this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
172 points (99.4% liked)
Asklemmy
43914 readers
828 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
In addition to what the others have said, in real life, international space law was based on maritime law. They even based directions on maritime law as the sailors used the stars to navigate, and that’s all you have in space to navigate with. So rockets and spacecraft call their directions the same as ships and sailing vessels, they have a port and starboard side, a bow and stern, up is zenith, down is nadir.
Fun fact the actual directions have some cool historical meanings. Nadir is the lowest point in elevation in the surrounding area, aka the bottom of the boat, and zenith is the area directly above you. So you could measure your latitude by measuring a star’s position relative to your zenith. Port was the side you docked on, because your steering oar was on your right. Starboard is a bastardization of the word stéorbord which is what the steering oar was called.
And it is important to note that the civilian aviation sector copied over civilian maritime sector.
The person in charge of the aircraft is the Captain, followed by numbers officers. This is similar to what happens in shipping. The chief flight attendant on an aircraft is the purser, which is the chief steward on a naval ship. There used to be Chief Engineer positions on some aircraft, similar to Chief Engineer positions on naval vessels.
The only reason the Air Force has its rank structure currently is because it branched off the Army.
I always had assumed Starboard being the opposite of port meaning you were navigating away from your home port to the stars.