Look up “The Frigates of EVE Online” on Amazon. 
Also… the EVE Chronicles are all cannon material written (or approved) by the DEVs.
The same goes for all the other sections around the Chronicles (like the Scientific Articles).
As with any game, there some things that have to be a certain way for gameplay reasons and other things where there are actual technical limitations.
And then there are other things where, as with any science fiction, some form of “suspension of disbelief” is required.
You say that… But look at every ship in Star Trek, Star Wars, Stargate… Basically anything with Star in the title. =)
If you wanted to cripple a Federation starship, any of them, you just aim for the bullseye in the center of the big circle. That will completely wipe out the command staff in a single blow.
Star Wars has a very famous scene where a single wounded fighter plows straight into the bridge of a Super Star Destroyer, causing the whole thing to crash / spear itself into the Death Star.
Star trek they were science vessels.
Star wars actually has some in universe logic because their shields cut off most things including stuff like communications.
So a bridge allows visual spotting.
But also both are space opera of sorts. Not trying to be remotely logical.
That’s my point lol, the pods don’t follow the normal, hazardous rule-of-cool for sci-fi ships - in that way at least, EVE’s pod pilots are a comparatively realistic take on controller-safety.
The simple fact is the human brain will always respond better to visual navigation with the assistance of instruments, rather than instrument navigation alone. This is why IRL pilots of IRL aircraft will, on a calm day with good lighting, not even bother with things like ILS. Hell, even on a calm clear night, ILS isn’t even always needed thanks to runway lighting. Now, you can actually fly a plane ‘blind’ from take off to landing, using nothing but your instruments, and I get that there are no tall mountains in space to run into, and anything you did run into would probably be moving so fast that you wouldn’t even know by the time it hit you, but on a big warship, the ability to look out over the AO and see the action taking place live, allows you a more complete perspective of an on-going battle, than just watching a few blips on a holoboard from a CIC with no real view of the battle. Having both, the view and the CIC board, gives you a better perspective. So I don’t see it as unrealistic at all.
Also, there are a lot of assumptions here than any transparent material used to make such portholes and viewports in the future will just be glass or perspex or something else we use today. Who knows what materials and engineering technologies we’ll have in a thousand years time?
Yeah, maybe “realistic” is the wrong word - for a pod pilot, no eyesight-vision is the only way they can roll, so the being hidden away in a safer spot within the hull makes the most sense for them 
That’s because, for a pod pilot, they’re plugged into the ship directly. In essence, they become the ship. They can see and feel all of space around them, influencing the engines and weapons as one would their own limbs at the speed of thought.
Exactly~ No eyes needed 
What I’m saying is, they can still see just fine. They’re just not using their own eyes to do it, because they get new eyes. Just as their guns are their new arms, and their engines their new legs.
Yeah I know lol, that’s what I’m saying too - capsuleers don’t need to use their actual eyes because of all of that, so there’s even less reason for a pod to be near a bridge~~
The pod usually isn’t anywhere near the bridge of a ship. Many such ships have their bridges converted into command and control equipment, or expanded processing arrays. These things are needed in the absence of a crew to handle ‘processing’ and drone control/gunnery. The CPU on our ships is like a second brain, one that doesn’t need to be quite as big for a crewed ship, because it’s doing things that lots of people would otherwise be doing.
There are examples of ships with the capsule placed approximately where the bridge would usually be, but it’s usually still deep within the ship behind layers of additional armour. Even with the bridge window left in place on an Incursus, for example, what’s behind it is actually an extended mainframe, and behind that, the pod.
What of what I said are you responding to there btw? I was already saying earlier that the pod is nowhere near the “bridge”, everything I’ve said past that has been more info to justify the “why” 
I wasn’t saying “the pod is in the bridge”, I was saying “it’s nowhere near the bridge and this is why”
Maybe I just enjoy explaining how things in EVE work.
Oh no that’s totally a good thing, I do that all the time~ It had just felt like the last post was in response to my own.
EVE’s fiction is really vast, it’s always good to have more people talking about it
And speaking of pilots/ships/crew fiction, “All These Lives are Fit to Ruin” has been a favorite chronicle of mine that deals with that sort of thing~
I want an EGG filled universe and i want it NOW !
Logic has no meaning in eve, the players even less.
Let me chime in on the “windows” thing, i read somewhere that in a windowless ship people tend to go a bit uneasy. So the windows are there for to put people at ease, you can see what is going on. Sure it may be dull as hell, but you can physically see that it is.
Instead of just knowing something is going on and hearing it, think of it as being blindfolded versus seeing everything.
I will just point that there are two art schools for designing fictional spaceships; “function is the shape” and “shape is the function”, and EVE Online designs are clearly in the “shape is the function” land. They aren’t supposed to look like realistic machines, just look cool according to EVE art guidelines.
The Alien series is a staple on how do look spaceships based on “function is the shape”: their design is based on certain functions and guessed necessities like “if I place an engine here, the thrust will go in that direction realtive to the ship’s center of gravity, but aso will require a fuel line connecting to a tank and so and so”
NANU NANU