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alt title(s): Two D Space 
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. - Futurama, The Bird-Bot of Ice-Catraz
As far as most TV writers are concerned, space is flat, like a great big tabletop. A few who have actually seen an airplane fly allow that space may have a third dimension as large as five or ten miles high, but not much more than that. There's just enough up-and-down to allow for dogfights between fightercraft and clever one-time-only attacks from above during battles between space warships. Otherwise, vessels approach each other as if they were floating on the sea and attempt broadside or bow-to-bow shots almost exclusively.
Maneuvering is also shackled to the horizontal plane most of the time. Very rarely will sci-fi shows and writers take advantage of the lack of "up/down" in real space by having ships attack each other at odd angles or vectors, which would offer something visually and tactically fresh. Even outside of battle, when two ships approach each other, no matter where they come from, they will always be oriented the same way; you never see a ship flying "upside down". (On rare occasions, an exception will be made for derelicts. Then again, upside-down derelicts can be found in the ocean, too.)
Perhaps as a corollary to the above, two (or more) starships, when involved in a standoff situation, will inevitably position themselves literally nose to nose in classic stare-down posture. This can be justified depending on the ships' weapons placements, but as often as not it's just a metaphor for the situation. The flip side of this is that, when two friendly ships are together, they will always be traveling side by side — that is, shoulder to shoulder. Not unlike escorts, even when they're not escorting. Abandoned ships may list visibly to one side as if sinking. The near-total separation spaceships have between yaw, pitch, and roll, and the path their inertia is carrying them on, is very rarely observed — "fighters" will nearly always be pointing in the precise direction they are moving in, as atmospheric planes are forced to.
Needless to say, nobody will ever think of bypassing a planar asteroid belt or similarly hazardous feature by simply going above or below it. It's also possible to wall off part of the universe by placing a barrier that spans the full ten-mile height from top to bottom.
By extension, and by analogy to earth-bound geography, every major location in space is at a fixed position. A planet may turn on its axis (if you're lucky), but its place relative to its sun and other planetary neighbors never changes. Think of a model solar system made of balls on a table. All distances and travel times are static; all positions are permanent and unchanging. Orbits simply don't happen — if two planets are X units apart on the left side of their sun, they'll always be X units apart and on the left side of the sun.
Now, all of this is bogus, of course, but the kind of hack writer who used to churn out television scripts for SF shows usually had no more clue about physics and astronomy than the family dog does, and sometimes less. As far as they were concerned, space was just like the surface of the earth, only bigger. In recent years, more scientifically-aware writers — and actual hard-science writers as well — have taken up the mantle, and space on TV is starting to look more like the real thing. But even they won't often let facts get in the way of the plot.
It isn't always a result of hack writing, though. Sometimes writers do this as intentional Acceptable Break From Reality; two-dimensional strategies are simply easier to show and explain, and much easier for most viewers to grasp (since that's how we're used to thinking.) This is especially common in older videogames, or ones where three dimensions would needlessly complicate the interface.
It is also worth pointing out that even many of the aversions of this trope really reinforce it, as ships approaching each other from odd angles is often played up as something surprising and out-of-the-ordinary, with the tacit implication that its ability to travel through three dimensions is something that sets the Cool Ship apart from regular ships, or that remembering to look up and down from time to time is a sign of unparalleled strategic genius.
From a practical standpoint, the strategic advantages of maneuvering in three dimensions during a battle are probably minimal — there is no Stealth In Space, and projected energy weapons can't be dodged. A very important thing which must be pointed out here is that Spaceships can't make use of an atmosphere to help them "steer" - rudders and alierons, which give aeroplanes their manouverablity, would be completely useless on a spaceship. So, pulling most of the cool moves that make use of three dimensional navigation (like some of the scenes you see in Top Gun, for example) would be near-impossible to do with a spacecraft. Remember how much we hated that fucking spaceship in the classic Asteroids game? Well, try to imagine that on a 3-D interface. (In fact, play Frontier: Elite 2 and think yourself lucky if you survive your first "dogfight".)
One consequence of this is that whenever "intentional" use of the third dimension pops up in a story, it is somewhat less realistic - now, instead of Two D Space, you have Old School Dogfighting, which treats Space as though it has an atmosphere, and spacecrafts are as manouverable, if not more so, than aeroplanes. Though admittedly this does look pretty frikkin' cool, especially if the CGI department gets to cut loose with their skills. However, almost never do we see two ships just happening to approach each other at different orientations in a normal no-fighting scene.
Note that all of the negative connotations above applies mainly to a television series...put Two-DSpace in a video game and thanks to the Rule Of Fun it becomes one of the Acceptable Breaks From Reality.
See also Space Is An Ocean, Acrophobic Bird, One Dimensional Thinking, Sci Fi Writers Have No Sense Of Scale, and Old School Dogfighting.
Examples
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- Both justified and averted in Mobile Suit Gundam and its kin, which primarily take place in the "Earth Sphere", the immediate neighborhood of Earth consisting of the moon and the five Lagrange Points. Lagrange Points are points of zero net gravity relative to any large two-body system, and are often used as the location for colonies. These five points all fall within the plane of rotation of the Moon around the Earth, which provides a natural 2D "landscape" for space. Any movement off this plane would be wasteful, all meaningful paths between important points would fall within the plane. This being said, many battles in space do involve movement perpendicular to this plane, for tactical reasons.
