Back before space travel, people thought that space warships had windows, and lots of them.  They were always shown cruising the stars with many multiple decks on aesthetically designed hulls replete with bright, shining windows.  They look beautiful, really.  Bright, luminous things against the harsh and deep dark of space.  Obviously, these ships were designed for entertainment.  The only reason to have windows is to see out of them and it assumes that little danger will come from anyone seeing in. 

Real spaceships, at least the kind depicted in stories, don't have windows.  They are warships.  Light and heat are the most obvious ways to find things in the shadows of space and advertising your existence and location across the open seas of space is plainly stupid if you wish to live long and prosper.  These ships are ulititarian, designed and built to perform particular functions, sometimes sleek, though mostly like giant black bricks, hulking massive boxes of angles, sliding silently as shadows across a moonless night. 

The kind of ships depicted in space travel in the days before that was a feasible possibility could only have functioned as cruise liners, sight-seer voyage vessels that only orbited planets or occasionally cruised the well protected interplanetary lanes. 

So it comes as no surprise that I was rather surprised by the sight of a well-light warship loping casually across the Vidusian Sea.  It turned out of a corner of space and headed on a mark for my adopted home planet,  ,docking lights carelessly lit, bright as a newborn star.  Who would run such a rig?

Pirates.