When I run into other ships in space games I usually orient myself to be head on with them. Unless I’m trying to murder them, then I try to go wherever their guns aren’t. Maybe Star Trek just skips showing that part.
Any ship traveling towards another ship would have its nose pointed towards it.
If both ships travel towards each other, their noses would be aligned, but their roll would likely be different.
That’s a bit different from what’s being shown in the comic where ships seem to have any orientation, no matter the context.
As for a galactic up/down, the galactic disc would be the obvious reference. That still leaves a 50/50 chance that two civilizations would choose the same direction as up.
Realistically (i.e., not in Star Trek), a ship traveling toward something will have its engine cone pointed towards it as it decelerates for rendezvous.
I disagree. You can have low angle intercepts where the nose can be pointed well less than nose-on or almost the same direction even. Inertia in space would have the nose pointed away from the other ship in some direction to decelerate. I think your comment completely disregards vectors of thrust and velocity along with the relative motion of the target. Nose-to-nose would be an incredibly unlikely arrangement to intercept or rendezvous. Maybe you’re thinking more orbital mechanics where nose/nose would be right for say docking, but even then it disregards the maneuvering to catch up/decelerate/orbital altitude maneuvering needed prior to that meetup.
Unless they decide to orrient with the disc vertically aligned. Of if they base it on their home system.
Maybe some of the the other ships are upside down but because we always see them that way we don’t know?
Can’t tell if this comic just doesn’t get it or put zero thought into it. And there is several examples throughout the various series where two ships don’t align to each other.
There are several reasons why the ships would always face each other, from common courtesy to defensive posturing.
When two ships face each other its like an nonverbal way of saying “we see you” or “you have our attention”. Orientation also plays apart in this. Of course there is no real reason to orient so both ships face “up” thanks to artificial gravity, but it’s also something that could be seen as polite and etiquette as getting on the same level as the other meeting them half way.
For defensive purposes, it also makes sense to nose towards a potential threat or adversary as within star trek the shields are strongest at the front (thanks to deflectors and navigational shielding) as well as the best/most accurate sensors to get a good reading. Additionally the forward arc of the ship will likely have the most overlapping weapon arcs, especially for ships like klingon bird of preys with fixed disruptor cannons facing forwards. This posture also tends to keep primary engineering, where the reactor/warp core is situated, obscured and defended, so if the ship wants to make a swift retreat their primary means of doing so is less likely to be damaged or disabled, and if you engage an FTL retreat towards a foes rear that foe needs to turn about and reorient themsevles to give chase, giving more time for the retreating party to take evasive action and avoid further intercepts.
Also, when playing space games, I automatically roll to align my ship’s up vector with the ships I encounter, without thinking about it. So I guess human nature plays a role too.
Pulsar?
Star Citizen
There is direction in space. Space is not a formless void there is order and structure to the universe.
The solar system is shaped like a disk. Most planets orbit and revolve to the same axis as the solar system.
When a star trek ship is seen in orbit, like the opening to TOS it is usually shown orbiting with the up of the ship facing the north of the planet, making a left turn with the planet off the port side.
Having a consistent orientation, like up=north would make sense for navigating a solar system. Federation ships in orbit are always shown rotating to face the direction of travel while in orbit. That’s not at all needed to remain in orbit, but having consistent orientation seems important to the federation.
tldr: The enemy gate is down. Orientation helps because we’re just built that way, and so is most everything else.
Is it actually? I always assumed orbits were all over the place and our 2d renders are similar to why paper maps are all fucky - just the easiest way to deal with 3d in 2d space.
The universe is not super precise, so it is a generalization, but within the solar system, planets orbit and revolve approximately in a plane.
The orbit of every planet in the solar system is within 8 degrees of the sun’s equator. With the exception of Uranus, every planet’s axial tilt is within 30 degrees of its orbital inclination.
The formation of solar systems results in most things settling into a mostly flat disk shape most of the time.
Doesn’t the sun’s, and other star’s, magnetic field cause this phenomenon?
Neat!
Yeah, that’s what i always thought as well. You could even extend that principle to spinning galaxies to have a common “up” direction.