- The problem does however crop up in terms of ship and mecha design. A recent example would be the giant mobile armor Alvatore from Gundam 00: it has 27 beam guns, of which zero are capable of firing downward. That glaring design flaw was not exploited by the heroes when they fought it. This is not a particularly uncommon occurrence; even when spaceships and mobile armors (it's not usually an issue with the humanoid mobile suits, since their hand-carried weapons are pretty easy to aim in any direction) do have bottom-mounted weapons, they're almost always much less numerous and less powerful than those mounted on the top and sides. Given that "up" and "down" are completely arbitrary distinctions in space, this is clearly a dumb way to design a warship, yet it rarely if ever presents a problem.
- In Crest Of The Stars and its sequel Banner Of The Stars, hyperspace is two-dimensional, with important strategic and tactical consequences.
- In Uchuu Senkan Yamato, Captain Okita (Captain Avatar in the English dub) shocks the bridge crew by commanding the helmsman to maneuver safely through a cluster of space mines by tilting the ship five degrees, a concept which shouldn't surprise anyone trained to fly in three-dimensional space.
- The anime Tytania plays this straight for the most part.
- Macross/Robotech was pretty guilty of this as well; ships would usually travel more or less on the same plane, wth only the occasional "stack" of ships; even then, ships would allways be orientated in the same direction. Robotech: Shadow Chronicles avoided this to a degree.
- All fleet battles that occur in Heroic Age involve shooting in every direction at one point or another. Iron Tribe ships have rotary guns that allow them to shoot in every direction, particularly important when their enemy is usually the Bronze Tribe.
- Last Exile both plays this trope straight and averts it in the first episode. At first, the airship fleets attack each other on a 2-D plane, according to the regulations of warfare, (oxymoron much?) but soon after their "chivalrous" exchange of fire, a mysterious fleet appears from above them and proceeds to "blow shit up" as the colloquial goes.
- Serenity. As far as can be determined from both expository dialogue and the ship's navigational displays, the "forgotten" planet Miranda is in a permanent location relative to another planet in the 'Verse, and the two are always separated by Reaver-infested space. None of these three things ever drifts away from the others due to the vagaries of orbital mechanics, despite the explicit declaration at the beginning of the film that all the worlds in the 'Verse are planets and moons orbiting a single star. The Reavers could have moved with the planet, but you'd think somebody would notice that.
- Until the Big Damn Movie's exposition, one could assume that the human worlds orbit many stars in a cluster such as the Pleiades: close enough that sublight travel is marginally plausible, far enough that relative motion within human time-scales is insignificant. Alas.
- Consider that System is still incredibly large, and the Reavers have only been around a couple decades or so at most. As far out as it's implied they are, orbital periods would be seriously long... (not to mention "Reaver space", being a gigantic collection of ships and nothing else, can move)
- Also, what if Miranda was a planet far off on the edge of the system, and that all the space, like a bubble around the system, between Miranda and whatever remaining planet was right before it.
- If Miranda was a moon of the planet they ran to next, the planet-moon system could have already been orbit-locked (pretty much like any orbital system eventually becomes without outside influence) and the Reaver fleet could have been "parked" in a lagrangian spot (Miranda did seem quite massive, so it could be shifted close enough). Don't forget that even though space is 3D, it tends to "2Dize" itself in a way - orbits are trying to "align" to a single plane and gravity based effects like the Lagrangian spots are actually pretty much spots (in 3D but still only marginal compared to the celestial objects around, especially when taking the sun into account :))
- Lampshaded in Star Trek II, where the page quote comes from, though not as much as it appears at first glance. Kirk and his Enterprise, battling Khan in a sensor-jamming nebula, manage to duck under Khan's Reliant and then rise to deliver the fatal shots. However, for all the implications that his "two-dimensional thinking" was a critical flaw in Khan's strategic prowess, this is one of perhaps two times in the entire franchise history that anyone tries anything like this. Even then, the ship doesn't change orientation; it just "dives" and "surfaces" in the nebula as though it were a submarine. The implication is that nebulae are an exception to the rule — that somehow, some way, normal empty space (or normal empty subspace) prevents three-dimensional maneuvering — so it's ultimately a reinforcement of the trope.
- In "normal, empty space", sensors would have rendered the trick ineffective.
- More to the point, the thicker (visible) parts of the nebula block sensor line of sight and are highly irregular in shape, so the Enterprise has to fire from a position from which it can see the Reliant, so the "surface" manoeuvre can be explained away in a kind of Fridge Logic.
- This is completely avoided in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. When the IKS Kronos One is attacked by Chang's ship, the shots come from "below" it in a vertical sense and a short ways off in the lateral, which is where the Enterprise was at the time. Later, Chang's Bird-of-Prey seems to move all over the place in shooting the Enterprise and Excelsior, including one torpedo shot after the Enterprise's deflector shields collapsed, blasting upward through the saucer segment of the hull from directly below in an alarming display of destructive power.
- The latest Star Trek by J.J. Abrams doesn't make a major point of it but manages some aversion, at least for its franchise. Most notably manuvering up out of Triton's atmosphere. A few other shots show the Enterprise and Narada at odd angles instead of the typical nose to nose face-off orientation.
- A counter-example is in Flight Of The Navigator where the young accidental pilot of a spaceship commands the ship's computer to take him 20 miles away, and the ship moves that distance straight up, away from the surface of the Earth.
