Idk, most navigation would be along or close to the ecliptic plane of the system, wouldn’t it
If you are going to and from points within a solar system, probably but not necessarily. Every transfer made between gravitational influences increases the chance that you will enter at an angle to the equatorial plane, especially if the two influences are not coplanar traveling between solar systems would likely have you entering at a significant angle. Furthermore, approaching a ship at a low velocity means slowing down as you approach them, so even if you do approach coplanar, it would be engines first and not nose first (unless star trek vessels have an ability to reverse their propulsors? I don’t know if that’s ever been shown aside from by approaching things nose first). The expanse showed this aspect of space interaction well with the flip and burn maneuvers
Starfleet ships basically maneuver like they’re weightless
massless?, which, mathematically, they probably are. Inertial Dampeners are mostly mentioned in reference to stopping Worf from smashing into all the science stations every time the ship accelerates, but if inertia isn’t affecting the ship, they can basically do whatever they want. Even a tiny amount of thrust would be enough to put them in reverse from Full Impulse. Add to this that the ships aren’t held together by their superstructures, but by their Structural Integrity Fields, and really, a Starfleet vessel could be constructed in basically any shape. They just look like they have a front and an up because humans like it that wayId also propose that the ships are built with up and down with the additional factor of navigation. Humans typically spend their entire lives in gravity so it’s probably easier for humans to navigate a massive ship when it is built like it’s in gravity so the crew onboard can focus on their jobs instead of figuring out what direction is the engine room. Additionally we always see that every ship in the show also has artificial gravity onboard. Making a amorphously designed ship even more confusing to navigate/traverse.
between solar systems
FYI, there is only one solar system in the universe.
Source:
There are many planetary systems like ours in the universe, with planets orbiting a host star. Our planetary system is called “the solar system” because we use the word “solar” to describe things related to our star, after the Latin word for Sun, “solis.” — NASA
But that still means they shouldn’t always meet with both having the same side ‘up.’ Sometimes one should be 180 degrees from the other.
How do we know that all the alien ships we’re seeing for the first time aren’t actually upsidedown?
But shouldn’t they stay that way because that’s their standard?
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Another question for you- Would it be close to the system’s ecliptic plane so that you have a per-system standard or would it be close to the galactic plane for an intergalactic standard? Maybe some civilizations would choose one and some the other.
Assuming orbital mechanics matter, which in Star Trek they dont seem to matter.
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?
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.
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.
Yeah, that’s what i always thought as well. You could even extend that principle to spinning galaxies to have a common “up” direction.
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.
Neat!
Doesn’t the sun’s, and other star’s, magnetic field cause this phenomenon?
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).
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 a federation standard for which way is “up” based on the plane of the galaxy.
So at least that explains why Federation ships always meet on “level ground”
as for why the romulans, klingon, and various other non federation, especially non friendly species from the other quadrants, would be oriented the same way?
Idk, maybe the progenitor race from that one single episode of tng that never showed up or was spoken of again made some kind of subliminal or genetic memories of which way up should be.
Somewhere, in Alpha Centauri, in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of Leopard, there is a very important looking document titled “This Side Up”.
the progenitor race from that one single episode of tng that never showed up or was spoken of again
The entire final season of Discovery was about the Progenitors.
Does anyone know if they were the same? Presented the same way?
What do you mean? They reference the TNG episode and even call them the Progenitors.
Yes, we know there is one word in common.
Do both sets of progenitors look the same, act the same, have the same background or goals? Or did they take a vague story and write their own version with their own appearance, their own background and goals?
Why not go watch the season and find out? They are the same.
Because I’d rather doom scroll and shitpost thank research which episode and find it to stream?
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The galaxy is about 100 times wider than it is tall, so if i am bump into someone while we are both crossing a sector, we will likely be on a similar plane, even if we are likely at wildley different “eleveations” . On top of that, being close enough to a ship to make visual contact with a really good telescope (say 20,000km) requires a conscious effort when talking about galactic scales.
Hilariously, they address this in the first season of Discovery.
