My first impression from a 2 hours playing session was that the ships look kind of cartoonish.
What about replacing those shiny gray/blue/white plain textures with some others that look more metallic, old, used, and the like. What about some external pipes, wires, machinery and so on?
I mean, aestetic design is the last priority in space since there is no air an thus no aerodinamic considerations. Real ships would be made out of plain steel and with cheap, efficent designs: no wings, the cockpit in the very middle, round ships, square-like ones... that sort of stuff.
I, for one, think actual ships look somewhat cartoonish, like they were taken out of futurama (no offense to the artists).

Have a look at the Serco Promethius. Something like that?

They look cartoonish because the textures on the basic ships are not as advanced as they could be. This is due to the fact that not everyone's video-card can handle heavy bump-mapping, reflections, etc.

And because not all of those features are coded into OpenGL... But leave the poor guys alone! Think of how much work it would take to produce those textures with a team of dedicated texture artists... Then replace that team with Waylon. He's done a really 1337 job and I applaud him (along with the various other devs) for doing such a kick-ass job with meager resources and little/no manpower.

my only complain is about the ships.

Everything else looks awesome, especially, but no only, asteroids and planets.

I just wish ships looked less stylish and more "home-made" :)

hm...
i agree with you to an extent, mg. still, the basic ships will be scrapped eventually and there will be an entirely new fleet (only the specials will stay the way they are).
or so i heard, at least.
on the other hand, if you played wing commander 3/4, the ships weren't THAT detailed either. and there are people with not-so-good systems (me included) who would still like to play the game at an acceptable viewing quality in addition to fluid fps.

No air in space, therefore no rust.

There is a place for reality and there are places where it doesn't belong, we are used to ships looking aerodynamic, if something looks completely different from what we expect a lot of potential customers might not buy.

realism is not bad as long as it doesnt mess with gameplay. I understand reality must be adapted to gameplay, like setting max speeds, explosions and sound in space and so on, however a boat doesn't need wings even if a winged boat would look cool, wings are just useless on the sea as well as in deep space. That's what I mean.
Of course not scaring customers is important, but i think avoiding the "more of the same with better graphics" modern curse is even more important.
Just my 2 cents or whatever its said for a personal opinion.
no offense!

/me sadly point at all the threads in the suggestions part and mumbles something about devs having to do so much work they are probably not going to care outright about rust on the vults...