- An atmospheric example comes from Top Gun, and indeed most movies involving modern close-range air combat. Here, fighters will never use the vertical dimension, despite the fact that very significant advantages can be gained from doing so. In fact, the Top Gun course was established to teach exactly these tactics when US F-4 Phantom fighters were being shot down by Vietnamese MiG-17s, which were slower but more maneuverable in the level plane...
- Averted, in all places, in The Empire Strikes Back. The Millennium Falcon pulls off 3D manouevers all the time during the Hoth chase, and Star Destroyers are often seen at odd angles relative to one another.
- Although it's not obvious at first, also averted to some extent in Revenge of the Sith. If you look carefully in the background during the space battle, it's evident that the vessels are all over the place in terms of dimensions, and it you follow the path of the Jedi fighters it's clear they're flipping through various vectors quite neatly.
- The Phantom Menace makes use of this trope to force peple to fly through the barricade instead of flying around it
- Averted at least once in Timothy Zahn's ''Star Wars''-based The Thrawn Trilogy. Military genius Grand Admiral Thrawn has been studying the artwork of the species on the planet they're about to attack. He notices that they don't have any sculpture, or indeed anything 3-D, and concludes that a multi-level attack by his fighters will rip them to shreds. He's right.
- Played straight in almost all other instances, however. This is especially apparent when anyone wants to invade Coruscant (at the centre of the galaxy); be it General Grievous, the Rebels, Thrawn or the Yuuzhan Vong, no-one ever considers the possibility of approaching it from above or below the galactic plane.
- Of course this one could potentially be justified by a lack of hyperspace routes above or below the galactic plane. In the EU there is a hyperspace anomaly around the edge of the galaxy that prevents extragalactic travel.
- Whenever a Star Destroyer shows up, there's about a fifty-fifty chance someone will point out that it has most of its guns along its sides, and tries to exploit this with an attack to the top or rear. One notable instance is the Battle of Thyferra: ISD Freedom comes in above and perpendicular to the (much larger) SSD Lusankya, allowing Freedom to bring its whole starboard gun deck to bear.
- The X Wing Series also frequently has large ships being attacked from only one side spin as their shields on that side take a beating, letting them bring an undamaged and fully shielded flank to bear. Reinforcements and snubfighters will often then try and get at the damaged side, but they have to contend with the damaged ships' own reinforcements and snubfighters. And that same series also has Rogue Squadron sneaking into a planet's atmosphere from one of the poles, where it's sparsely populated.
- In the EU Mon Calamari captains do have this as an advantage, and Ackbar in particular is a master at it. Remember the original trilogy had to use physical models, and so was limited in its presentation. The space battle at the beginning of ROTS, with 3D-generated ships, seems to mostly avert the trope.
- Lampshaded in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, as it's implied that Ender's ability to think in three dimensions (which he sees as common sense) sets him apart from 99.9% of the human race, complete with rival schoolmates who don't get how he does it.
- It's less ability to think in three dimensions — other commanders were quite capable of using three-dimensional attacks, formations, and flanks as it is ability to rearrange those dimensions however he wants, since they're all arbitrary in zero G.
- Taken even further in Ender's Shadow. Bean is smarter and much less trusting than Ender, and rarely assumes that something is true just because it was taught to him. This is best demonstrated in the scene where Bean comes to the conclusion that none of the solar system defenses are practical, because the Buggers could just hop over them. He realizes that the only defensive strategy that makes any sense is a preemptive attack against the enemy's planet. He decides that Earth's attacking force must have been sent decades ago, and would be arriving within the next few years.
- Averted at least sometimes by the Buggers. The first "mission" Ender faces features a fake command ship in the center of a spherical entrapment formation.
- Averted casually in the Lensman books. As the Trope Codifier of Space Opera, there was nobody to imitate, and E. E. "Doc" Smith knew what he was doing. A larger fleet will see to "englobe" the foe rather than surround it, and all fleet actions are very thoroughly three-dimensional.
- Kinda justified in The Lost Fleet
 , where they divided space between above the planets' orbit and below, so that they have some semblance of up and down. It's mentioned that ships almost always pull "up" instead of diving "down," even though in space there's no difference.
- Honor Harrington books have their Space Navy battleships described as "Ships of the Wall" rather than "...of the Line". Single ship actions often involve a great deal of rolling and pitching up and down, too.
- The series' technology was specifically designed to force ships to put most of their guns into two broadsides rather than all the way around, though as noted above, ships do roll to put those broadsides at whatever angle is necessary. Despite the overt and heavy emphasis on emulating the Age of Sail, the series carefully avoids treating space like water (it is 3-D, very large, and you can coast forever).
- Averted heavily in the Halo novels, where emphasis is put on gravity wells, orbit, planetary horizons, etc. The famous "Keyes Loop" consisted of a ship firing a missile backward. They don't go fast enough to overcome the forward speed, and it means you can race past the enemy and detonate that missile they forgot about that's now right next to 'em.
- Averted and played straight in Isaac Asimov's Foundation Saga in Foundation and Empire. One of the astounding victories that contributed to Bel Riose's arise to fame was attacking an enemy fleet from below the planetary plane in the solar system. As the rest of the naval brass felt that was very unsporting, it is impliet that they didn't learn anything from it.
