Oh my... I always thought the "Green Dragon" faction was some kind of friendly alien race, until I read the description in the original post, and realize they are in fact humans with would-be Asia/Chinese background.
I rarely make criticizing comment, but their ship design just doesn't make any sense, at all. While the other human faction have relatively plausible and rational ship designs, the XLE ship seems to be designed with only aesthetics (read: dragonish-look) in mind, and added functional parts later when they realize they can't survive on aesthetics alone. They didn't even do a good job on aesthetic either, their ship look outright alien to begin with. If they are indeed aliens then it would be okay, as you can't explain the alien mind. But they are designed by humans... guess their design bureau is filled with art school expellees.
On a side note, the Asia dragon looks nothing like XLE ships which they supposedly represented. They are more akin to fanged snakes rather than winged lizards. Google it if you are interested. Their faction name also puzzles me... "Xing" clearly means "Star", but I can't make any guess on "Lao". Amongst the commonly used words, it could either be "Old" or "Prison" or "Work", none of which fits the name of an empire. It would make more sense if it's "Liao", one of the ancient dynasty name.