When you look at Jupiter or Saturn through even a high magnification telescope eyepiece the first thought is "It's so tiny, I was expecting something bigger". But as you look longer you start to ignore all the blank space and notice the details on Jupiter or the details in the rings of Saturn and you stop seeing it as small.
Remember your FOV is something like 120 degrees, but the only bit your brain really attends to is 20 degrees, and all that detailed colour? Only 4 degrees across, if you are generous with what counts. That 2.5-4 degrees is filled out by siccadic motion of your eyes that your brain automatically filters out, and the persistence of the brains attempts to recreate reality out of the fragments you're looking at now and what the rest looked like when you last paid attention. That's why you don't see at all the blind spot.Your brain just tries to recreate it from what else it looked at in the "recent" past.
So when you're not interested in something, your vision is 120 degrees. When you#re interested, like watching engrossing TV or a movie, it's about 20 degrees and you no longer see the wall or the audience, your brain isn't bothering to fill them in.
And what happens when you look at the sun is that you either see it fill the screen or it is surrounded by mostly black. Same as if you held up a coin against the dark. It is only when there's something we know the size of in the field of view (and that isn't a spacecraft, unless you are an actual astronaut and hacked in your own cockpit to boot), you just see it there flat dead and look at the lack of it elsewhere in your vision.
The harvest moon is bigger not because it is closer but because in the middle of the sky it is a tiny half degree disk, but when down at the horizon it is much bigger than the skyscraper or huge tree that is less than a fifth of a degree. Yet your brain knows how big trees are, the size of black not so much. So it seems bigger because you can relate it to something you know how big it is.
Same with the ships.
TBF, X3 had it worse in the models. When it had windows in the textures used for ships, if the ship was bigger or smaller than the texture was designed for, the windows just expanded or shrank to fit. Therefore if the skin was written with 3ft windows on a 300ft craft and that skin was used on ships 200ft an 1000ft, they'd both look the same size.
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