- Alluded to in David Brin's Uplift series. Most space-faring species (humans included) are descended from terrestrial creatures and 2-dimensional thinking dominates their naturally evolved spatial reasoning capabilities, making most of them mediocre space pilots. Dolphins on the other hand, having descended from an aquatic species, had evolved superior 3-dimensional spatial reasoning, making them superior space ship pilots.
- Averted thoroughly in Niven and Pournelle's The Gripping Hand, in which the action in the Mote system includes multiple references to changing orbital configurations and the political and military effects this has on a space-based civilisation. There's also 3-D elements in the space travel despite most of it taking place in the plane of the Mote system, thereby providing a sound reason for an almost 2-D approach.
- The Co Dominium universe, and especially the Mote books, are quite hard SF, and 3-D movement is part and parcel of space travel as depicted therein.
- Mentioned in Only You Can Save Mankind, Johnny realizes when he sees Kirsty fly just how badly everyone else flew - they moved like they were playing a computer game, while Kirsty's ship pirouetted.
Live Action TV
- The "barrier at the edge of the galaxy" in the second pilot of Star Trek The Original Series, "Where No Man Has Gone Before", looked to be no more than dozen miles or so tall — but a starship capable of travelling light years in a day couldn't go over it — or, for that matter, straight up, which relative to the plane of the ecliptic is one of the two fastest ways to get out of any galaxy. (The other being, of course, straight down.)
- On the other hand, at least the Tholian Web appeared to be spherical.
- In the Q-continuum books, the Q we know and love is responsible for both the outer and inner barriers of the galaxy.
- Star Trek The Next Generation was extremely fond of the "starship standoff" posture, to the point of being nose-to-nose with hostile vessels. On the other hand, the Grand Finale stupendously averted this trope: "Admiral" Riker's customised Enterprise-D not only destroys three Klingon warships in the space of about five seconds, but then flies straight through the resulting debris straight along the Y-axis.
- It was also averted in the episode "Time Squared" where the Enterprise was stuck in a vortex/entity that was pulling them downwards, and the only way to escape it was not to fly straight down into it.
- In the TNG episode Redemption II, Picard blockades the entire Romulan-Klingon border with twenty-three ships. Considering a starship at Warp 9 can only travel a few light-years per day, the ships would either be spread so thin that the blockade was worthless, or the border was no larger than maybe one square light-year.
- A rather fanwank-y explanation for matching orientations in Star Trek: when ships meet, it's courtesy for them to align to whatever orientation the highest ranking ship is at. Not that this explains being trapped by ring-shaped anomalies, but it does try to reduce the silliness somewhat.
- Star Trek Voyager has an episode where the Voyager gets trapped in some kind of space anomaly. When asked to try to fly out of the anomaly, the helmsman states he can't, because the anomaly surrounds the ship "like a ring".
- The vast Astrometrics display was at least an attempt to bring some three-dimensionality to space; certainly an improvement on the flat-display star charts.
- In Star Trek Deep Space Nine there was an interesting case of that "tilted derelict" principle. A derelict space station, Empok Nor, was constantly being shown as tilted. Of course, this was for the benefit of the viewer, so that a viewer can tell it apart from its sister space station, Terok Nor (a.k.a. the Deep Space Nine), since they actually look the same.
- I never really understood the way people assume is it written as if space was 2D. In many battles it shows ships attacking from above, it just isn't specifically mentioned, not to mention docking — if space was 2D then it would be impossible for a ship to manouevre around DS 9 like the Defiant did (speaking of the Defiant, what about in 'What You Leave Behind' when it did that epic loop to get behind the Jem'Hadar ships?). Also, directions are given in 3 dimensions by 2 sets of 360 degrees, one around the ship and one at a right angle — when they say 90 mark 10 that would mean 90 degrees to the right and 10 degrees up.
- It must be said though that knowing how the ship heading system is supposed to work just makes it painfully obvious that the ships almost never actually move like that!
- True, DS 9 seemed to be a little better about this. In Sacrifice of Angels, the Klingon Fleet swoops in from above. Also, the Defiant, as mentioned elsewhere, had a tendency to exploit the third dimension.
- And yet, in the same episode, they can't warp around a blockade that looks to be no more than a few miles on each side. By the time the Dominion realized what was going on, turned around and entered warp, the Federation would almost certainly have a head start to DS 9 and be able to stop the anti-graviton beam.
- The image at the top of this page is from the Star Trek Enterprise episode "Exile". The spheres only shoot out "gravometric waves" (not to be confused with boring old gravity) in lines, and since space is two-dimensional, the lines intersect, misshaping reality.
- Babylon 5 is pretty good that way, at least in the early seasons. From about the middle of the third season ("Severed Dreams" and on), space battles became rather more 2-D than they had been. Still, there's at least one example of a Narn ship being bushwacked by a Shadow ship from directly below; the attacker even flies right through the space where the Narn was before it got blown to pieces.
- There are also multiple shots of Starfuries (the human fightercraft) spinning around their centers of gravity to get a shot, without changing the speed or direction of their travel.
- Firefly. Lampshaded hilariously in one episode when Wash tries to lose a pursuing spaceship by flying into a narrow canyon. After some fancy maneuvering and bragging on Wash's part, a pan out reveals their pursuer simply flying over the canyon.
- The entire Milky Way galaxy in Blakes Seven had a ring of mines around it to deter a certain group of aliens from ever invading. A ring. Around a galaxy. (This could be done with Von Nueman machines — start at the point that is most threatened and spread from there.)
