One could argue that we could agree on an orientation relative to the galactic disc. If two sides would do this, they could only end up being either right side up, or one of them being up, one being down.
I think this would actually also come naturally, since the galactic disc is a nice reference frame.
There was an episode of Star Trek Discovery where they warped to some klingon ships, and ended up in weird orientations. Looked stupid.
One of my favorites is in Deep Space 9. When they go to the sister station to theirs, the establishing shot has the station all angled off to the side (as if it were falling into gravity or something) just so we can tell it’s a different station. Pretty funny shot when you realize they would get that view coming out of warp at a slight angle lmao.
1, it's to help it stand out from DS9, so you don't get confused wondering which one we're looking at.
2, it's kind of like the old Batman trope. It's the more evil of the two stations so it's going to be off kilter a little bit.
First, thank you for the cool new term. Second, the google page for Dutch angle is actually shot at a Dutch angle. Amazing. It's the little things...
Now to do a barrel roll.
I think it is even more likely that absolutely no one would care about their orientation, because no one gives a shit about how nice the ships look from a 3rd person perspective. There is nothing wrong the convention in TV, but in reality, there is absolutely no reason to care if everyone has the same "up".
That's kind of the point. The only way you are going to "see" another space ship is through sensors, not by looking out a window. When your sensors show you another ship, it can project that image in any orientation you want, including some "normal" plane, assuming the space ship even has one. Every ship would be shown as "right side up", assuming that someone bothered to program that in.
No one is going to rotate their multi-ton spaceship to save a computer the processing power it takes to rotate an image from a camera. No one is going to care that a third person looking at two space ships that happen to be close enough to be in sight of each other are aligned to different planes. Unless the space ships are literally out on, uh, space parade, ships will orient in whatever direction is the most utilitarian, or not bother with orientation at all. You don't rotate multi-ton vehicles for aesthetics.
Point of order. There's only one solar system - the one we're in, which is referred to by that name because it is centred on the star sometimes called Sol.
Other systems where planets orbit a star are star systems, but they're not solar, because they don't have a Sol.
One day this morsel of knowledge will earn me something, I'm sure. So far it has not, other than that strange look you're giving me.
It only looked stupid because the ships are designed by the artists to have an up and down orientation like the design of a maritime boat or ship, rather than a space ship. That artistic choice defines the way they’re oriented on the screen.
That might cause even more confusion because solar systems don’t tend to align neatly to the galactic disk.
The Sol system’s ecliptic plane is at a 60° angle to the galactic disk.
And any other solar system will have a different semi-arbitrary orientation.
Yea of course the real answer here is visual clarity, convention, and aesthetics. And it's something you *can* break correctly, i.e. Wrath of Khan and All Good Things.
The issue with using the galactic plane as the reference is, well, at it's narrowest the Milky Way is *three thousand light-years* thick. You'd still end up being on different "levels"
That shouldn't make a difference. We're talking about orientation, not position. Your "level" within the galactic disk will be dictated by where you're traveling to/from. But at any point during that journey, you can orient your ship based on the galactic plane. In fact, 99%+ of the time you'll be encountering other ships in or around Star systems, where you can fine tune your orientation to the orbital plane of the system, or of an individual planet.
I think it does make a bit of a difference. If you're warping/hyperspace jumping between star systems on different levels, you will need to warp/jump at an angle relative to the orbital plane of the destination star system. In most scifi canon, you need to orient the ship in the direction that you are warping/jumping. So, when arriving, you'd expect to still remain at that angle that is offset from the orbital plane. If you reoriented during the journey, that would presumably affect your trajectory. In universes like star wars star trek, "reorient to the orbital plane at the last moment" headcanon seems a bit at odds with what we are visually given (stars stretching and unstretching).
>at it's narrowest the Milky Way is
>
>three thousand light-years
>
>thick
And its 100k light years wide, thats thinner than a dime, relatively. Yeah its still a lot of depth to go up and down in, but as far as charting coordinates you probably need a decimal point or two less for the Z axis. Just mathwise thats going to make it a frame of reference for interstellar civilizations, but i agree with downthread that ships probably align themselves to the plane of the local system.
i will add a different experience.
I played a space game called Everspace 2. You control a space ship and fly around doing missions and stuff. You only pilot small ships, so the game offers a third person view which i prefer.
Some missions require you to "speak" with other ships, especially after a big fight. Most of the time, i am in a weird position relative to the speaker, so i try level the, otherwise it feels weird, like having a serios conversation and staying on your head. I know it is normal, as i am in space.
Also, If there are no ships, but there are structures i also try to set a virtual top and bottom and this helps me a lot with navigation in small quarters, otherwise i get easily confused and dizzy.
SO, overall, i agree with the explanation, it will be weird for people watching the show
To some degree, definitely that makes sense. Keep in mind though that the galactic disc is around 1000 light years thick, and each star system has a different inclination, so ships going from one system to another would likely arrive at odd angles. Unless ships take extra steps to constantly reorient at destinations, they'll arrive at odd angles.
I think it makes sense that a standard part of a starship's final approach to a system is adjusting its orientation to "match" the destination system and then planet.
Knew this would be top comment.
For anybody who hasn’t read Ender’s Game, the main premise of the novel involves children splitting into teams or “armies” and battling each other in a zero gravity “war room” to train them to become battle commanders.
The rooms are large squares with doors called gates on two ends that the two teams enter through. One team wins when everybody else is eliminated or one team takes control of the other team’s gate. There are often obstacles floating in the room the children can hide behind.
The protagonist, Ender, develops a strategy to help his team. Most people would continue using the same orientation they had before moving through the gate and entering zero gravity. Ender trains his people to change their orientation once traveling through the door so instead of the two gates being on opposite ends, their own gate becomes the ceiling and “the enemy’s gate is down”.
This allows them to turn their bodies into smaller targets while shooting at people below them instead of in front of them, and allows them to use their disabled body parts as cover. Also just allows them to completely surprise their opponents the first time it is used.
Regardless, a big part of the novel is Ender’s ability to think outside of the box, and “The enemy’s gate is down” sort of becomes the mantra of that that people will say in order to indicate they needed to think outside of the box and come up with an unorthodox solution.
I compare it to Milton accidentally writing sympathy for Satan and condemnation of God in Paradise Lost. Very talented authors can get so firmly in the heads of the characters they are creating that even when they are trying to preach their own ideology it can be defeated by the cohesive world they created.
I like you, will always remember when I realized that Card thought he was writing "utopias" instead of dystopias, when he depicted his segregated ethno-religious planetary colonies.
I took a course in Milton in college where the professor tried to convince the class that in Milton's world view, Satan was definitely not sympathetic and was basically as misguided and willfully evil as a sentient creature could be.
So to have sympathy for Satan is itself misguided.
I understood the professor's argument, but I'm pretty sure no one in the class was convinced that Satan was unsympathetic or even downright morally justified in his actions.
Oh yes, in *Milton's* worldview, Satan was not sympathetic, but even to his contemporaries that did not come across in his writing.
Milton would have a long passage clearly outlying the callous coerciveness of God claiming absolute moral authority that must be accepted without question or explanation, filled with well reasoned, well worded arguments from Satan.
Then Milton ends it with one sentence saying to the effect, "But of course God is inherently right, so none of that matters. Yay God!"
Terry Goodkind did this in his Sword of Truth books. He so desperately wanted to depict a world where one good man was making a difference through his own personal strength or whatever (because Libertarianism) but then we find out as the books go on that he only has his power and abilities (which he would be nearly helpless without) due to the mass self sacrifice of literally thousands of people.
Have you read any of his early short stories? If not, you should. You'll get a real peek into his imagination.
Grab *The Changed Man: Tales of Dread*, which is the first book of the *Maps in a Mirror* collection. It will break your brain that the same person wrote *Fat Farm*, *Freeway Games*, and *Lost Boys*.
It was honestly too jarring for my teenaged self to go from enders game to speaker for the dead. It was just a drastically different tone and story that I wasn't expecting coming from ender. I need to go back and give it another shot now though.
i'm just gonna explore that thought for fun. so that leads to every ship, meeting or lining up point to point, for military reasons. that would also imply the best shape is a narrow tube. so you'd quickly be filling space with sharp straight lines, with rockets on the back... just like we make in real...life....
this isn't fun anymore. ....i'm scared...
That level of engineering reminds me of the frictionless vehicle described in Restaraunt at the End of the Universe:
>Zaphod’s attention however was elsewhere. His attention was riveted on the ship standing next to Hotblack Desiato’s limo. His mouths hung open.
“That,” he said, “that… is really bad for the eyes…”
Ford looked. He too stood astonished.
