Speaking as an engineer, most TV and movie starships look stupid to me. You look at early posters of the Enterprise (original series) and they clearly hadn't decided what the nacelles were supposed to be. They show flames emerging from the rear ends. Not only is the design structurally weak, but the ship would spin like a pinwheel.
Then there was the "WW2 in Space" era, pioneered by Japanese anime. Star Blazers in the US. Capital ships and aircraft with jets added as an afterthought. And the apparent internal "gravity" is always at right-angles to the direction of thrust and motion. I'll pick
>>7866383 and
>>7855313 as random examples of this trope.
Nowadays, artists take advantage of CGI to add incredible amounts of detail to outer surfaces. Rationalized as "doesn't matter because there's no air resistance". But someone has to go outside to maintain all that junk and humans are clumsy and awkward working in vacuum. Anything which can be installed within a pressurized environment ought to be.
Doesn't mean ALL visions of the future are poorly thought out. Leonov from "2010". Some of the spacecraft from "Babylon Five", especially Earth's space navy. Most of "The Expanse".
This is my work and I'll freely admit I'm not a very good 3D artist. Simple geometric shapes are about my limit.