- Also in B7: Travis spots the Liberator and says, "I knew he'd have to return to this galaxy!" Space isn't only flat, it's tiny. See also Babylon 5 where the width of a numbered 'sector' sometimes seems to be a light-second, sometimes several light-years.
- An episode of Lost In Space once had the Jupiter II in great danger because a navigation error put the ship on a direct course to Earth — with the sun in the way. And apparently the sun was too large an object for an interstellar craft to go around. 1-D Space?
- Stargate SG 1 averts the "fixed position" extension; in fact, a plot point in the early episodes is that the systems connected by the Stargate network have shifted, so that the coordinates are no longer quite accurate.
- This interpretation unfortunately runs badly afoul of the fact that the 6-symbol gate addresses only have about 2 billion unique combinations, which is completely insufficient to represent any kind of accurate real coordinate system over an entire galaxy. However, the complication is quickly forgotten and the entire rest of the series treated the addresses more like phone numbers for planets than coordinates.
- Also (mildly) averted in the first Season 10 episode where an Ori vessel unexpectedly destroys a Ha'tak by coming down on it from above.
- While the spinoff Stargate Atlantis tends to ignore orbital mechanics and such (in one case having a spaceship make a hyperspace jump from a planet's surface into space, where it miraculously begins orbiting), in the season four opener Atlantis, traveling through space, hits an asteroid field, but is saved by skimming only the top edge (giving the chance for an Asteroids-like shooting sequence). While allied fleets typically face the same direction, battles may include any number of complicated spatial maneuvers.
- The space battle in the recent episode "The Lost Tribe" also featured brief scenes of a Traveler and an Asgard ship, battling in vertical position around another.
- In the episode "The Last Man", Micheal's Hive attacks two warring Wraith ships from above, which were already damaged. Needless to say he kicks their ass in seconds.
- SG Atlantis is still notoriously inconsistent with this. The fighter jets use constant burn as though they are in atmosphere and the mechanics of both the capital ships and the fighter jets are as though they're still in atmosphere, instead of taking full 3-D. There are a few notable exceptions though, as with the Traveler/ Asgard ship. This is probably due to a low SFX budget than anything else, though.
- Completely averted in Andromeda, where ships routinely utilize all three dimensions of space, fly off in random directions, and the like. Not uncommon is a shot of some collection of fighters flying "upwards" around other ships in pursuit of one another.
- Mostly present in Battlestar Galactica, especially in "The Passage" where the Fleet had to pass through a dangerous star cluster instead of going around because it would take too long. (Giving the impression that the cluster is a very large wall in space) Partially justified in that both the human and Cylon ships, by design, present their weaponry most effectively when oriented parallel to each other, and the show does occasionally make more use of vertical space than most others do.
- Err, the point of "The Passage" was that it would take too long to avoid the star cluster no matter which axis they used to try and go around it.
Tabletop Games
- Applies in Warhammer40000 spin-off game Battlefleet Gothic which, naturally, is fought across a flat table top. In the designer's notes, the game's author acknowledges that space is 3D, but it would be logistically difficult to actually make a game that worked that way and also, because there's no gravity in space, making things 3D would just amount to being a range-modifier. Instead, the movement of the ships (much like their size compared to celestial phenomena) is assumed to be an abstraction for the sake of playability.
- The 2-D space problem also pops up in the background material about the Tyranids. The Imperium, accustomed to strategic planning across a flat-ish galaxy, is perplexed when Tyranid swarms start popping up deep "behind" their defensive lines, rather than approaching from the edge of the galaxy like the others. Then it dawns on them that this new Hive Fleet is making a flanking action of sorts and attacking "upward" from "beneath" the galaxy. To be fair, the humans haven't had to deal with extra-galactic threats until this point.
- The Star-Trek-based Star Fleet Battles tabletop game also has 2D space. The designers always felt the quote above was a dig at their game. However, attempts to add 3D maneuvering when they were first designing the game greatly increased complexity for little improvement in gameplay.
- Of course, Star Fleet Battles also has a core rulebook that's, no kidding, 428 pages of double column, 9 point Helvetica type as of this writing — and even then, there are new supplements adding to it every year. Trying to make SFB 3-D would probably make someone's head explode.
- In the boardgame Battlefleet Mars they went to some effort to develop a system of representing three-dimensional movement for the ships...wasted effort. There was simply no tactical advantage to maneuvering in more than two dimensions.
- Plus, it had you doing the Pythagorean Theorem. By hand. Every time you wanted to take a shot, or plot a maneuver. You also had to track movement (with counters) on two maps, one for the vertical, one for the horizontal; keeping track of the two data sets meant a lot of fiddle factor, for no real boost in playability.
- Averted in Attack Vector:Tactical board game of space combat simulation. Just read the praise quotes and who said them.
- Battle Space, the space-combat game set in the Battle Tech universe, averts this and uses 3D space (even though it is played on a 2D board). Whether or not the players decide to use all 3 dimensions is up to them, as Battle Space also ignores friction, which might make things difficult when you have to change the pitch of your craft by # degrees downward in #/kps velocity while the fore-facing weapons on your fighter are pointing to the left of the direction you're traveling in by # degrees, and that if you don't apply counter-thrust to each of these maneuvers you just get to calculate more (though, you still have to calculate for the counter-thrust as well). One wonders why it wasn't very popular...