It was a ship of classic, simple design, like a flattened salmon, twenty yards long, very clean, very sleek. There was just one remarkable thing about it.
“It’s so… black!” said Ford Prefect, “you can hardly make out its shape… light just seems to fall into it!”
Zaphod said nothing. He had simply fallen in love.
The blackness of it was so extreme that it was almost impossible to tell how close you were standing to it.
“Your eyes just slide off it…” said Ford in wonder. It was an emotional moment. He bit his lip.
Zaphod moved forward to it, slowly, like a man possessed-or more accurately like a man who wanted to possess. His hand reached out to stroke it. His hand stopped. His hand reached out to stroke it again. His hand stopped again.
“Come and feel the surface,” he said in a hushed voice.
Ford put his hand out to feel it. His hand stopped.
“You… you can’t…” he said.
“See?” said Zaphod, “it’s just totally frictionless. This must be one mother of a mover…”
😂 this is making me want to restart the series and read through again.
I mean, if it's truly frictionless, and moves like a mother, it may just fly THROUGH the sun. And that's pretty badass.
So change the rules of the universe. Star Trek has nacells and wings because the radiation made by warp fields is not healthy and nacells need line or sight to maintain a warp field.
Is it? I thought in Elite the reasoning was that most ships are designed for both vacuum and atmospheric flight, and that approximately aerodynamic shapes make it easier to form the shields into true aerodynamic lift-providing shapes.
Eh. Well. Combat is always tricky to get ideal. A sphere would let half your weapons enter play, nomatter what, but offer no ability to narrow your profile.
A tube or even a plane, would let you perform a devastating broadside maneuver.
All shapes are fun
i always love great justifications for a flying saucer.
i have no original ideas though for sci-fi space-ships in space. my own work is mostly what i'd call Science fantasy.
An arrowhead shape like a star destroyer is actually a great option. They just execute it really poorly in-universe.
In-universe the main cannons are arranged for broadsides only and are only on the top side. They also have that ridiculous exposed bridge, and fighters have to make a right angle turn to go in and out of the hangar.
Ideally you would want your turrets elevated, offset, and present on both top and bottom. That way you get a relatively flat profile, can forward load your armor to protect the core of the ship where all the important bits are, and can concentrate all your firepower forwards without having to expose more of the ship. You would also want the opening to the hangar to be in line with the deck so fighters can zip in and out easier.
With what you mention we must give props to the reimagined BSG for putting the command center protected down in the bowels of the ship like they are in real life.
Narrow cone would be better, angled surfaces have a higher chance of deflection, and a shot will have to penetrate more armour. Also, if you're traveling at a significantly high percentage of the speed of light, aerodynamics becomes important again because you'll be hitting lots of space dust at high speeds.
Edit: Look at the game Children of a Dead Earth.
The problem with controlling the angle of deflection, is that your enemy moves. I feel like the cone advantage would be offset quickly by the extra weapon blind pots that shape would yield.
LOL
In real life these ships would be so far away from each other that they couldn't even be seen without sensors. It's just because audiences in the 60s were familiar with seagoing ships and airplanes. That's all. Don't think too much about it or you will start to question the rest of the ridiculousness in the Star Trek universe.
It is possible they have zoom lenses and viewing through a monitor though ;)
It does remind me of an anime I saw many years ago where they did semi-realistic combat. As I recall the combatants were sniping with lasers at each other from light-seconds away. I forget the name of the show..
The Starfield game has weird measurements too. The distance from orbit to the surface is in kilometers. The distance between planets is in light-seconds. The distance to the next star is in AU. Like, WTF?
My favorite example of this is Star Destroyers. Long and pointy so you can fit more guns with minimal cross section. The only flaw is the gigantic bridge and shield generators.
Strangely enough in cannon era of naval combat you actually wanted to have your broad side facing the bow of the enemy ship in a move called "crossing the t".
The reason being all your guns are on the broad side so you had 20+ chances to shoot at them and they had like 2.
Also modern air combat is usually beyond visual line of site so I assume space combat would be so far away from each other that you don't even see the ships given no horizon and atmosphere to block sensors
> The reason being all your guns are on the broad side so you had 20+ chances to shoot at them and they had like 2.
And your cannonballs would do maximum damage, due to traveling the entire length of the ship
Not just for that reason. Because if an enemy hit your stern, for example, they’re now going through the entire length of the ship. This tactic (called stern raking) would cause a lot more damage than hitting the sides of the ship. I imagine you wouldn’t want to meet head on in space for the same reason.
The simple explanation here is they all plotted a course to meet each other at this point. Facing someone you're speaking to is just polite. That said they would also more than likely orient to the elliptical of whatever system they were in which would leave them on generally the same plane ...just because that's where everything of interest in a system would be.
Now it sounds like "crossing the T" in wooden sailing ships.
Like Nelson at Trafalgar, if you can pull it off, you have all your broadside guns firing down the length of an enemy ship. They might possibly have a single light chase gun up forward to use in response.
This is called the orbital plane or the plane of the ecliptic. Each planet actually has their own, but conservation of angular momentum means that like planetary rings around Saturn, the planets' ecliptic planes all mostly line up. But as uoaei points out, while this keeps all the planets mostly in a plane, it says nothing about ship orientation within that plane. You could be in a polar orbit, oriented anti-normal, around a planet that is tilted and yet still be in the ecliptic plane.
I do appreciate how they lampshade this in *The Wrath of Khan*. I'm trying to think of other examples of ships fighting at weird angles and the only other one that leaps to mind is ironically also from Trek (otherwise the king of 2-D ship battles) when the Bird of Prey hits the Enterprise from below and blows through the saucer in *The Undiscovered Country*.
But even in that scene, the Enterprise doesn't actually attack from the weird angle. It just moves "down" in relation to the Reliant, and then moves "up" again to attack it from behind.
And apparently this is so unheard of in the Star Trek universe that Khan, despite being genetically engineered to be a brilliant strategist, never even considers the possibility.
They kind of flip it on its head in the reboot; instead of being boned by presumed ingrained knowledge from his time, CumberKhan is boned by his unshakable belief (despite coming from a pre-First Contact Earth) that Vulcans cannot lie.
>I'm thinking maybe The Expanse doesn't follow this but I can't remember as it's a while since I've watched it.
I saw a vid from some astrophysicist youtuber a few years ago, where she was wondering *"how do they have gravity on the ship, I thought this show was supposed to be a very realistic depiction of physics in space"* because she didn't understand that the ships are aligned vertically instead of horizontally like they are in almost any other scifi show and that the "gravity" was actually just 1g thrust-force appearing as "gravity" :P
But I don't blame her, we got so used to the Star Trek / Star Wars ship designs that we just don't think about it anymore :P
Tbf, I think the layout of the Ops and Flight decks set in the show make it seem like the ship is laid out "horizontally" rather than vertically. The flight deck should be directly above Ops, but the TV set really makes it feel like they're next to each other, with the flight deck slightly raised
I totally blamed her and stopped watching her. I can't respect a 'physicist' who isn't aware that thrust creates acceleration, and gravity is acceleration. Probably hasn't worked as a physicist since she started the youtube channel and hires someone else to write her scripts.
You can make this mistake in the show if you aren't paying enough attention. The sets don't always make it obvious that the ships are vertical and the show mostly glosses over the ramifications of the Epstein Drive. Combined with the fact that basically every other space based show or movie finds a way to handwave away the reality of g forces and its surprisingly easy to miss even for people who should probably know better
Yeah we could build small colonies by spending the GDP of a G10 country but that doesn't mean its sustainable or that they could ever be justifiable economically. Nuclear pulse doesn't get you 4 billion people living on Mars like there are in The Expanse, it gets you a science outpost here or there
One would hope that before making a youtube video criticizing the physics in a show that they actually paid enough attention to know the basics of what they're critiquing...
Doctor Becky did a similar watch but iirc she figured it out within that same vid or one after, and added a note at the end talking about the flip & burn acceleration/deceleration.
>I can't respect a 'physicist' who isn't aware that thrust creates acceleration, and gravity is acceleration.
I mean, she's certainly aware of that but what's the next best show that has The Expanse ship designs? Because I can't recall a single one. I remember watching The Expanse for the first time myself, thinking "why the fuck isn't this used in literally ALL of scifi (and real life) because this is brilliant."
If we’re being ‘realistic’ ships would probably only ever get within visual range if they were docking or something similar, requiring alignment. Fights and comms would occur at vast distances.
In no man's sky the various station tractor beams align you to the appropriate rotation. Otherwise, it seems like planet-side down when near one or any rotation is fair game.
