I felt like elaborating on the design for Textile Plant 1051 as I got a sudden image of it in my head... a sort of floating sandwich factory oil rig. I guess I had a subconscious image of the ill fated Texas Towers oil rig in my head. It had these Amiga Boing Balls on it, and it sunk (just like the Amiga) so that's why it stuck in my head. There needs to be spacious factory floors inside so I clustered up the greeble at the center give space for that more open simplicity.
Then of course I got to wondering what an industrial space explorer ship might look like. I wanted something which matches the space platform – maybe a box or cylinder... I tried a lot of shapes but I think the most interesting ones are the Wright wing (bottom left) or perhaps something simpler like the Elite Viper / Type S wedge (top). I tried some other Elite ship shapes but it didn't feel right.
The ship would need to meet some requirements, such as easy to draw in perspective, not too much detail, preferably low on ovals to draw, room for camera inside... about the side of the millennium falcon or a bit smaller so it can take a team of interesting characters. Novel shape. Able to land on planets and easy to board without a complex contraption (a tailsitter problem). Probably has grav plating since the space platform already implies that it does.
Goblins are usually primitive so I though a fun twist could be to use them as the long dead precursor race / lost empire. Put them in V uniforms (Moontrap also used red and black). They're probably only ever encountered as deep frozen corpses in derelicts.