Some ships, particularly civilian ones and leisure-oriented ones, featured bridges set on the exterior of the vessels.
As long as the demand was there, shipwrights were willing to design whatever their customers wanted. Plenty of starships journeyed through the stars while exposing their bridges to external attacks.
Suffice to say, the chances that these idiotically-designed starships got taken out with relatively little effort were very high!
Only the safest star sectors where piracy and instability didn't exist featured these ship designs.
In the less secure portions of space, it was best to choose safety over beauty. No amount of aesthetics mattered if the primary command section of a starship could be taken out by a single, powerful long-ranged attack.