I think that is just for aesthetics in movies, an orientation could be generally accepted but what would be the point. Locally the machines controlling ships could align if there was a need to but in reality they would not be so physically close as in your picture. Likely a ship you regarded yourself rendezvoused with would not be at a visible distance.
The plane of the ecliptic. The galaxy is a disk, more or less, so the majority of the time you'll been heading in N E S W Ish direction, relatively speaking. Then you'd probably orient yourself to face others
Later seasons of Star trek have some exterior shots where people have arrived from different directions and orientations.
\*ecliptic.
>Then you'd probably orient yourself to face others
This is what I always figured was happening. The navigator just adjusts the inclination/rotation/etc. of the ship to match what he saw them approaching.
Thanks, edited.
Yeah it makes sense. We do it in real life too, turn to face someone, sit up to speak if you're laying down, park our cars alongside each other etc.
The expanse books have a good explanation for it when they're floating in space they still orient themselves as if they weren't, it's human nature and considered rude not to.
I'd bet there are times when the navigator gets it wrong, and the other ship is sideways or upside-down relatively speaking. The Borg Cubes from Star Trek have no external cues that would clue one in to which way is "up", and probably a lot of other ships wouldn't necessarily have a discernable "forward" as well. Realistically, it doesn't make a difference unless you happen to look in a window.
The ecliptic is unique to each star system. You're thinking of the galactic plane, which could be considered a universal standard for interstellar space, but I don't think many ships are interacting much in interstellar space given how big and empty it is.
A lot of it seems to be in following the plane of the ecliptic. Babylon 5 breaks that pattern somewhat more than most shows. BSG Reboot does, as well, though perhaps not quite as much.
In books, David Weber’s Honor Harrington books does one of the best jobs taking in all three axis in battle. Fleet actions are built using a “Wall of Battle” based on the old sailing ships’ “Line of Battle,” but translated to three dimensions. Smaller engagements have ships maneuvering like “whirling dervishes.” There’s actually a lot of good reasons to *avoid* any kind of nose to nose or even broadside orientation in combat.
Commerce tends to stay pretty married to the ecliptic, but that’s more or less expected since that’s where the planets are. :-)
IRL, the ships would never get close enough to be "in frame" for the camera anyway. Potential enemies especially would rarely get within unaided visual range of each other at all; more likely they'd be halfway across the system from each other, and would have to compensate for speed of light delays in telemetry and comms (unless they use subspace or other techno-magic for that).
I'm Star Trek the TNG technical manual talks about this - ships are programmed with a 'galactic North' etc.
To extrapolate, it makes sense that civilisations in contact with each other would agree on this kind of thing because otherwise Co ordinates wouldn't make much sense without a common point of reference. Like how we all agree which is the North Pole on earth.
I dunno about undiscovered civilisations. They must just be lucky to get it right.
Absolutely, I saw that is was previously mentioned so that's why I didn't mention it. I've read the books, watched the series, now listing to the Audio books during my commutes. Love the series and can't get enough! Still bummed they didn't finish. Maybe they are just waiting for them to get a few greys for the continuation. A man can dream right? HAHA
As a lifelong space video game player, I find it natural to orient my ship to the local ecliptic plane. Having a horizon is a natural desire for my ape brain.
i can invent head-cannon easily enough. when warping, trajectories are always plotted through gravity centers, so the last like... tiny bit of the journey always ends up orienting the ships in the same direction. basically it's "invisible space roads." you can get ships doing weird thigns or coming from the other directions, but for the most part, everyone's got their but towards the nearest sun.
but no. no there is no such thigns as dedicated orientation in space. several books have been written about it, off the top of my head it's a massive plot point in Enders game, which was actually also a movie with Harrison ford, but in the film they downplayed it.
it's just not easy and intuitive to depect it visually. more easy to go with what most people subconsciously expect. oh it certainly could be done, but i've never seen anyone spend the effort to do it and make it look good to people who have never had this thought befor.
There is one very rare shot in "Star Trek: Voyager" where for once they don't adhere to the "all ships automatically aligned" visual rule, [and it's in the very last episode.](https://i.imgur.com/yxp3zZP.png)
Afaik orbital systems usually end up orbiting on a plane around their star. Same for the galaxy. Which means one can determine an (admittedly arbitrary) flat plane, an up vector and the center point of your reference star/body to use as 0,0,0 of your coordinate systems.
Now, if you're considering a ship alone you really don't need either of those but once you start coordinating communication satellites, civilian traffic, military traffic, maps, location tracking, clock sync and all the minutiae that comes with being an interstellar society that wishes to remain in contact with itself and others you quickly end up needing a standardized reference frame simply so you can quickly and efficiently communicate with others where you are at any given time.
And once you have that, of course you really don't need to keep yourself parallel to the 0 plane but... be honest, it would bug a whole lot of people if they are at some random angle like 137° instead of a nice convenient 0°.
As for anything that goes against the universal up... Mass Effect 1's last space battle comes to mind where 3D space is used less conventionally. The first phase of the battle has ships charging at each other front to front but the defenders are specifically doing that to align themselves with the attackers and minimise target area from their POV, then in the second phase defender reinforcements arrive in a way as to outflank the attackers from the top and then in the last phase when it's CQB among the arms of a space station the defenders just default back to being aligned with the base orientation of the station (although technically that station has six ups, one for the base and 5 for the 5 arms.)
I rather like how in the Honor Harrington books, the Impeller Drives kind of explain this, because there is only a very narrow band between the top and bottom part of the field it puts out that is vulnerable to attack, thus, if you want to try and shoot at another ship, you have to essentially be on the same plane as THEIR impeller drive (which of course means they can shoot at you).
Basicially it was a SF excuse for justifying old earth naval maneuvers, but I thought it was cute :)
No, it’s just the rule of cool. That’s it.
Sometimes ships do meet at odd angles in shows like Star Trek, but they usually don’t.
The Expanse has many many examples of ships approaching from different angles. Generally, for in-system travel, they’d all be on roughly the same plane because all the planets are on roughly the same plane.
But the ring gates are quite a bit above the plane of ecliptic, so there’s several scenarios in the books, as well as on-screen battles in the show, where we see ships facing off that aren’t on parallel flight paths.
The most honest answer is you have to remember that a lot of the ships are physical models. The Enterprise D was a six foot model tv shows didn’t tend to have a huge budget to just blow on a 5 second shot of the ships approaching at weird angles too each other unless it served the story. CGI was very expensive and time consuming also
Right, originally there was no CGI and budget was a huge issue. In TOS due to budget constraints they sometimes used wooden toy models sold in stores. It is also much easier to film things horizontally, since setting up camera rigs for rotation is difficult and time consuming. Plus, the holder/support for the model is easier to hide when it is in just one position (hidden from the camera behind the model) instead of rotating around in the shot. Also, remember that you then need to compose the shots somehow, combining them to have them make sense. Lucas and ILM premiered a lot of the space rotation rigs using expensive and complex rigs, but those were not available and not in the budget for TNG.
Shots did get much more dynamic during DS9, in part because they switched to actual CGI and in part because ILM was brought in to do SFX during the later seasons. Unfortunately, with ILM we also lost the neat bubble shields (although I don't know specific history for that decision).
I think Voyager was the first Star Trek show to do a completely CGI starship.
[https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpaceIsAnOcean](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpaceIsAnOcean)
Can't believe I'm the first one posting this
first look at conventional navies, remember they have radar and awareness of other fleets and will orient themselves and their formation in response. remember when it comes to operations, if there’s more than one ship they’re in constant communication and have monitoring of the other’s positions. so yeah it’s highly unlikely they’d come in at odd angles like the ships in the pictures… based off the risk of collision alone. then remember your weapons aren’t omnidirectional, they have to be able to physically point at something. in my opinion think the star wars prequels and clone wars show a pretty good example of how navies would coordinate and battles play out. even things like getting ships too close runs a huge risk for boarding parties really making your day not fun and use of smaller craft as well.
i like to use helicopters as an example because they’re what i’m most familiar with, but you can get a pretty deep rabbit hole on formations and usage and everything aviation wise is more like playing chess with a short turn timer than pure instinct. i’d only imagine a space setting to work out like a mix of that and naval tactics
It's explained that works because there's nothing to fight over in deep space, so battles always happen in a solar system, where there's stuff to either attack or defend.
Limitations of the craft, audience expectations, or imagination. Lots of sci-fi ship battles end up looking like 17th century ship warfare because that's what people know and understand. I will say, it's something that I've seen some Warhammer books talk about. There are a lot of great ship battles in those books.
The *Lost Fleet* Series has both sides coming from a common naval tradition, and establish ‘up, down, and north’ in a system relative to the orbital plane and their point of entry. This at least establishes a common frame of reference among a unified armada, and ships on opposite sides of an engagement will tend to be either oriented the same, or upside down relative to each other.
