We built our colony ships long and slender due to the required length of the hyperdrives. The long ships served the dual purposes of making the rides smoother and allowing more framework to hang the colonization packages onto. Colony ships were a mass of habitation modules, hibernation chambers, control rooms, cargo bays, and the hundreds of other systems required to setup a new colony cut off from home by years or even decades of travel. Even the girders that held everything together had a purpose. They formed the skeleton of a new space station after the colonization packages detached and dropped towards the new home of humanity. And then the hyperdrive core set sail for Earth where the crew would report the successful colonization of a new world and begin preparing to take the next colony mission away.