Technically, this only needs to be the practice of Starfleet (or even just human) navigators in order to account for 99% of what we see in Star Trek. Maybe it’s our guys who are doing all the careful orienting, and the alien of the week just comes in from whatever angle they want.
Or maybe, since Starfleet is seeing it all through the view screen rather than directly, it’s just a little image manipulation for the comfort of the viewer
I thought that it was canonical, at least in some series, that the viewscreen is a window that displays a 1x view of outside and any time they want to zoom in, or are hailed, if turns into a monitor? I swear there’s been multiple times where someone was sucked out of the bridge through it.
Technically, this only needs to be the practice of Starfleet (or even just human) navigators in order to account for 99% of what we see in Star Trek. Maybe it’s our guys who are doing all the careful orienting, and the alien of the week just comes in from whatever angle they want.
And there are LOTS of examples of other ships uncloaking in non aligned positions.
I like this “starfleet policy is to make a best guess and align up when approaching” - borg cube presents particular problems.
Or maybe, since Starfleet is seeing it all through the view screen rather than directly, it’s just a little image manipulation for the comfort of the viewer
I thought that it was canonical, at least in some series, that the viewscreen is a window that displays a 1x view of outside and any time they want to zoom in, or are hailed, if turns into a monitor? I swear there’s been multiple times where someone was sucked out of the bridge through it.
There’s probably thousand of pages written on diplomatic rules about which civilization’s ships have to re-orient themselves to meet another’s.