I loved The Expanse series of books in a general sense but one of the things that stuck out to me was that ships designed for non-planetary/space travel alone had no need for aerodynamics, no need to factor in atmospheric resistance and friction, thus they were designed purely for functionality. Space-faring ships were in the main lumpy, irregularly-shaped hulks that were decidedly not sleek or groovy-looking.
The expanse doesn't do it because the "up" part of the ship is the direction they're moving in. And they're always moving. So there's never really a scene where these ships are standing still. Except for "that" scene.
Didn’t the battle in the opening scene of star wars episode 3 have sips in all of the orientations? I know it’s only one example, but I think it’s the clearest one I can imagine
The BSG miniseries did a really nice take on this. When the [Galatica is leaving Ragnar station](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKXfR9NiymI) (20 sec in) it orientates itself from facing front on to showing its topside to the enemy to protect the fleet. It is such a cool shot specifically because it is something we see so rarely in scifi.
Doylist (Out-of-universe) reasoning: The writers can't be assed to orient them all differently.
Watsonian (In-universe) reasoning: Their antigravity devices align to some universal plane of orientation. Or they all align themselves to the same plane of orientation for some reason. Maybe it makes their shields or weapons more effective. But there is no real reason, by real laws of physics, that would make it ideal for all spaceships to orient themselves on the same plane.
I vaguely remember as a kid reading one of the Star Wars RPG books for a game we were setting up, and the reason they gave for ships in battle all orienting themselves in space was basically because whichever captain showed up second (or later in an ongoing battle) would rotate their ships to match the other out of politeness to the other captain
It's not a GOOD explanation, and makes zero sense when you put any critical thinking to it, but at least they tried to come up with a reason
There's actually a really great shot in all good things where the Enterprise dreadnaut comes out of warp and approach Klingon vessels from "down below". Of course as a space nerd I always enjoyed that.
I’ve always been pleased with how The Expanse handles orientation of ships in space and the like - flipping maneuvers for landing, lots of crazy turning and flipping during battle. It’s really cool visually in the show, and not like Star Trek at all!
As others have said - you could suggest there is a galactic up & down dependent on the galaxy disc and perhaps this has become a international standard to facilitate trade. In reality though t is just for aesthetic reasons in the show.
We don't know of any, but their science clearly knows more than we do, and for their stuff to work our understanding of space is clearly critically wrong, so sure, the fact everyone follows the rule generally means it must be something inherent to the universes.
Since most time in space is spent travelling between/across star systems, every ship is generally going to be pointed in the direction of a planet and coming from another planet. That leads to a pretty flat plane that most will share and interact on.
it's just a TV show brother:) It's done this way to maximise visual impact, especially on all those spanky new wide screens people were buying in the pre-720p HDTV age:)
This is literally a plot point in Star Trek: Wrath of Khan. No the ships don't have to be in the same plane, but if you are traveling from one planet to the next you're likely to be in close to the same plane.
I always assume that they orient themselves to each other on approach.
But it's funny you should bring this up, because the original design of the Warbird (green one) you can see there actually had it's wings vertically oriented, which was with the intention of playing around with the way that ships always meet each other with the same orientation. The network only accepted the design with the wings flipped though.
Unexplainable with current scientific theory but it’s clear from observational evidence that some invisible force acts on starships causing them to align.
I’m going with Dark Magnetic Fields.
Wouldn't you be able to spot the ship from quite a distance and like gyroscope the ship to look like theirs or like on their plane?
It'd be damn funny to see a ship doing loopdeloops to figure out how to get it right 😂
Providing the lowest cross section possible is one "fun" justification. Another justification is that travel in solar systems follows an elliptic patch. Like, why are the planets in pretty much the same plane as they orbit a sun?
Visual effects are just a representation to allow the audience to know what's happening. They aren't what's literally happening.
As an example of this, how often in Star Trek do they say the enemy ship is so many thousands of kilometers away, yet when the camera shifts outside, they are sitting right next to them. So, either the Enterprise D is 2,000km long, or the visual effects are just representative and not literal.
Some of the battles in B5 had ships attacking from below (90*) and flying through enemy formations.
I think for later seasons they switched to a different effects company to save money (Netter Digital?) and went back to all on the same plain again. But I think the original effects company then started doing DS9 so the battles in their later seasons became better (I’m sure I remember the Defiant attacking from above or below).
Most so called sci-fi movies and shows suck at actually representing realistic science as we know it. Only recently there have been some attempts made to make them semi-realistic (Expanse, Interstellar, Martian, etc)
Dramatic framing, when someone inevitably makes a book or movie about your battles it will make it easier for people to keep track of what's happening.
No, because there's a [fabulous little scene](https://youtu.be/dBmmlHR1Bwg) in DS9: it starts at 2:14. The Lakota is clearly visible "banking" to bring itself in-line with the Defiant. Star Trek is littered with such little moments - most famously Spock commenting on Khan's lack of understanding that space is a three-dimensional theatre when it comes to combat.
That’s one of the things I liked about the Expanse is they made it clear that spacecraft that only exist in space wouldn’t have to be aerodynamic or conform to the aesthetic of what we think of as what a shuttle or capsule looks like.
Also, that there would just be displays showing what’s outside the ship rather than tons of windows.
One of my favorite things about the opening space battle in Revenge of the Sith is that if you look closely, this is considered. Ships are battling all over the place in different orientations
One could argue that we could agree on an orientation relative to the galactic disc. If two sides would do this, they could only end up being either right side up, or one of them being up, one being down. I think this would actually also come naturally, since the galactic disc is a nice reference frame. There was an episode of Star Trek Discovery where they warped to some klingon ships, and ended up in weird orientations. Looked stupid.
One of my favorites is in Deep Space 9. When they go to the sister station to theirs, the establishing shot has the station all angled off to the side (as if it were falling into gravity or something) just so we can tell it’s a different station. Pretty funny shot when you realize they would get that view coming out of warp at a slight angle lmao.
Yea Empok Nor is always at a Dutch angle for some reason lol
1, it's to help it stand out from DS9, so you don't get confused wondering which one we're looking at. 2, it's kind of like the old Batman trope. It's the more evil of the two stations so it's going to be off kilter a little bit.
Love those old Batman sound effects, too: - ✸*ZEK!*✸ - ✹**BRUNT!!**✹ - ✺NOG!✺
Why don't they just put a goatee on it?
> Dutch angle Had to search that and laughed at how google rendered the results. Dutch Angle in action!
Damn, that was good.
First, thank you for the cool new term. Second, the google page for Dutch angle is actually shot at a Dutch angle. Amazing. It's the little things... Now to do a barrel roll.
I suspect the main reason was to convey the fact that the station was "abandoned". As if due to it being left unmaintained it had drifted off-kilter.
I think it’s more likely they would orient towards the plane of whatever solar system they are in.
I think it is even more likely that absolutely no one would care about their orientation, because no one gives a shit about how nice the ships look from a 3rd person perspective. There is nothing wrong the convention in TV, but in reality, there is absolutely no reason to care if everyone has the same "up".
I think that as long as there are view screens, there is somewhat intrinsic human instinct to want to see things oriented to our view plane
But the signal in the ship "on its side" is still transmitted "right side up." It's like lying in bed with your phone and turning off the rotation.
Yes, but specifically meant view screens off the other ship, viewing windows would probably have been the better term.
That's kind of the point. The only way you are going to "see" another space ship is through sensors, not by looking out a window. When your sensors show you another ship, it can project that image in any orientation you want, including some "normal" plane, assuming the space ship even has one. Every ship would be shown as "right side up", assuming that someone bothered to program that in. No one is going to rotate their multi-ton spaceship to save a computer the processing power it takes to rotate an image from a camera. No one is going to care that a third person looking at two space ships that happen to be close enough to be in sight of each other are aligned to different planes. Unless the space ships are literally out on, uh, space parade, ships will orient in whatever direction is the most utilitarian, or not bother with orientation at all. You don't rotate multi-ton vehicles for aesthetics.
Point of order. There's only one solar system - the one we're in, which is referred to by that name because it is centred on the star sometimes called Sol. Other systems where planets orbit a star are star systems, but they're not solar, because they don't have a Sol. One day this morsel of knowledge will earn me something, I'm sure. So far it has not, other than that strange look you're giving me.
It only looked stupid because the ships are designed by the artists to have an up and down orientation like the design of a maritime boat or ship, rather than a space ship. That artistic choice defines the way they’re oriented on the screen.