North is subjective though and I doubt any ships are actively tracking the magnetic flux of every planet in the system
North is determined by the rotation of the planet. The sun sets in the west, and if you are facing west, north is to your right. This is true for any planet/moon and doesn’t have anything to do with magnets.
Not every planet spins in the same direction
Venus and Neptune are the only round objects that are rotating in different directions in our solar systems. The angular momentum of the proto-planetary disc is preserved in all the bodies with enough mass to preserve said angular momentum following a collision. So every solar system has an inherently “up” and “down” to it’s planetary disc with nearly all the major bodies in said system rotating in a similar fashion.
The ecliptic North Pole (Earth’s plane of orbit) is a bit over 27 degrees off the plane of galactic rotation. Which one is “up” and why would a spacecraft that’s done any number of inclination changes to get there care about it?
I think most space faring civilizations would orient themselves to the the local system they are in. Same way that maps of Manhattan are always rotated 29 degrees so the avenues are running up and down the page. Out in interstellar space i think a ship would orient to the galactic plane just for the ease of navigation. It’s a lot easier for the navigator to plot a course if the ship is already oriented to their maps, e en if the computer does a lot automatically.
But I don’t think mamy ships would spend much time hanging out in interstellar space. There is just way too much nothingness coupled with a shit ton of radiation since you are no longer being protected by local solar wind
Edit: this is all assuming FTL travel. I think the expanse probably does thing things closest to reality with the bulky skyscraper shaped ships that creat artificial gravity from acceleration. They don’t have much in the way to really orient to anything since “up” is the direction of travel.
There’s multiple things you’re mixing up here. There’s the “up” in the global coordinate reference frame. This could be based on the local system, though that makes entering and exiting the system a tiny bit more difficult. More likely it’d be based on galactic coordinates.
There’s also the ship reference frame in the comic. This probably won’t be oriented towards the global coordinate system. It’ll be oriented towards whatever the engines, sensors, and gravity need. Because the ships will all be in orbit, their orientations will probably be changing constantly relative to other ships and the global reference frame. There’s no reason to orient in a single direction and lots of reasons not to (it wastes energy, points your sensors away from the things you want to see, etc).
I’d like to think that it is an unspoken rule among all spacefaring people, regardless of their planetary origin or biological design, to automatically reorient their ships to match the “up” direction of any other ship they are approaching.
It makes sense since (effectively) all spacefaring peoples started on a planet with gravity and well defined “up” directions. You wouldn’t interact with anyone in gravity while upside down, so as a courtesy you’d always want to be facing “up” for both your sake’s.
Technically, this only needs to be the practice of Starfleet (or even just human) navigators in order to account for 99% of what we see in Star Trek. Maybe it’s our guys who are doing all the careful orienting, and the alien of the week just comes in from whatever angle they want.
And there are LOTS of examples of other ships uncloaking in non aligned positions.
I like this “starfleet policy is to make a best guess and align up when approaching” - borg cube presents particular problems.
Or maybe, since Starfleet is seeing it all through the view screen rather than directly, it’s just a little image manipulation for the comfort of the viewer
I thought that it was canonical, at least in some series, that the viewscreen is a window that displays a 1x view of outside and any time they want to zoom in, or are hailed, if turns into a monitor? I swear there’s been multiple times where someone was sucked out of the bridge through it.
There’s probably thousand of pages written on diplomatic rules about which civilization’s ships have to re-orient themselves to meet another’s.
Clearly transporters can’t compensate for relative orientation so its universal courtesy to align your ships so guests don’t transport in upside down.
Every time a person transports the transporter annihilates the universe and rebuilds it around the transportee but just a little to the left or right depending where they want to go
But the ships are always sideways relative to planet surfaces?
I always thought that it was the computer adjusting the view for the crew. I mean its not a window its a screen.
I think it’s both.
They probably align to the orientation of the galaxy they are in. Or even the solar system.
You only have 2 orientations like that.
3, you can also treat the center as down.
That’s how Kirk defeated Kahn. He understood that space isn’t limited to just 2 dimensions
I’m actually surprised you were the first person to bring that up. I was going to, but then I got into a conversation with someone in the thread and forgot. It’s the only time I can remember where they really used the idea that space is three dimensional.