- In Spelljammer, a Space Opera Meets Fantasy AD&D setting, ships carried their own "gravity plane" with them. However, if docking or otherwise directly interacting with a bigger ship, the bigger ship's gravity would override the smaller one's. Space etiquette thus required that ships intending peaceful interaction line themselves up so all the gravity planes were on the same 2D plane. (The way gravity worked in Spelljammer, you could bring your ship in on another ship's gravity plane, but flipped "upside down". This was the easiest way of identifying your captain as a smartass.)
- In a rather egregious example, the Star Wars Roleplaying Game Revised Core Rulebook makes an obvious and ultimately pointless lunge for this trope in the actual rules: "Sometimes a pilot needs to reverse course but maintain relative gravity — that is, keep "down" on the ship the same as "down" in the prevailing gravity — to avoid straining the ship's inertial compensators." Because we all know that our own modern spacecraft can't maintain an orientation other then floor-towards-Earth when in close proximity to our planet's gravity well. Because of the inertial compensators.
- Ironically, the old West End Games RPG version of Star Wars handled it better: it explained battles are generally fought in two dimensions because that's as much as most starship captains can psychologically cope with. Apparently it would be too psychologically disturbing to have a Star Destroyer hanging upside-down above your vessel blasting the hell out of it. The RPG goes on to muse that a species psychologically comfortable with, and able to grasp, the intricacies of three-dimensional starship combat, would certainly pwn pretty much every other starfaring species in the galaxy.
- It doesn't help, of course, that even the Mon Calamari in Star Wars choose to fight in two dimensions as well; of all the species able to cope with combat in a three-dimensional environment, one would have hoped that an aquatic species would be able to do so.
- What also doesn't help is that a lot of the battles in Saga Edition are usually done with 'miniatures on a grid.
- Justified in Traveller. The 2D maps are feigned to be a simplistic projection of 3D space for normal usage. Presumably the navigator would be using a more detailed system which would usually be represented to the PC as part of the navigation roll.
Video Games
- The entire Vertical Scrolling Shooter genre is based around this concept.
- Averted completely in the Freespace series. Up and down are only relative directions. Ships can be attacked from multiple angles and in turn are also armed to attack or fend off attack from multiple angles.
- Star Trek Encounters depicts space as having three discreet "levels": a ship can fly normally, ascend to the "high" position, or descend to the "low" position. Only very large objects such as planets can occupy more than one level at the same time.
- The original 1980's Star Trek arcade game takes place in space, which is completely 2D.
- On the other hand, the Star Trek: Bridge Commander actually forces the player to turn and tilt the ship to get the best firing/shilded angle to the target.
- In Freelancer, everything, that is, everything, lies in the same two-dimensional plane: planets, bases, trade lanes, jump holes, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The player, however, can move along the vertical axis, allowing for some really intense space battles. Since gameplay would certainly be harder if the game followed the actual three-dimensional structure of the space, this is part of the many Acceptable Breaks From Reality that can be seen on videogames.
- Due to the fact that planets tend to be almost exactly in a horizontal plane around their local star, that's not so bad — if the planets are on that plane, the lanes joining them would be as well, and since the axis of rotation also tends to be perpendicular to that same plane, geostationary satellites would be on it- so any stations orbiting the planet could well be in the same plane to make it easier to set up ground-based logistics. Granted, the jump holes and the stations not associated with any particular planet have no reason to be in that plane (except, perhaps, ease of mapping...).
- Space is very 3D in the Microsoft-turned-Open Source game Allegiance; rolling you ship to present the narrowest profile (and most weapons) is critical, enemies will fly at you from any direction, asteroids, stations, alephs, and valuable items may be vastly above or below you. The tutorial specifically advises dropping scanner probes above and below the plane of the ecliptic, since pilots are less likely to look for them there.
- However, while the 3D-ness of space is very important in gameplay, it is not a perfect aversion. The "sectors" in which combat takes place are not entirely spherical, but somewhat squashed — there is less "up and down" room than "side to side" or "back and forth," and sometimes this becomes important in gameplay (such as when trying to hide in a stealthy ship). Also, there is still a well-defined "plane" lying across the middle of the sector, and while some asteroids will be found far above and below, most of them will be scattered relatively close to it. In the end, however, the game is still remarkable for averting, if imperfectly, this and many other Space Is An Ocean and Old School Dogfighting tropes while remaining very fun to play.
- In the Galaxy Angel Gameverse, you can't plan your attacks in three dimensions, but at least when they're executed they work that way.
- Played with in Homeworld: The environment is three-dimensional, but everything orients along an invisible horizontal plane and capital ships tilt to move 'up' or 'down,' like submarines. This has less to do with technical limitations, and more with looking cool.
- Inherently played straight in some: some warship models have more guns on the top side than on the bottom side (cf. destroyers, both Hiigaran and Vaygr). Subverted in more ways in when the warships have cannons on top, bottom, and sides, or the weapons turn out to be missile launchers, in which the homing ability renders the issue of direction (almost) moot.
- Several modders took this to heart and played with it in the most interesting ways. Some notable, famous mods have some types of frigates ditch the 2-D adherence and circle the target at a spherical, instead of a ring trajectory. This gives a very interesting battle as when the other, more stationary battleships are pounding away head-to-head, some annoying frigates are either taking potshots from up, down, or behind, or a hard-to-catch mezzer is running around in
circles spheres, effectively Min Maxing his fleet.