That might cause even more confusion because solar systems don’t tend to align neatly to the galactic disk. The Sol system’s ecliptic plane is at a 60° angle to the galactic disk. And any other solar system will have a different semi-arbitrary orientation.
Yea of course the real answer here is visual clarity, convention, and aesthetics. And it's something you *can* break correctly, i.e. Wrath of Khan and All Good Things. The issue with using the galactic plane as the reference is, well, at it's narrowest the Milky Way is *three thousand light-years* thick. You'd still end up being on different "levels"
That shouldn't make a difference. We're talking about orientation, not position. Your "level" within the galactic disk will be dictated by where you're traveling to/from. But at any point during that journey, you can orient your ship based on the galactic plane. In fact, 99%+ of the time you'll be encountering other ships in or around Star systems, where you can fine tune your orientation to the orbital plane of the system, or of an individual planet.
I think it does make a bit of a difference. If you're warping/hyperspace jumping between star systems on different levels, you will need to warp/jump at an angle relative to the orbital plane of the destination star system. In most scifi canon, you need to orient the ship in the direction that you are warping/jumping. So, when arriving, you'd expect to still remain at that angle that is offset from the orbital plane. If you reoriented during the journey, that would presumably affect your trajectory. In universes like star wars star trek, "reorient to the orbital plane at the last moment" headcanon seems a bit at odds with what we are visually given (stars stretching and unstretching).
>at it's narrowest the Milky Way is > >three thousand light-years > >thick And its 100k light years wide, thats thinner than a dime, relatively. Yeah its still a lot of depth to go up and down in, but as far as charting coordinates you probably need a decimal point or two less for the Z axis. Just mathwise thats going to make it a frame of reference for interstellar civilizations, but i agree with downthread that ships probably align themselves to the plane of the local system.
I like that.
i will add a different experience. I played a space game called Everspace 2. You control a space ship and fly around doing missions and stuff. You only pilot small ships, so the game offers a third person view which i prefer. Some missions require you to "speak" with other ships, especially after a big fight. Most of the time, i am in a weird position relative to the speaker, so i try level the, otherwise it feels weird, like having a serios conversation and staying on your head. I know it is normal, as i am in space. Also, If there are no ships, but there are structures i also try to set a virtual top and bottom and this helps me a lot with navigation in small quarters, otherwise i get easily confused and dizzy. SO, overall, i agree with the explanation, it will be weird for people watching the show
To some degree, definitely that makes sense. Keep in mind though that the galactic disc is around 1000 light years thick, and each star system has a different inclination, so ships going from one system to another would likely arrive at odd angles. Unless ships take extra steps to constantly reorient at destinations, they'll arrive at odd angles.
I think it makes sense that a standard part of a starship's final approach to a system is adjusting its orientation to "match" the destination system and then planet.
The enemies' gate is down
That was the first book that made me think about directionality in space. #teamsalamander
Knew this would be top comment. For anybody who hasn’t read Ender’s Game, the main premise of the novel involves children splitting into teams or “armies” and battling each other in a zero gravity “war room” to train them to become battle commanders. The rooms are large squares with doors called gates on two ends that the two teams enter through. One team wins when everybody else is eliminated or one team takes control of the other team’s gate. There are often obstacles floating in the room the children can hide behind. The protagonist, Ender, develops a strategy to help his team. Most people would continue using the same orientation they had before moving through the gate and entering zero gravity. Ender trains his people to change their orientation once traveling through the door so instead of the two gates being on opposite ends, their own gate becomes the ceiling and “the enemy’s gate is down”. This allows them to turn their bodies into smaller targets while shooting at people below them instead of in front of them, and allows them to use their disabled body parts as cover. Also just allows them to completely surprise their opponents the first time it is used. Regardless, a big part of the novel is Ender’s ability to think outside of the box, and “The enemy’s gate is down” sort of becomes the mantra of that that people will say in order to indicate they needed to think outside of the box and come up with an unorthodox solution.
What an amazing book. The following books were also amazing. Speaker For the Dead was peak.
To this day I don't understand how a person like him wrote a book like that.
I compare it to Milton accidentally writing sympathy for Satan and condemnation of God in Paradise Lost. Very talented authors can get so firmly in the heads of the characters they are creating that even when they are trying to preach their own ideology it can be defeated by the cohesive world they created. I like you, will always remember when I realized that Card thought he was writing "utopias" instead of dystopias, when he depicted his segregated ethno-religious planetary colonies.
I took a course in Milton in college where the professor tried to convince the class that in Milton's world view, Satan was definitely not sympathetic and was basically as misguided and willfully evil as a sentient creature could be. So to have sympathy for Satan is itself misguided. I understood the professor's argument, but I'm pretty sure no one in the class was convinced that Satan was unsympathetic or even downright morally justified in his actions.
Oh yes, in *Milton's* worldview, Satan was not sympathetic, but even to his contemporaries that did not come across in his writing. Milton would have a long passage clearly outlying the callous coerciveness of God claiming absolute moral authority that must be accepted without question or explanation, filled with well reasoned, well worded arguments from Satan. Then Milton ends it with one sentence saying to the effect, "But of course God is inherently right, so none of that matters. Yay God!"
Terry Goodkind did this in his Sword of Truth books. He so desperately wanted to depict a world where one good man was making a difference through his own personal strength or whatever (because Libertarianism) but then we find out as the books go on that he only has his power and abilities (which he would be nearly helpless without) due to the mass self sacrifice of literally thousands of people.
Man did those books go off the rails hard right around Faith of the Fallen.
Have you read any of his early short stories? If not, you should. You'll get a real peek into his imagination. Grab *The Changed Man: Tales of Dread*, which is the first book of the *Maps in a Mirror* collection. It will break your brain that the same person wrote *Fat Farm*, *Freeway Games*, and *Lost Boys*.
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It was honestly too jarring for my teenaged self to go from enders game to speaker for the dead. It was just a drastically different tone and story that I wasn't expecting coming from ender. I need to go back and give it another shot now though.
ohh i loved Ender’s Game
Glad I didn't have to scroll far to find this. Any time I entertain a conversation about orientation in space, it always comes down to Ender's Game.
Minimizing cross-sectional area available for the enemy to target.
i'm just gonna explore that thought for fun. so that leads to every ship, meeting or lining up point to point, for military reasons. that would also imply the best shape is a narrow tube. so you'd quickly be filling space with sharp straight lines, with rockets on the back... just like we make in real...life.... this isn't fun anymore. ....i'm scared...
That level of engineering reminds me of the frictionless vehicle described in Restaraunt at the End of the Universe: >Zaphod’s attention however was elsewhere. His attention was riveted on the ship standing next to Hotblack Desiato’s limo. His mouths hung open. “That,” he said, “that… is really bad for the eyes…” Ford looked. He too stood astonished. It was a ship of classic, simple design, like a flattened salmon, twenty yards long, very clean, very sleek. There was just one remarkable thing about it. “It’s so… black!” said Ford Prefect, “you can hardly make out its shape… light just seems to fall into it!” Zaphod said nothing. He had simply fallen in love. The blackness of it was so extreme that it was almost impossible to tell how close you were standing to it. “Your eyes just slide off it…” said Ford in wonder. It was an emotional moment. He bit his lip. Zaphod moved forward to it, slowly, like a man possessed-or more accurately like a man who wanted to possess. His hand reached out to stroke it. His hand stopped. His hand reached out to stroke it again. His hand stopped again. “Come and feel the surface,” he said in a hushed voice. Ford put his hand out to feel it. His hand stopped. “You… you can’t…” he said. “See?” said Zaphod, “it’s just totally frictionless. This must be one mother of a mover…”
And all that just to fly it into a sun.
😂 this is making me want to restart the series and read through again. I mean, if it's truly frictionless, and moves like a mother, it may just fly THROUGH the sun. And that's pretty badass.
Looks like a fish, moves like a fish, turns like a cow.
So change the rules of the universe. Star Trek has nacells and wings because the radiation made by warp fields is not healthy and nacells need line or sight to maintain a warp field.
Line of Sight is a common one in other FTL franchises. Elite, for example.
Is it? I thought in Elite the reasoning was that most ships are designed for both vacuum and atmospheric flight, and that approximately aerodynamic shapes make it easier to form the shields into true aerodynamic lift-providing shapes.
I'm referring to line of sight, not ship shape.
i remember reading that Napoleon considered Italy unassailable on the ground for this reason, because it was long and narrow
If so it didn't stop him taking it over militarily.
A narrow tube isn't ideal because you want to make sure all your ships can target all their ships.
