Well the first thing that stands out is that this doesn't have the extremely overused "big metal battleship" style to it. (etc.)
IMO this tends to be because most SciFi on the whole are made by humans for standard human consumption. Our engineering ascetics/practicality tends to leak into most ships/structures, like "armored = strong", producing a lot of the gratuitous metal and plating lines. But it also grounds the alien races to qualities that are understandably
human (although they may not be themselves human). So yeah it includes all Star Trek/Wars, BSG, Gundams, Warhammer 40K, right up until your bump into the opposing, somewhat less overused "gracefully curvaceous ships" associated with Tolkien-esque elf-alikes. (Even for relatively indie games like FTL, a human-impression is left on the chubby Rock ships, angular/hooked Mantises, round Zoltans, and crustacean Slugs.)
On that note, I came across a striking counterpoint in
Legend of Galactic Heroes, where there's a planetoid fortress Iserlohn that essentially looks like a giant opaque marble, because it's protected entirely by some form of liquid metal through which all the actual ships and turrets dive into and out of. In a universe where everything else is plated, antennaed, and relatively sane (although on the spindly side).
Maybe big gaping holes in ships is the new human in AI War II.
Fools the AI into not building any orbital mass drivers, since the bolts would mostly sail right through the rings without doing much.
(EDIT: The whole crystal-beings-making-crystalline ships is a bit tongue-in-cheek ironic, given that humans with today's sensibilities would
never build a vessel that looks like flesh. It was commented elsewhere that the three AI War aliens all built ships that took after themselves in some manner, while I don't think this is true for humans - our ships take not after us, but our flippant aesthetics. Thus based on the ships that they tend to build, the Spire would probably
love to trade porcelain and bone china.)
