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Comment by Freak_NL | Hacker News Reader

Star Trek: TNG made a teenage me wonder why starships encountering each other always appeared to have matched their orientations.

Was there some kind of prearranged signal? A diplomatic code adhered to even by enemies? Just a general preference on all sides concerned preventing headaches and vague unheimlich feelings of discomfort? So many questions…

If I was harassing the federation I would keep my ship at an awkward angle relative to theirs at all times just to keep them on edge.

I was totally fine with the other plot holes though.

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Don't think it was necessarily a plot hole, albeit after the fact. Plenty of sci fi authors have taken similar approaches throughout the years. The idea is that in a spiral galaxy the natural tendency would be to stick with the orientation that matched the galactic plane along the right-handed spin (to determine up vs down) and some authors have even extended naval directional signals into space. This is from The Lost Fleet:

"Within a solar system, directional references were always made to the world outside a ship so other ships could understand them. Anything above the plane of the system was up, anything below it down. The direction toward the sun was right, or starboard, (or even 'starward' as some urged), while the direction away from the sun was left, or port."

"The direction toward the sun was right, or starboard, (or even 'starward' as some urged), while the direction away from the sun was left, or port.""

Ehh. Ahh. "Port" and "starboard" should be relative to the bow/stern axis of the ship. Otherwise you'll have a hard time finding the head.

In the future we won't need a head, because we'll have matter teleportation.

That just needs a few lines of plot glue to fix that problem! Like, "Warp drives need to be oriented parallel to the ecliptic plane of surrounding celestial bodies to best calculate navigation and maximize their space bending effect. Naturally, ships keep this orientation at all times just in case."

I remember thinking the same thing. They did break the matching orientations in the final episode with the attack from below, which was fun:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=did164yEFx4&feature=youtu.be...

Now I understand why I felt that scene was so brutal!

Cue the great SF writer E.E. 'Doc' Smith of Lensman fame, who went into detail on the challenges of just getting two spaceships to match velocities closely enough to allow docking at transfer of passengers and cargo. (He did handwave the speed of light away, though.)

Or why all the ships have a front and a back. This why I like the Borg ships.

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