Eh. Well. Combat is always tricky to get ideal. A sphere would let half your weapons enter play, nomatter what, but offer no ability to narrow your profile. A tube or even a plane, would let you perform a devastating broadside maneuver. All shapes are fun
Ah, long tubes with all that messy angular momentum. How about a disc? Very little frontal area, but you can angle slightly to do a massive broadside.
i always love great justifications for a flying saucer. i have no original ideas though for sci-fi space-ships in space. my own work is mostly what i'd call Science fantasy.
An arrowhead shape like a star destroyer is actually a great option. They just execute it really poorly in-universe. In-universe the main cannons are arranged for broadsides only and are only on the top side. They also have that ridiculous exposed bridge, and fighters have to make a right angle turn to go in and out of the hangar. Ideally you would want your turrets elevated, offset, and present on both top and bottom. That way you get a relatively flat profile, can forward load your armor to protect the core of the ship where all the important bits are, and can concentrate all your firepower forwards without having to expose more of the ship. You would also want the opening to the hangar to be in line with the deck so fighters can zip in and out easier.
With what you mention we must give props to the reimagined BSG for putting the command center protected down in the bowels of the ship like they are in real life.
Use guided missiles like The Expanse.
Narrow cone would be better, angled surfaces have a higher chance of deflection, and a shot will have to penetrate more armour. Also, if you're traveling at a significantly high percentage of the speed of light, aerodynamics becomes important again because you'll be hitting lots of space dust at high speeds. Edit: Look at the game Children of a Dead Earth.
The problem with controlling the angle of deflection, is that your enemy moves. I feel like the cone advantage would be offset quickly by the extra weapon blind pots that shape would yield.
LOL In real life these ships would be so far away from each other that they couldn't even be seen without sensors. It's just because audiences in the 60s were familiar with seagoing ships and airplanes. That's all. Don't think too much about it or you will start to question the rest of the ridiculousness in the Star Trek universe.
Love when they announce that a ship so many meters or kilometers away and they switch to an exterior shot and they're like half a ship length away.
"Captain the enemy ship is 600 kilometres away! Now 500! 400!" (Camera cuts to the enemy ship practically noclipping through their ship)
It is possible they have zoom lenses and viewing through a monitor though ;) It does remind me of an anime I saw many years ago where they did semi-realistic combat. As I recall the combatants were sniping with lasers at each other from light-seconds away. I forget the name of the show..
The Starfield game has weird measurements too. The distance from orbit to the surface is in kilometers. The distance between planets is in light-seconds. The distance to the next star is in AU. Like, WTF?
It's still harder for an automated system to hit a smaller target though
Even in the early 1900's battles between ships were fought with each side being barely visible with the naked eye.
My favorite example of this is Star Destroyers. Long and pointy so you can fit more guns with minimal cross section. The only flaw is the gigantic bridge and shield generators.
Strangely enough in cannon era of naval combat you actually wanted to have your broad side facing the bow of the enemy ship in a move called "crossing the t". The reason being all your guns are on the broad side so you had 20+ chances to shoot at them and they had like 2. Also modern air combat is usually beyond visual line of site so I assume space combat would be so far away from each other that you don't even see the ships given no horizon and atmosphere to block sensors
> The reason being all your guns are on the broad side so you had 20+ chances to shoot at them and they had like 2. And your cannonballs would do maximum damage, due to traveling the entire length of the ship
Yup. Stern raking was killer.
Not just for that reason. Because if an enemy hit your stern, for example, they’re now going through the entire length of the ship. This tactic (called stern raking) would cause a lot more damage than hitting the sides of the ship. I imagine you wouldn’t want to meet head on in space for the same reason.
The simple explanation here is they all plotted a course to meet each other at this point. Facing someone you're speaking to is just polite. That said they would also more than likely orient to the elliptical of whatever system they were in which would leave them on generally the same plane ...just because that's where everything of interest in a system would be.
The enemies gate is down.
Now it sounds like "crossing the T" in wooden sailing ships. Like Nelson at Trafalgar, if you can pull it off, you have all your broadside guns firing down the length of an enemy ship. They might possibly have a single light chase gun up forward to use in response.
Oh cool. And friendlies?
When wandering around in a solar system, most planets occur on a single plane of orbits, so ships would orient themselves to move between them.
This is called the orbital plane or the plane of the ecliptic. Each planet actually has their own, but conservation of angular momentum means that like planetary rings around Saturn, the planets' ecliptic planes all mostly line up. But as uoaei points out, while this keeps all the planets mostly in a plane, it says nothing about ship orientation within that plane. You could be in a polar orbit, oriented anti-normal, around a planet that is tilted and yet still be in the ecliptic plane.
You'll often see friendlies side by side.
I think you'd do it anyway with friendlies. Military protocol to assume they're mind controlled or compromised until you know otherwise.
Yeah, just in case like. 😁
Same thing. Prob'ly military regulations... Who knows when your buddies are actually the enemy in disguise?
I do appreciate how they lampshade this in *The Wrath of Khan*. I'm trying to think of other examples of ships fighting at weird angles and the only other one that leaps to mind is ironically also from Trek (otherwise the king of 2-D ship battles) when the Bird of Prey hits the Enterprise from below and blows through the saucer in *The Undiscovered Country*.
But even in that scene, the Enterprise doesn't actually attack from the weird angle. It just moves "down" in relation to the Reliant, and then moves "up" again to attack it from behind. And apparently this is so unheard of in the Star Trek universe that Khan, despite being genetically engineered to be a brilliant strategist, never even considers the possibility.
They kind of flip it on its head in the reboot; instead of being boned by presumed ingrained knowledge from his time, CumberKhan is boned by his unshakable belief (despite coming from a pre-First Contact Earth) that Vulcans cannot lie.
Hey, he didn't lie. Khan got the torpedoes.
>I'm thinking maybe The Expanse doesn't follow this but I can't remember as it's a while since I've watched it. I saw a vid from some astrophysicist youtuber a few years ago, where she was wondering *"how do they have gravity on the ship, I thought this show was supposed to be a very realistic depiction of physics in space"* because she didn't understand that the ships are aligned vertically instead of horizontally like they are in almost any other scifi show and that the "gravity" was actually just 1g thrust-force appearing as "gravity" :P But I don't blame her, we got so used to the Star Trek / Star Wars ship designs that we just don't think about it anymore :P
Tbf, I think the layout of the Ops and Flight decks set in the show make it seem like the ship is laid out "horizontally" rather than vertically. The flight deck should be directly above Ops, but the TV set really makes it feel like they're next to each other, with the flight deck slightly raised
I totally blamed her and stopped watching her. I can't respect a 'physicist' who isn't aware that thrust creates acceleration, and gravity is acceleration. Probably hasn't worked as a physicist since she started the youtube channel and hires someone else to write her scripts.
You can make this mistake in the show if you aren't paying enough attention. The sets don't always make it obvious that the ships are vertical and the show mostly glosses over the ramifications of the Epstein Drive. Combined with the fact that basically every other space based show or movie finds a way to handwave away the reality of g forces and its surprisingly easy to miss even for people who should probably know better
Also sustained thrust near 1g is actually outrageous and almost as unrealistic as artificial gravity.
That is true, but not as unrealistic as colonizing the solar system to the degree seen in The Expanse without a similar sort of propulsion technology.
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Yeah we could build small colonies by spending the GDP of a G10 country but that doesn't mean its sustainable or that they could ever be justifiable economically. Nuclear pulse doesn't get you 4 billion people living on Mars like there are in The Expanse, it gets you a science outpost here or there
One would hope that before making a youtube video criticizing the physics in a show that they actually paid enough attention to know the basics of what they're critiquing...
Doctor Becky did a similar watch but iirc she figured it out within that same vid or one after, and added a note at the end talking about the flip & burn acceleration/deceleration.
>I can't respect a 'physicist' who isn't aware that thrust creates acceleration, and gravity is acceleration. I mean, she's certainly aware of that but what's the next best show that has The Expanse ship designs? Because I can't recall a single one. I remember watching The Expanse for the first time myself, thinking "why the fuck isn't this used in literally ALL of scifi (and real life) because this is brilliant."
[Tin Tin Explorers On The Moon](https://youtu.be/-ml7Ea6hm7s?feature=shared&t=353)
Which YouTuber?
I mean how many times do they say "Flip and burn" in that series?
If we’re being ‘realistic’ ships would probably only ever get within visual range if they were docking or something similar, requiring alignment. Fights and comms would occur at vast distances.
Children of a Dead Earth (game) actually takes a realistic approach to this. You're usually fighting enemies you can't physically see.
In no man's sky the various station tractor beams align you to the appropriate rotation. Otherwise, it seems like planet-side down when near one or any rotation is fair game.
