[dsr_]

Lucas was telling a story, so he made the symbols look like things that his audience already knew: one and two-person fighter planes, small tramp freighters, giant naval warships. The good guys and the bad guys get distinct visual styles for their fighters so you can tell them apart. The bad guys have all the big warships, and they have bridges as command centers up high over the main body, batteries of guns that look like WWII battleship's guns, anti-fighter guns that recoil like an antiaircraft cannon, and send out swarms of fighters like aircraft carriers.

The rebels have hangars in jungle and snow bases that would have been perfectly reasonable in a WWII movie.

Star Trek developed a different aesthetic, starting with a flying saucer and then trying to justify it in various ways.

[sandworm101]

Yup. The evil empire had big carriers and giant battleships. The good guys had their fighters hidden in caves. It is a WWII metaphor. Abrams continues this subversion in the opening of Episode VII: The bad guys come at night in their helicopters to search a desert community for rebel terrorists. Credit where credit is due for sneaking that theme into an otherwise apolitical film. (And king bad guy carries a flaming cross.)

[prideout]

Whenever there is a flotilla of ships in Star Trek, they seem to always arrange themselves into a two-dimensional plane and orient themselves according to their artificial gravity. This evokes ships at sea.

Starfleet seems to use a naval ranking, and officers use words like "hail", "heave to", "away team", and "bearing". The navigation terminology in Star Trek sees to be related to the galactic plane, which again evokes the surface of the sea.

The drive section of the Enterprise looks like the keel of a boat to me, and her nacelles look like the hulls of a catamaran.

Roddenberry loved the Hornblower books and I'm sure he was influenced by naval aesthetics.

[jimktrains2]

The honor Harrington by Weber series is also based on Hornblower and has some very nice, realistic depictions of physics and battle in space (minus the ftl, of course). I highly recommend it.

[zrail]

The one very notable exception to the two-dimensional flotilla is the depiction of the battle of wolf-359. As I recall the battle played out as a ball of Starfleet ships surrounding the Borg.

[TeMPOraL]

Wouldn't say it's an exception; the scenes from the battle and the aftermath still look pretty planar to me. Similarly, the battle with Borg over Earth, while not completely flat, had ships orbiting the Borg cube more-less along a plane.

The Dominion Wars in DS9 had been both the best and the worst, sometimes in the same battles. I remember the confrontation when the Federation fleet tried to punch through a Dominion blockade to DS9. Yes, they were saved by the Klingons arriving off-plane (and with the local star behind them, reminiscent of a WWI/WWII fighter tactic), but other than that, the battle was terribly planar and terribly crowded.

Star Trek has IMO nailed most narrative, but I wish they'd remake combat scenes with a little better, and more 3D, choreography. Leave the FX the same, though; IMO the TNG/DS9/VOY/ENT style of weapons was the best in the whole series, and the best in "soft sci-fi".

[sradman]

I wonder if the hangars in the jungle came from the script or from the memories of someone who experienced the view from Temple IV at Tikal. I had the surreal experience of standing atop Temple IV and suddenly recognizing this was the camera location of Star Wars rebel base landing scene while being enveloped by the smells and sounds above the rain forest canopy, especially the cacophony from the howler monkeys.

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Tikal

[PeterCorless]

Star Trek was telling stories of the Cold War in space.

[usrusr]

And many other stories in space entirely unrelated to the cold war. There really aren't that many TOS episodes that have Klingons in them.

[TeMPOraL]

Klingons... and in TNG, at some points the role was taken over by the Romulans. TNG's "The Drumhead" is essentially about McCarthy's hearings.

I still like it.