Futuristic aircraft that don't have aerodynamic shapes, like Starfleet shuttlecraft. Why should our understanding of aerodynamics regress?
Well they are mainly designed to fly in space. I would guess that when they do fly in the atmosphere impulse engines are powerful enough that lift isn't required for them to fly.
But that doesn't make sense. A craft that's designed to be aerodynamic will work just fine in space, but a craft that isn't aerodynamic won't even be
capable of functioning in atmosphere. This is why, as someone pointed out above, the Space Shuttle is aerodynamically shaped. Any craft that's designed with atmospheric entry and maneuvering in mind as even
part of its function would have to be designed with aerodynamics in mind.
And relying on "powerful impulse engines" is incompetent engineering. Mr. Murphy was an engineer, and Murphy's Law is a basic principle of good engineering design: if your design allows for something to go wrong, then it will go wrong. If you design a shuttlecraft that depends entirely on powerful engines or shaped forcefields to keep from crashing, it's going to crash big-time whenever there's a power failure. That's inept design. You want a design that can still function as a glider and give you the chance to get the engines going again or glide to a safe landing (remember, the Space Shuttle's landings are entirely unpowered).
Of course some of the later shuttles like the Delta Flyer and the shuttles on the Enterprise E did look more aerodynamic then many of the earlier shuttles.
And the shuttlepods on
Enterprise. That's a function of improving budgets and construction techniques. It's costlier and more complex to build a shuttle mockup with curved, aerodynamic contours than it is just to nail a bunch of flat wooden boards together and cover it in paint. If you look at Matt Jefferies' prototype designs for the shuttlecraft, they were much more aerodynamic, but it just wasn't practical to build them on a TV budget. These days, there are probably fabrication techniques that make it easier to produce curved shapes, like vacuforming of fiberglas or something.
-And everyone's favorite: the decon chamber being used to screen out bad stuff rather than just doing it the easy way, with the transporter.
That's not a problem. The decon chamber was only used in
Enterprise, a series in which the transporter was still a prototype technology that wasn't quite trusted. They simply wouldn't have developed transporter technology to the point where it could work as a biofilter. That was the whole point of things like the decon chamber in ENT -- to show a less sophisticated level of technology.
And yeah, manned fighter ships don't make any sense in space combat. Their only purpose in Earth-based combat is to deal with things beyond the horizon of a battleship, but in space, there are no horizons. Anything a manned fighter could do, a computer-controlled missile could do just as well, and without the added expense of life support and fuel for a return trip.
Exactly what I thought. 