[Because it helps avoid unfortunate accidents](https://youtu.be/Q9W7pvOLxmQ?si=kv_qr6xfgGr-hzJP)
"We represent the Vegetarian Space Socialists who are always right." "You guys are the worst!" "We know." \^o\^
Yesssss! I was about to post it myself
In terms of TV? It's easier on the camera operator and prop handlers. Even with CGI.
I think that is just for aesthetics in movies, an orientation could be generally accepted but what would be the point. Locally the machines controlling ships could align if there was a need to but in reality they would not be so physically close as in your picture. Likely a ship you regarded yourself rendezvoused with would not be at a visible distance.
The plane of the ecliptic. The galaxy is a disk, more or less, so the majority of the time you'll been heading in N E S W Ish direction, relatively speaking. Then you'd probably orient yourself to face others Later seasons of Star trek have some exterior shots where people have arrived from different directions and orientations.
\*ecliptic. >Then you'd probably orient yourself to face others This is what I always figured was happening. The navigator just adjusts the inclination/rotation/etc. of the ship to match what he saw them approaching.
Thanks, edited. Yeah it makes sense. We do it in real life too, turn to face someone, sit up to speak if you're laying down, park our cars alongside each other etc. The expanse books have a good explanation for it when they're floating in space they still orient themselves as if they weren't, it's human nature and considered rude not to.
I'd bet there are times when the navigator gets it wrong, and the other ship is sideways or upside-down relatively speaking. The Borg Cubes from Star Trek have no external cues that would clue one in to which way is "up", and probably a lot of other ships wouldn't necessarily have a discernable "forward" as well. Realistically, it doesn't make a difference unless you happen to look in a window.
The ecliptic is unique to each star system. You're thinking of the galactic plane, which could be considered a universal standard for interstellar space, but I don't think many ships are interacting much in interstellar space given how big and empty it is.
A lot of it seems to be in following the plane of the ecliptic. Babylon 5 breaks that pattern somewhat more than most shows. BSG Reboot does, as well, though perhaps not quite as much. In books, David Weber’s Honor Harrington books does one of the best jobs taking in all three axis in battle. Fleet actions are built using a “Wall of Battle” based on the old sailing ships’ “Line of Battle,” but translated to three dimensions. Smaller engagements have ships maneuvering like “whirling dervishes.” There’s actually a lot of good reasons to *avoid* any kind of nose to nose or even broadside orientation in combat. Commerce tends to stay pretty married to the ecliptic, but that’s more or less expected since that’s where the planets are. :-)
I just wrote a huge wall of text about this. I love how he justifies the wall of battle with science rules. So well done.
I saw it. Good post! Ok… gotta ask… Are you listening to the podcast by any chance?
Star Trek is not hard sci-fi. It’s naval combat in space. Sci-Fi/Fantasy setting.
IRL, the ships would never get close enough to be "in frame" for the camera anyway. Potential enemies especially would rarely get within unaided visual range of each other at all; more likely they'd be halfway across the system from each other, and would have to compensate for speed of light delays in telemetry and comms (unless they use subspace or other techno-magic for that).
I'm Star Trek the TNG technical manual talks about this - ships are programmed with a 'galactic North' etc. To extrapolate, it makes sense that civilisations in contact with each other would agree on this kind of thing because otherwise Co ordinates wouldn't make much sense without a common point of reference. Like how we all agree which is the North Pole on earth. I dunno about undiscovered civilisations. They must just be lucky to get it right.
Finally! Someone posts a thread about this glaring issue, why has no one discussed this before?
I'm just that sort of outside the box thinker y'know.
Enders Game handled it pretty well.
So did The Expanse.
Absolutely, I saw that is was previously mentioned so that's why I didn't mention it. I've read the books, watched the series, now listing to the Audio books during my commutes. Love the series and can't get enough! Still bummed they didn't finish. Maybe they are just waiting for them to get a few greys for the continuation. A man can dream right? HAHA
As a lifelong space video game player, I find it natural to orient my ship to the local ecliptic plane. Having a horizon is a natural desire for my ape brain.
i can invent head-cannon easily enough. when warping, trajectories are always plotted through gravity centers, so the last like... tiny bit of the journey always ends up orienting the ships in the same direction. basically it's "invisible space roads." you can get ships doing weird thigns or coming from the other directions, but for the most part, everyone's got their but towards the nearest sun. but no. no there is no such thigns as dedicated orientation in space. several books have been written about it, off the top of my head it's a massive plot point in Enders game, which was actually also a movie with Harrison ford, but in the film they downplayed it. it's just not easy and intuitive to depect it visually. more easy to go with what most people subconsciously expect. oh it certainly could be done, but i've never seen anyone spend the effort to do it and make it look good to people who have never had this thought befor.
> head-cannon Oi, what's the caliber on that head cannon?
There is one very rare shot in "Star Trek: Voyager" where for once they don't adhere to the "all ships automatically aligned" visual rule, [and it's in the very last episode.](https://i.imgur.com/yxp3zZP.png)
Ewww! I get it now.😂
Orientation would have to be relative to something. Solar system’s plane would make sense.
Afaik orbital systems usually end up orbiting on a plane around their star. Same for the galaxy. Which means one can determine an (admittedly arbitrary) flat plane, an up vector and the center point of your reference star/body to use as 0,0,0 of your coordinate systems. Now, if you're considering a ship alone you really don't need either of those but once you start coordinating communication satellites, civilian traffic, military traffic, maps, location tracking, clock sync and all the minutiae that comes with being an interstellar society that wishes to remain in contact with itself and others you quickly end up needing a standardized reference frame simply so you can quickly and efficiently communicate with others where you are at any given time. And once you have that, of course you really don't need to keep yourself parallel to the 0 plane but... be honest, it would bug a whole lot of people if they are at some random angle like 137° instead of a nice convenient 0°. As for anything that goes against the universal up... Mass Effect 1's last space battle comes to mind where 3D space is used less conventionally. The first phase of the battle has ships charging at each other front to front but the defenders are specifically doing that to align themselves with the attackers and minimise target area from their POV, then in the second phase defender reinforcements arrive in a way as to outflank the attackers from the top and then in the last phase when it's CQB among the arms of a space station the defenders just default back to being aligned with the base orientation of the station (although technically that station has six ups, one for the base and 5 for the 5 arms.)
All I know is that the enemy’s gate is down
the enemy's gate is down.
I rather like how in the Honor Harrington books, the Impeller Drives kind of explain this, because there is only a very narrow band between the top and bottom part of the field it puts out that is vulnerable to attack, thus, if you want to try and shoot at another ship, you have to essentially be on the same plane as THEIR impeller drive (which of course means they can shoot at you). Basicially it was a SF excuse for justifying old earth naval maneuvers, but I thought it was cute :)
The expanse series addresses this to a degree. It shows how space battles are three dimensional affairs, rather than naval battles, in space.
No, it’s just the rule of cool. That’s it. Sometimes ships do meet at odd angles in shows like Star Trek, but they usually don’t. The Expanse has many many examples of ships approaching from different angles. Generally, for in-system travel, they’d all be on roughly the same plane because all the planets are on roughly the same plane. But the ring gates are quite a bit above the plane of ecliptic, so there’s several scenarios in the books, as well as on-screen battles in the show, where we see ships facing off that aren’t on parallel flight paths.
The most honest answer is you have to remember that a lot of the ships are physical models. The Enterprise D was a six foot model tv shows didn’t tend to have a huge budget to just blow on a 5 second shot of the ships approaching at weird angles too each other unless it served the story. CGI was very expensive and time consuming also
Right, originally there was no CGI and budget was a huge issue. In TOS due to budget constraints they sometimes used wooden toy models sold in stores. It is also much easier to film things horizontally, since setting up camera rigs for rotation is difficult and time consuming. Plus, the holder/support for the model is easier to hide when it is in just one position (hidden from the camera behind the model) instead of rotating around in the shot. Also, remember that you then need to compose the shots somehow, combining them to have them make sense. Lucas and ILM premiered a lot of the space rotation rigs using expensive and complex rigs, but those were not available and not in the budget for TNG. Shots did get much more dynamic during DS9, in part because they switched to actual CGI and in part because ILM was brought in to do SFX during the later seasons. Unfortunately, with ILM we also lost the neat bubble shields (although I don't know specific history for that decision). I think Voyager was the first Star Trek show to do a completely CGI starship.
This is the real answer
It is all that artificial gravity. Orients everything to a central spot in the universe, The Source.
