I've always wondered why in movies and TV, despite the ability to travel in three dimensional space, spaceships always travel the same way up relative to the camera and each other. They also tend to fly in past the outer planets and through the asteroid belt before reaching Earth. It seems our perception of the solar system and space is still very two-dimensional. Surely the most direct route for many visitors would be from the north or south (relative to earth), rather than through the solar system and a belt full colliding asteroids. Just thinking aloud.
I agree totally. It starts with using naval terminology for everything. (Why do you need "launch tubes" and "catapults" to launch space fighters? And it's even sillier for "landing". Just push them out of the side by hand to launch, and have them match velocity and toss out a rope to land.)
Bear in mind that in Star Wars and most SF movies/TV shows (a) small spacecraft have "wings" and bank like planes, and (b) big spacecraft have "bridges" that poke up like the equivalent structures on a cargo ship. Personally, I'd have some high resolution cameras and telescopes on the outside of my ship and have the "bridge" in an armored ball deep inside the ship. It's not like you can see anything useful with the naked eye in a space battle.
Have you ever watched ST2:
The Wrath of Khan? There's the hilarious line from Spock about how Khan is thinking "two dimensionally" (owing to his lack of Star Fleet training) which leads Kirk to suddenly, for the first time ever, move the
Enterprise in the third dimension.
Probably the only SF movie that comes close to getting any of this stuff right is
The Martian. (Even so, when they vent the air in the ship for some extra thrust, that is ridiculous. And as the author himself points out, wind gales on Mars would be barely perceptible as a light breeze owing to the near-vacuum that passes for Mars's atmosphere.)
Another common misconception — it's REALLY hard to "drop" something into the sun. It's actually harder to slow down something to the point where it will fall into the sun than it is to travel to another star.
The argument for people sticking to the plane of the ecliptic (where all the planets and most of the other junk is) applies if (a) you want to visit other planets or (b) you want to use gravity slingshots (since there's nothing to slingshot around outside the plane of the ecliptic), so it makes perfect sense in hard SF (like 2001) where you're pretty much talking about very much slower-than-light travel, but if you have warp drives or can do hyperspace jumps or whatever it makes absolutely no sense.