Children of a Dead Earth Artwork

I think the real question you're all missing is how do you pray facing Mecca when you're orbiting Ceres.

Or what to do when it's under an atmosphere of pressurized sulphuric acid vapor and volcanic ash.

Saying only that won't do. We're people of reason here. You better explain your grievance in full.

crappy cross-section of the stock laser frigate (without concave hull, because then it looks horrible, and with new railguns) I did in order to help educate my friends. I did it in like an hour.

I actually think that with concave even the stock designs look kinda cool. Plus it allows hiding stuff behind blisters and shaping armour more according to your needs.

And it does save mass most of the time.

Agreed. I mean, the COADE app icon still has the convex-hull laser frigate (I think, or gunship), plus convex doesn't have shot traps, and convex hulls don't look as...phallic.

I, too, want the stock ships to go back to simple convex but for the option to stay. I've actually done that with a bunch of the stock ships myself.

As a guess: Since USTA is made up of NESR and EAM (North Eurasian Socialist Republic and East Asian Conglomerate) a good guess here is that the outer cogs thingy came from flags of those SSR.

Soviet republics generally have a round circle of yeast/wheat surrounding a sickle and hammer, And i guess in this case they just glossed that over because they don't plant yeast in space, there's no agriculture anymore, the significance of the proletariat is now made up of only industry workers so no meaning having plants symbolizing farmers.

And the center shield could be for putting heraldry, or it had some heraldry originally and then lost its face when mass copies are required. What we see could be a result of simplifying copying over 200 years with people not caring too much what they meant (at least in the beginning). The flag of Nippon Prime is another example, they could have simply used the old imperial battle flag or the current red-dot flag. Probably using a template commonly used for radioactive material simplifies reproduction of the flag??? 

On another note- that shield could represent the military or trade union within the USTA, symbolizing the protection of the workers from foreign threats and common interests of the bolsheviks (a common theme in SSR). Hell, even USTA may be a syndicalist trade union or something, they never had enough air-time before their surrender. It seems that USTA never had enough definite details about their political structures and life and even organization. They are only represented in propaganda, and the propaganda gloss over the details and make it seem like a capitalist hellhole.