When Starfleet ships meet with Klingon ships you see them out the windows hanging at odd angles. When two Starfleet ships meet, they warp in at an odd angle then bank and roll to align the ships to each other.
This is why the Borg are true geniuses. Spheroid ships are good from any perspective.
I wonder how ship design would change if odd orientation were normalized
They’re not. It’s better to be disk shaped for combat because you present a minimal cross section to an enemy “in front” of you. If you are the attacker, you can chose your attack to face the side of the enemy ship and minimize your own damage / maximize theirs.
A cube is not stealthy and equally easy to hit from all sides. It’s weird that the Borg use it because they don’t think up their own ideas; they just copy. And no other species uses cube shaped ships. This is a minor plot hole.
The Borg didn’t want to be stealthy and assumed they could always adapt to a threat.
Think of the house you live in. There have been plenty of idealists proposing various domed, turreted, or cylindrical building, but lack of straight walls would make it damn annoying to arrange the furniture. Similar to cargo ships: we used to have hull shaped but now the most important concern is rectangular shipping containers. Extrapolate to spaceship design, and a cube is most efficient for crew quarters cargo storage
Houses are generally cookie cutter because they are easier to build that way. Spaceships are custom made because they are the only thing keeping your insides from boiling in space.
I read this one story long ago where there was a war between two spacefaring civilization. One was technologically advanced but fewer in number. However their attempts to improve their technological edge, worked toward eventually every ship being custom, unique …… until they lost the war under the weight of unique parts and maintenance that made their ships too expensive to keep running.
Even space ships need a supply chain, parts p, service, repairs. If we do ever become a spacefaring civilization, we’ll need many copies of relatively few unique models, like we already do with aircraft, cars, ships, and houses
You can trust the mass produced spaceships if you want, but I think they’ll end up like Boeing.
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?)
Picard season 3 has a longer battle, and its a lot more 3d than previous shows.
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.
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.
In the real world, you wouldn’t even need drones. If some alien civilization saw us as a threat, even if we were a significantly more advanced technologically than we are now, they would just have to start altering the orbits of asteroids, comets and meteors, which could be done by just changing their albedo in certain areas and at certain levels.
Basically, they could destroy us with paint and math.
Yeah, you wouldn’t, but in those books, the ai of ships have random evasive movements they perform to make some shots miss.
That’s last pane is essentially an eve online screenshot
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?
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…
This is why I appreciate the scene in Undiscovered Country where Kronos One glides into view, seeming to align itself to the Enterprise’s orientation.
Star Trek VI is the best Trek movie by far. I mean Trek is always best in an episodic TV format so the movies generally don’t have a reason to exist. But VI was needed to give a send off to the original cast. And it gives some commentary on the cold war which was relevant at the time and fit into Trek canon since TNG was a thing by then so we knew the Klingons and Federation made peace.
And yeah it had a lot of details in there. I always loved the universal translator constantly screwing up… Shakespeare in the original Klingon, old Vulcan proverbs about Nixon. The antigrav failing on the Klingon ship, and yeah ships not just behaving like ships floating in water. It nailed everything.
it suprises me that this sentiment isn’t more common. i don’t hate the other movies, but they’re more movies with the Trek characters and world than they are Star Trek in a movie format. with it’s allegorical but ultimately hopeful story, VI really did feel like Star Trek proper, just with a bigger budget and longer runtime. The Motion Picture had the same spirit but loses points for just bolting 2001 and the Nomad probe episode together, and I’d like to think that Into Darkness could have been a modern-at-the-time Undiscovered Country if they didn’t spend the whole runtime failing to be a modern Wrath of Khan
Yeah I think a story about an arms buildup and a defense industrial complex just doesn’t work well in a movie. In real life it’s about subtle influences on politics not “pew pew pew”, there’s not even any opportunities for passionate speeches. Just “maybe it’s bad to put so many resources towards building warships and once you have them you might be tempted to use them to justify the expenditure… someday.” In the real world it’s a trend over time, so how do you make a compelling story about that? If you deviate too much to make it more interesting it’s not accurate to the real world, and then it’s more like a fictional problem.
