I think most species probably align themselves to either the galactic plane or prominent orbital plane of the local star system.
the "up" & "down" directions would be completely arbitrary, though. there's no reason to think everone would decide on a standard for those.
and species without that certain sense of appropriateness, or an overt dedication to logic, would likely not bother with a standard orientation. and especially when in orbit over a planet, I think everyone would orient their "down" towards the surface.
In more realistic scenarios, "down" is just defined by the direction of thrust. So approaching a ship, they will be down assuming you are decelerating to match their velocity, but they will be up if you are still thrusting towards them.
But all of that has almost nothing to do with how people will think of orientation to other ships since generally speaking you won't be using eye sight to communicate ship to ship. At that point an agreed upon down will be needed. Probably aligned with galactic or star system to establish a plane, and probably right hand rule to establish up and down. In general given that space is big and ships are small they will just be points on each others radar until they need to dock with each other so it doesn't really matter how people are actually oriented, as long as when they communicate what they say makes sense to the other side.
edit: or maybe down is towards the currently orbitted gravity well, like towards a planet/moon/star.
Yeah, they’d also have the cargo doors open. All this was to radiate heat into space. Heat buildup and dissipation is a big problem in space as unlike on Earth there is no atmosphere to transfer heat to.
Could they use "thumb rules" if said species have thumbs? One that us fleshy puny humans use is the right hand rule where a third axis convention (up) corresponds with counterclockwise movement by the hand curl. Of course you could easily use the other hand since they're arbitrary anyway.
You've stumbled across the answer in your own question. The hand choice is arbitrary, and the direction is a binary choice between the galactic plane looking clockwise or counterclockwise. So you'll get an even mix of upside-down and upside-up ships when you choose that normal direction arbitrarily.
Most realistic depictions are from the Klingons because tactically you should always face with your weapons oriented towards everyone at all times, including your allies.
Realistically their does need to be some consideration but the medium they travel isn't air, but the occasional speck of dust, hydrogen atom, and other small stuff. It's not much but for interstellar travel there are still considerations needed, namely reducing your cross sectional area in the direction of travel. Long and thin gives you less drag since it hits less stuff.
Regardless the airplane looks doesn't make much sense anyway :)
Not a trekkie, do they ever land in atmosphere on these ships? You would want aerodynamics for that to reduce drag and thus heat, but I'm not familiar enough to know.
I guess they probably have good thermal protections with their future tech, though.
The ships can land and take off at least some of them can but they don't fly around in the atmosphere they just go up and down they're either on the ground or they're in space but they can't really manoeuvre.
Except for that one episode of Voyager where they just kind of forgot about that, but I think that was hand-waved away by saying that they just made the shields into a bubble and so essentially from the air's perspective the ship was a sphere. That's apparently what the shuttlecraft do too, which is why they fall like a brick whenever they're shot down.
Depends on the distance being traveled by both ships. The Milky Way is 1000 light years deep, so there's a lot of vertical room to maneuver. Mentioned locations at real star systems, like Wolf 359, are definitely not all on the same plane in any way. Possibly more relevant, though, is that 'up' isn't really much of a thing. Star systems can (and do) have their axis tilted significantly off of the galactic axis, so even if you define 'up' within a star system and orient your ship that way, you may wind up tilted weird when you arrive at the next system due to it having a different 'up'. You could define 'up' by the galactic axis, but that would still only apply to the one organization; there's no reason for the UFP, Romulans, Klingons, Cardassians, and Dominion to all agree that one side of the galaxy is the top and the other is the bottom, but they do anyway. Humans couldn't even agree on which way to orient maps of our own planet for centuries.
well, if they are all using the galactic plane, but have different standards, maybe we just didn't know that they're always showing klingon ships upside down.
Sure but there are star systems that are above and below the exact ecliptic of the galactic plane. We're not on the ecliptic that's why you can't see the milky way as well in the southern hemisphere because we're kind of below it.
If a ship was travelling from Sol to Arcturus it would travel up (relative to the galactic plane) because we're slightly below it and it's considerably above it. The galaxy is very thin compared to its width, but it's still of thousands of light years high.
I thought of that. Ships would also be traveling great distances, and account for elevation enroute. It's not like you'd get to the Enterprise then hang a hard up turn to meet their elevation. You'd travel at an angle.
Don't forget about orbital mechanics. For a rendez vous between two ships you need a lot of maneuvers in opposite directions, it's not like shown in movies where the fly like airplanes. If two ships are close to each other they will likely be in different orientations and it would be a waste of energy to face each other since communications still happen at thens of thousands of kilometers of distance
Actually, space in general is mostly 2 dimensional, in that all the interesting stuff generally takes place on some sort of almost flat plane. A star system is generally on a plane, so is the galactic system, and for most planet+moons too. They just tend to be different planes so for ease of communication you will probably just align your idea of down with whatever the most convenient plane is. This of course is ignoring what gravity down is, as that changes as thrust does.
And as for ship alignment, yeah no one is going to worry about that till its time to dock, at which point the lighter vessel will likely change their orientation since its easier and takes less energy. Spaceships are not going to be within human sight range of each other most of the time, even being in relatively the same are. Space too big and getting ships close to each other is dangerous!
But in media that fucks with people's idea of meeting and seeing each other so for convenience of not confusing the audience you don't see that level of realism often.
What’s weirder to me is how ships are oriented to a planet. Especially if they left atmosphere just a while ago. So they left the planet and then decided to orient the ship and align the vertical axis of the ship with the axis of the planet just for looks.
I think in this context no ship would ever approach nose-to-nose. That's just for the viewers to see. I'd wager no two ships would come into less than around 1-5 km of each other if they weren't lining up flight paths for shuttles or docking. It's not like they need to "stand up" next to each other and "talk".
They would probably have formations they would assume while in transit or stopped, so it would probably be normal to cross paths with a formation flying upside down or in a perpendicular axis.
In case of just meeting and talking, they'd probably do it from wherever they happen to be, very far from each other, flying towards different destinations. In case of combat, they would behave like a swarm of insects and reorient their formations continuously.
do it right and it could even look very good and immersive. But at least with the skills, technology and budget of a 1966 TV show, and especially with certain wack ship designs it's far easier to just have everything oriented the same way
Right, so, let's talk naval ships from the age of sail. There's no need for two sailing ships to face each other also, but that's inevitably how ships will meet on the ocean.
The HMS Enterprise spots the HMS Defiant. They plot a course towards the Defiant. Defiant will eventually spot the Enterprise, and will alter its course. Both ships will meet with their bows facing each other. Same logic applies with spaceships, with two issues:
There's actually no need for two spaceships to meet in order to talk or transfer people. I'll hand wave that away saying that's standard procedure, as the cost in time and energy to go from the beaming range to visual range is negligible, and even in the 24th century it's a good idea for ships in the middle of the vastness of space be as close to one another as possible in case of emergency.
While both ships will change their pitch and yaw to face each other, there's no need to change the roll. This can also be hand waved - while there's probably a standard, absolute "up" (say, using the spin axis of the galaxy) altering the roll will allow both ships to use the same subjective "up".