- Multi-beam Frigates in Cataclysm did this in the un-modded game, and also didn't bother with the orientation convention.
- Ships move and attack three-dimensionally in space MMORPG EVE Online, but stationary ships pitch parallel to the ecliptic plane for no explained reason.
- Averted in Nexus: The Jupiter Incident, where ships, if left unattended, will rotate along their axis.
- Subverted in Colony Wars series; the battleships seem to travel in a same axis, but all of its weapons are usually rotating along its body to protect from all axes, plus every craft is equipped with boosters that point to more directions than just forward (including your own small spacecraft). Also, every enemy and ally rarely comes with the same axis with yours, most of the time, you can't tell which side is up. The radar system is also very 3D that amateurs would have problems with it. When you do fight inside atmospheric stages, the "up" and down" quickly gets defined, so much so that players at that point who have been accustomed to the pure 3D space needs some finesse in said stages.
- The Elite remake Oolite both averts this (you can maneuver three-dimensionally, and pretty much have to in order to do much of anything) and takes it to an extreme: the large-scale structure of space is one-dimensional, with everything of interest lying roughly on a line connecting a solar system's jumpgate with its space station (asteroid fields, stars, moons, and some space stations excepted).
- Justified in that most of the objects of interest are manmade, and were placed there because it's the route most traders take from the jump-in point to the planet.
- Star Flight and Star Control 2 both have this but as they were initially games made back when 3d graphics were basically really bad wireframe and trying something on the scope or scale of Eve Online was simply impossible at the time. (The first Star Control had a 3D starmap in 1990, but it was really simple-looking and confusing). In the manual, Star Control 2 attempts to justify this by explaining it as an unusual property of Hyper Space... but this doesn't explain the two-dimensional non-hyperspace combat.
- Star Control 3 replaced its predecessor's 2D starmap with a 3D one. It was considerably more difficult to remember where anything was and a good deal less pretty — for a start it lacked the "spheres of influence" from SC 2. Of course, "circles of influence" would have been a more accurate term.
- Star Control 2 was a regression in this sense, since the original (1990) Star Control had a tactical game played on a 3D starmap. The map was a three-dimensional pattern of differently-coloured dots, and constantly rotated. It was darned hard to know which system connected to which, however. The mellee combat was still 2-D.
- On the other hand, Sundog, from the same era, averts it (stars on your navigation display have their 'Z-axis' distance from your current position shown by their icon's size, and whether this is positive or negative by whether they're filled in or not.)
- Avoided in Ad Astra Games space combat titles (Attack Vector: Tactical, Saganami Island Tactical Simulator, Squadron Strike), which use a top down view of a sphere parsed out in 30 degree angles for tracking a ship's orientation. It's rather clever when you wrap your head around it. The map display issue is handled by tilt blocks and stacking tiles and box miniatures; a tilt block is sort of like a chair without arms and has a 30 degree and 60 degree incline in it from a 90 degree slice taken out at an angle. Box miniatures are little cardboard boxes with ship art on all six sides. Stacking tiles work like square poker chips to show altitude, with one color reserved for showing negative altitude. Lots and lots of thought went into this.
- In the 2005 Battlestar Galactica episode "The Captain's Hand", there are places where the Pegasus, in the hands of a fighter pilot (Lee Adama) rolls on her axis to take her dorsal mounted heat exchanger systems out of the arc of fire for a bunch of fighters coming in. The lingo used to describe the maneuver (and the way the maneuver is shown in the CGI) are almost identical to what you'd see in a game of Attack Vector: Tactical. Otherwise, most BSG ship and fighter combat tends to be 2-D unless there's room in the CGI budget to make it explicitly 3-D.
- Mostly avoided in X-3: Reunion. Use of the autopilot will rotate your ship so that it is the right way up, but you are free to move in all three directions. Secrets and Khaak squadrons often are found well off the XY-plane. However, the sector map does display as a 2D grid, with no more than 4 gates per sector.
- Star Wars: Empire at War also restrict gameplay to the 2D plane.
- Except that ships of different classes are higher "up" or lower "down", for example, Corvettes are higher "up" than, say, battleships, and fighters, when egeaged in dogfights, go all over the place. Considering that Empire at War is an RTS with a top-down viewpoint, it would be Hell to get ships to move in 3D.
- Sword Of The Stars features a main map in complete 3D, requiring the player to pivot and zoom in order to get the full perspective. The expansion even adds the Real Space template for galaxy generation, which is just what it sounds like. In combat, however, Z-axis movement is only possible through keyboard hotkeys, as opposed to the normal mouse-commands.
- In the Jovian Chronicles RPG the space combat rules allowed for vertical movement and distance between units; however, those rules were "optional" and could be disregarded to speed gameplay. The artwork and fiction would frequntly show ships and craft moving on different planes to each other.
- While the starfighters in Star Wars Battlefront II are allowed to fly in three dimensions, capital ships are often right across from each other in most of the space maps. The only exceptions are Space Mygeeto and Space Coruscant, where rival ships are arranged in three dimensions and can move and navigate on their own.
- In Star Craft, the maps in Space take place on man-made orbital platforms and the space between them is like the water on other maps, so they are functionally no different from the maps that are on the surfaces of planets. So guardians, air units that can only attack ground, still can't attack other air units even with the freedom of space, and the siege tanks' attacks are still restricted to the surface of the platform, though they would presumably be able to hit air units in the low gravity conditions.