They even make a note of it that Khan is possible to defeat because of it. Spock says, “he is intelligent, but not experienced. His pattern indicates two dimensional thinking.”
And then virtually all other Star Trek space battles are based on two dimensional thinking. Oh well.
There is no other battle shown in Star Trek to rival the time given to the one in Khan.
Off the top of my head there are incidences of ships being behind moons, in weird places they wouldn’t expect, etc. It’s just not a) discussed nearly as much on screen or b} shown on screen.
When we do see big battles, they are in 3d - Wolf 359 comes to mind.
I think you are correct that Khan is explicit and gives it a lot of punch, but I would argue we shouldn’t be too quick to say they almost never deal with 3d/zero g.
(who remembers Klingon’s blood is pink?)
DS9 did have a few battles take advantage of 3D space but not to the degree or time WoK gives it. Sisco using the mirror-verse Defiant against Mirror Worfs Neg’Vhar. Comes to mind, or how the Klingons in general would ‘dive’ onto Dominion ships from odd angles during set piece battles.
Picard season 3 has a longer battle, and its a lot more 3d than previous shows.
This reminds me of how in a lot of sci-fi universes, every planet the characters go down to has earth standard gravity. When in reality there would be a ton of variance, some planets would have 20% stronger, or weaker, or crushing.
Expeditionary Force book series was a breath of fresh air, portray space battles how they probably would play out, at such long ranges you could move your ship and avoid a directed energy weapon. The books also do a great job with there being more variety in planetary conditions too. I loved that series. The audio books are fantastic, R.C. Bray does a wonderful job!
I think many stories hand-wave this by only interacting with “M” class planets unless the story is helped by adding the additional complexity.
Does M-class include the requirement of having 1.0g (or near enough)? I didn’t know that. Does that mean the federation is only made up of planets where humans don’t look daft moving around? Or maybe it has something to do with production budgets… 🤔
Yesz M class includes having tolerable gravity. There are many things that make a class M planet, which is why they are so rare. In some sci-fi universes there are other species that populate other types of planets that are rarely interacted with because there is not direct competition or benefits.
The Orville has that with Xelayans coming from a planet with higher gravity so they’re super strong under human conditions.
at such long ranges you could move your ship and avoid a directed energy weapon
But how would you know an energy weapon had fired? Wouldn’t you be constrained by the speed of light, regardless?
If Star Trek sensors were constrained by the speed of light, warp travel would be impossible.
If their engines aren’t constrained by speed of light, why would their weapons be?
Just fire warp-capable drones at the enemy.
This is also an idea behind the Dark Forest Hypothesis, a proposed explanation for the Fermi Paradox. Any spaceship fast enough for interstellar travel can be used to destroy planets just by flying into them.This is also an idea behind the Dark Forest Hypothesis
I think that’s less about warp-speed weapons and more about natural resource constraints and the unpredictable nature of technological advancement causing advanced civilizations to preemptively obliterate one another.
But yes, the only practical defense against superluminal weaponry would be to avoid getting spotted.
Yeah, you wouldn’t, but in those books, the ai of ships have random evasive movements they perform to make some shots miss.
Down is towards the target.
The Enemy Gate is down!
Here’s my retcon. The science of inertial dampeners are such that you have to be precisely aligned perpendicular to galactic north for maximum effectiveness.
galactic north
This isn’t entirely unreasonable to determine, since the galaxy is a big disk and you could map that as a 2D plane. For the most part, ships are traveling across the plane between planets, in the same way that a ship flying from Earth to the Moon or Earth to Mars would be flying through a plane perpendicular to the two bodies. Not a lot to visit above or below the plane, and the shortest distance would be between two points, so…
I hate this take. It doesn’t look stupid at all, it looks cool.
Btw, the klingon ships are made for atmospheric maneuvers?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCARADb9asE
Boldly going forward cause we can’t find reverse
Gosh seeing that “rage” tv bug in the corner is nostalgic.
I couldn’t find the original.
Yeah I wasn’t judging at all mate. Just reminds me of my childhood, sneaking back up at night to watch the music videos :)
