Dynarsky stared at the blocky... things (he hesitated to call them ships) on the table. They looked modular. They had bits stuck on at odd places. There seemed to be no cohesive palette other than heat-reflective gray. Which, now that he thought about it, might make a few of his signature, elegantly-twisting radiators irrelevant. The entire thing looked not just born out of necessity and efficiency, but bound to it. It was closest in philosophy to Dent's Pre-Modern Neo-Anarchism*, when the famed designer had attempted to eschew all philosophies for something functional. That was right around [i]Eastwing[/i]'s first season of broadcasting, during the Kessian Fundamentalist Uprisings**. There was a reason that he'd won the competition, however. After blanching at the design, he forced himself to work with it.

His face went through several phases of outright disgust, concern, confusion, and suspicion. Then he regained his composure.

"Those are, um... very... functional?" he said. "I suppose we could use some of those concepts as a basis for the final design. But what message are we trying to send here? That this is a bare-bones military expedition, and that any alien life we encounter on the other side should steer clear? It seems like the design suggests a desperation and aggression on our part, as if we're shouting, 'stay back! I bite!'" Gene paused.

"Having been in some of your ships, I think we can make the interiors substantially more liveable, too. Doesn't anyone get sick of gray? And the lack of decent views? If this is going to be a long term mission, then we ought to make at least the interior pleasant. Which, to be frank, you can't do with such a modular, factory-printed design. It's not like we don't have the experience to make a functional bespoke ship."

"In short, if we did use your designs, it would have to be heavily modified. Something to give it an overall direction, with purpose in the components, not just aimlessly sticking on what's needed and then seven backups anywhere that works."

[hr]
[sup]*Arthur Dent had a rather simple philosophy toward the art of engineering: go with what worked and was efficient. There's an old debate among Khasi historians that Dent never intended to have a philosophy, and had just blundered into fame by being born at the right time. There are several books going into great detail about the meaning of this or that detail aboard Dent's ships, all rather dry, efficient, and methodical. Many Khasi buy them just because the way the books were written acts as a silent critique of how Dent's ships were built, and most think that's really rather clever.


**The Kessian Fundamentalists were a group of Khasi that wanted to return to Kes' perceived original message: "follow your heart, and everything will work out in the end". They attempted to perform an opera creatively called "[i]Yanhallow 2[/i]", taking advantage of the chaos of the inter-governmental period. Unfortunately, part of their philosophy was a banning of television cameras, so any recordings of the sequel to Kes' famed masterpiece are extraordinarily rare. Critics of the period universally panned it, however, calling it derivative, and that it lacked a certain realism. Which was ironic, in the end, since realism was exactly what the Kessian Fundamentalists hoped to achieve.[/sup]