- Every 2D space shooter, from Darius to R-Type to Gradius to Ikaruga, uses this trope. Heck, it's right there in the name of the genre.
- Averted in the Lylat System stage of Super Smash Bros Brawl, which shows spaceships fighting at all kinds of crazy angles. Mind you, the platform you're standing on is 2D.
- The shareware game Escape Velocity is limited to a 2D plane, allowing it to use very simple controls for combat, akin to Asteroids or Star Control's HyperMelee. This also makes it far easier to flood the screen with weapons fire.
- The Japanese-only PSX game Aubird Force and its sequel avoided using 2D space. Each ship could travel along the XYZ axis, and could also rotate itself in a myriad of ways in order to face the enemy with the best possible weapons or armor. It mostly ignored everything else that is real about space, though.
- In Spore, the star-chart is completely 3D, which can make it difficult to find the star you want. However, solar systems are completely flat and are all completely paralell, your own ship never has to roll at all to land on the planets or to interact with ships, infact, every ship is also on the same plane as you. However, it's entirely possible to design a ship specifically so that it can move and attack in all directions, though this has no effect on gameplay.
- And every plane and boat are also on the same level, no matter how air-tight the vehicle, it cannot function as a submarine, and no matter how many engines, the planes are completely incapable of going up or down.
- Ironically, the stars themselves are only located within a rather thin area on the z-axis, but that's more than just justified; it's Truth In Television, as the galaxies in Spore are based on our galaxy, the Milky Way, which is a "spiral" galaxy. Spiral galaxies rotate around a massive black hole in the center like a whirlpool, and are quite flat-looking when viewed from the unbelievably massive distance away required to allow one to be seen as a whole.
- In the Star Trek strategy game Armada, you were limited in how high above/below the plane you could get, and 3D maneuvering offered little benefit beyond going to the bottom of the plane to minimize your ship's size on the other player's screen.
- While the game Cortex Command is a side-scroller which takes place mostly on the ground, in the opening cinematic it shows a flat view of a planet, and orbiting the planet exactly perpendicular to our view, is a Trade Star. So, apparently, the space station is orbiting around the poles for some reason, despite most of the action taking place closer to the equator. In the game itself, everything is completely 2D, to the point where it's impossible for even friendly entities to squeeze past each other.
- The Super Robot Wars series is an interesting example, where space is actually more two-dimensional than any other type of map. In game everything takes place on a two dimensional grid but missions that take place on earth have at least three "levels", ground, air and underwater and occasionally underground. Space levels don't have this distinction.
- Completely averted in the Independence War games, which take care to simulate space combat and get the physics and implications right. It also uses realistic inertia, so you can twist to face one way and fly another which is a key tactic.
- Heavily averted in Project Sylpheed, a fully three dimensional space shooter combat game. Unfortunately, playing the game shows why this trope is usually adhered to. About 50% of the folks who try to play it become violently nauseous or motion sick while trying to navigate rapid-combat in a sphere in which you can turn in any direction.
- Sins of a Solar Empire tries to avert this trope, having ships that will occasionally go up and down and be above or below others, and planets that are (slightly) above or below others. But basically it's still 2D - each planet is fixed in space, the 'phase lanes' that link planets always basically go parallel to this plane, and because of this most combat takes place on the plane. You can still move the viewpoint around in 3D, but it doesn't change anything.
- Averted in Mass Effect. Since the game only has space combat in a single Cut Scene, there's no need to worry about player confusion and ships are free to move in 3D. What combat we see is still a bit close and formation based, but that's amply justified due to the fact that the entire fight revolves around a specific Cool Gate.
- Averted repeatedly in the webcomic Crimson Dark. For example, early on, the crew find a derelict vessel, but realize something's wrong when they find that it's aligned precisely with the galactic plane, despite supposedly having been blown around in a firefight.
- It also justifies all spaceships keeping the same orientation in space: in the universe, it's apparantly standard practice to orient "up" and "down" relative to the nearest body in space to prevent pilots from getting disoriented and/or lost.
- Averted often in Schlock Mercenary, such as here where the narrator specifically mentions that the killzone is spherical.
Western Animation
- Parodied by Futurama: A bunch of protesters surround the show's equivalent of an oil tanker. It just goes up and flies over the human barrier.
- It's then Lampshaded by the quote at the top of the page.
- Likewise, the producers (several of whom have advanced degrees) explain in commentaries that they would have liked to do things like show the ship flying upside down or at odd angles, but ran out of time/money to do so.
- In Spongebob Squarepants, curiously only a few creatures actually swim. Which is treated like flying. SpongeBob once built an airplane— indeed, the episode where he does so is entirely oriented around him trying to "fly".
- Star Wars The Clone Wars treats banking up like something that would put a strain on your fighter and could even make your fighter stall if damaged unfortunately for Matchstick.
- Subverted though when Asoka has the ship turn it's "bottom" towards the star destroyers to get them to send their bombers into a trap.
Web Original
- Averted in Void Dogs, where the perfectionist pilot of the Shays Rebellion fumes when an engine failure means a whole spaceport gets to watch as they're towed in "off plane".
Fan Fic
- Spoofed in this ''Star Trek'' parody where the Enterprise crew, Klingons, Romulans and Ferengi all start arguing about whose ship is the right way up.
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