This is a rather open ended question so it might be hard to answer but I could use some direction.
I want to be able to tell some ships apart from similar role ships without needing to look at the name. I can and have downloaded ships, but most of them use parts from many factions and I kinda want the ships I use to still keep they style of the race I'm playing. I use default templates for ships with standard equipment and custom ships for prototypes. To differentiate between the three weapon types I decided to have kinetic ships be long like ocean ships, beams would be wide like aircraft, and that leaves tall for missiles. The only tall ship I can think of is an alliance cruiser from Firefly that looked somewhat like a flying city with tall buildings. However, city-ships doesn't look right for a tiny design so I think mechs for smaller missile ships.
I made one tiny kinetic ship that looks somewhat like the vulture from Starcraft and one mech that took a longtime to get to where I liked the look. It looks like a skier which is not what I planned but that's where I ended up.
So, any advice on how to get these things to look good? Like a person designed them and not just threw together?