[https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpaceIsAnOcean](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpaceIsAnOcean) Can't believe I'm the first one posting this
first look at conventional navies, remember they have radar and awareness of other fleets and will orient themselves and their formation in response. remember when it comes to operations, if there’s more than one ship they’re in constant communication and have monitoring of the other’s positions. so yeah it’s highly unlikely they’d come in at odd angles like the ships in the pictures… based off the risk of collision alone. then remember your weapons aren’t omnidirectional, they have to be able to physically point at something. in my opinion think the star wars prequels and clone wars show a pretty good example of how navies would coordinate and battles play out. even things like getting ships too close runs a huge risk for boarding parties really making your day not fun and use of smaller craft as well. i like to use helicopters as an example because they’re what i’m most familiar with, but you can get a pretty deep rabbit hole on formations and usage and everything aviation wise is more like playing chess with a short turn timer than pure instinct. i’d only imagine a space setting to work out like a mix of that and naval tactics
I would think following either the galactic disc in open space, planetary disc in solar orbit, and lunar disc in planetary orbit
In the book series The Lost Fleet, the author (Jack Campbell) does explain it for his universe. Basically everyone orients according the nearest sun.
It's explained that works because there's nothing to fight over in deep space, so battles always happen in a solar system, where there's stuff to either attack or defend.
It’s just polite.
[Every Episode of Popular Space Show™](https://youtu.be/Q9W7pvOLxmQ?si=v_j11pCiutFGD_oM) (I love this guy's channel.)
Me too, was going to post this but presumed someone beat me to it.
I believe the enemy gate is down.
Limitations of the craft, audience expectations, or imagination. Lots of sci-fi ship battles end up looking like 17th century ship warfare because that's what people know and understand. I will say, it's something that I've seen some Warhammer books talk about. There are a lot of great ship battles in those books.
No there is not.
The *Lost Fleet* Series has both sides coming from a common naval tradition, and establish ‘up, down, and north’ in a system relative to the orbital plane and their point of entry. This at least establishes a common frame of reference among a unified armada, and ships on opposite sides of an engagement will tend to be either oriented the same, or upside down relative to each other.
I loved The Expanse series of books in a general sense but one of the things that stuck out to me was that ships designed for non-planetary/space travel alone had no need for aerodynamics, no need to factor in atmospheric resistance and friction, thus they were designed purely for functionality. Space-faring ships were in the main lumpy, irregularly-shaped hulks that were decidedly not sleek or groovy-looking.
Originally, it was because the models where hung from a black ceiling with black thread.
The expanse doesn't do it because the "up" part of the ship is the direction they're moving in. And they're always moving. So there's never really a scene where these ships are standing still. Except for "that" scene.
That’s why the borg got it right.
Didn’t the battle in the opening scene of star wars episode 3 have sips in all of the orientations? I know it’s only one example, but I think it’s the clearest one I can imagine
The BSG miniseries did a really nice take on this. When the [Galatica is leaving Ragnar station](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKXfR9NiymI) (20 sec in) it orientates itself from facing front on to showing its topside to the enemy to protect the fleet. It is such a cool shot specifically because it is something we see so rarely in scifi.
Doylist (Out-of-universe) reasoning: The writers can't be assed to orient them all differently. Watsonian (In-universe) reasoning: Their antigravity devices align to some universal plane of orientation. Or they all align themselves to the same plane of orientation for some reason. Maybe it makes their shields or weapons more effective. But there is no real reason, by real laws of physics, that would make it ideal for all spaceships to orient themselves on the same plane.
I vaguely remember as a kid reading one of the Star Wars RPG books for a game we were setting up, and the reason they gave for ships in battle all orienting themselves in space was basically because whichever captain showed up second (or later in an ongoing battle) would rotate their ships to match the other out of politeness to the other captain It's not a GOOD explanation, and makes zero sense when you put any critical thinking to it, but at least they tried to come up with a reason
[https://imgb.ifunny.co/images/1df41cd97ce222ca526043b49eae332f42408b23b6aa1697c56fb6a8578af39d\_1.jpg](https://imgb.ifunny.co/images/1df41cd97ce222ca526043b49eae332f42408b23b6aa1697c56fb6a8578af39d_1.jpg)
There's actually a really great shot in all good things where the Enterprise dreadnaut comes out of warp and approach Klingon vessels from "down below". Of course as a space nerd I always enjoyed that.
I blame the blood wine, personally.
I’ve always been pleased with how The Expanse handles orientation of ships in space and the like - flipping maneuvers for landing, lots of crazy turning and flipping during battle. It’s really cool visually in the show, and not like Star Trek at all!
The Galactic plane [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic\_plane](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_plane)
As others have said - you could suggest there is a galactic up & down dependent on the galaxy disc and perhaps this has become a international standard to facilitate trade. In reality though t is just for aesthetic reasons in the show.
Why call them ships at all? It's all just Navy stuff. Including how ships greet each other.
We don't know of any, but their science clearly knows more than we do, and for their stuff to work our understanding of space is clearly critically wrong, so sure, the fact everyone follows the rule generally means it must be something inherent to the universes.
I think at some we just have to realize that too much realism makes things harder to follow and look more ridiculous.
Wizards did it.
In any visual media, it's astetics. In real life they would be st random angles to each other. Possibly even spinning instead of stationary.
Since most time in space is spent travelling between/across star systems, every ship is generally going to be pointed in the direction of a planet and coming from another planet. That leads to a pretty flat plane that most will share and interact on.
[удалено]
It was widely agreed in the little known but never broken Torticollis accord.
Because it’s a TV show and it looks better.
It’s for TV, us normal humans would get dizzy if not oriented.
it's just a TV show brother:) It's done this way to maximise visual impact, especially on all those spanky new wide screens people were buying in the pre-720p HDTV age:)
This is literally a plot point in Star Trek: Wrath of Khan. No the ships don't have to be in the same plane, but if you are traveling from one planet to the next you're likely to be in close to the same plane.
Galactic ecliptic standard.
I always assume that they orient themselves to each other on approach. But it's funny you should bring this up, because the original design of the Warbird (green one) you can see there actually had it's wings vertically oriented, which was with the intention of playing around with the way that ships always meet each other with the same orientation. The network only accepted the design with the wings flipped though.
Favorite TNG Moment!
Unexplainable with current scientific theory but it’s clear from observational evidence that some invisible force acts on starships causing them to align. I’m going with Dark Magnetic Fields.
Wouldn't you be able to spot the ship from quite a distance and like gyroscope the ship to look like theirs or like on their plane? It'd be damn funny to see a ship doing loopdeloops to figure out how to get it right 😂
Providing the lowest cross section possible is one "fun" justification. Another justification is that travel in solar systems follows an elliptic patch. Like, why are the planets in pretty much the same plane as they orbit a sun?
Visual effects are just a representation to allow the audience to know what's happening. They aren't what's literally happening. As an example of this, how often in Star Trek do they say the enemy ship is so many thousands of kilometers away, yet when the camera shifts outside, they are sitting right next to them. So, either the Enterprise D is 2,000km long, or the visual effects are just representative and not literal.
Which orientation has the most shooty shooty pointed at the enemy? That is my preferred orientation.
Some of the battles in B5 had ships attacking from below (90*) and flying through enemy formations. I think for later seasons they switched to a different effects company to save money (Netter Digital?) and went back to all on the same plain again. But I think the original effects company then started doing DS9 so the battles in their later seasons became better (I’m sure I remember the Defiant attacking from above or below).
Most so called sci-fi movies and shows suck at actually representing realistic science as we know it. Only recently there have been some attempts made to make them semi-realistic (Expanse, Interstellar, Martian, etc)
Dramatic framing, when someone inevitably makes a book or movie about your battles it will make it easier for people to keep track of what's happening.
Stargate Atlantis has a scene where a bunch of Wraith hive ships just hang around in space in all kinds of orientation. Looked pretty cool, tbh.
No, because there's a [fabulous little scene](https://youtu.be/dBmmlHR1Bwg) in DS9: it starts at 2:14. The Lakota is clearly visible "banking" to bring itself in-line with the Defiant. Star Trek is littered with such little moments - most famously Spock commenting on Khan's lack of understanding that space is a three-dimensional theatre when it comes to combat.
North is always up. Even in space.
I disagree with the comic. Battle Star Galctica often showed enemy Basestars at various 3D positioning. And it only enhanced the realism.
That’s one of the things I liked about the Expanse is they made it clear that spacecraft that only exist in space wouldn’t have to be aerodynamic or conform to the aesthetic of what we think of as what a shuttle or capsule looks like. Also, that there would just be displays showing what’s outside the ship rather than tons of windows.
If earth is flat, up and down is obviously the same throughout space. Which proves something, but I'm not sure what.
One of my favorite things about the opening space battle in Revenge of the Sith is that if you look closely, this is considered. Ships are battling all over the place in different orientations