Leela: When you were planning this peace ring, didn't you realize spaceships can move in three dimensions?
Free Waterfall, Sr.: No, I did not.
Free Waterfall, Sr.: No, I did not.
— Futurama, "The Bird-Bot of Ice-Catraz"
In space battles, as opposed to ground battles, the attacks could come from any position: above, below, behind, or sideways. So many commanders forgot that after years out of a fighter pilot's chair.
All movement in the Star Trek Universe is two-dimensional. Starships, including newly met aliens, only operate on the plane, never exhibiting pitch, roll, or yaw, let alone diving or climbing. Everyone agrees which way is “down” (Borg vessels fly the same way up as the NCC1701D), and goes into orbit round planets at similar odd angles. Moreover, motion is not only pre-Einsteinian, but Aristotelian! Drives producing constant thrust induce a constant velocity, not acceleration, so you can do warp-9.8 hairpin turns without slowing down (“Encounter at Farpoint”, ST:TNG); but if you are power-drained like the shuttles in “The Voyage Home” (ST:TMP4) you swiftly coast to a halt.
The paradigm is one of roughly World War One-style naval warfare, with ships limited to two-dee movement through a resisting medium. Cloaked vessels are metaphorical submarines; “The Wrath of Khan” (ST:TMP2) adds one solitary “submerge-and-resurface” tactic (and boasts of this “three-dee thinking”); while ST:TNG tries to make its manoeuvring look a little more flexible. But none of this rises to the level of Battlestar Galactica's World War Two aircraft-carrier warfare metaphor, or Star Wars' aerial dogfight paradigm, let alone treating all three dimensions as equally useful, and no particular direction as “down”. Is it too late to start imperceptibly phasing in this kind of imagery?
Turk strained at the controls of the Pulsar-Phased Adenoid Five Galactic Cruiser, trying desperately to pull up from an uncontrolled dive, until he suddenly remembered he was in space, and there is no up or down.
— Joseph E. Fountain, Fredericksburg, VA, The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest 2015
