they can make these files actually be able to change things in the game then that would be fine.