That's not for you, it's for your girlfriend.

Okay, that was an oversimplification, and a crass one. HOWEVER, the basic point is that science fiction has a nasty habit of getting in its own way as far as general audience appeal goes. The best way around this is to use it as a metaphor for something else. Star Wars (and, not uncoincidentally, BSG) use "planes." Star Trek uses "boats." Babylon 5 used "fuck you, I'm J. Michael Straczinski and I only need five seasons to hit syndication, piss off" but more on that in a minute.

Say you're going to set something in the future. The core sci fi audience will happily nerd out about what's different in the future, what's the same, how it got that way, how this that or the other is impossible but that other thing isn't, etc. The core sci fi audience isn't nearly big enough to keep the show afloat, though. You need the casuals - the people who think lasers are cool but would never say "live long and prosper," the people who will flip through it and maybe watch because football isn't on, etc. These people really don't give a shit about the physics of your universe. They wanna see special effects, tits and drama.

So you show Picard on the bridge of the Enterprise and he's staring down some green Romulan football and up is up and down is down and everyone speaks English. We get right to the core of the drama - "you're entered the neutral zone, ass." If, on the other hand, one ship is upside-down, Joe Six Pack is going to sit there ignoring all the exposition about kyrellian freighters or whatever and sit there thinking "why the fuck is that ship upside down?"

'cuz he knows this show. This show has been playing since WWII - there's a captain, and he's got a crew, and he's got guns, and he orders his dudes to fire a warning shot off the bad guy's bow and tells his ensign "flank speed" and there's big lumbering battles and sometimes there are explosions and everyone jumps around. It doesn't matter if you're off the coast of Guadalcanal or off the shoulder of Orion, it's a naval battle.

Compare and contrast with Star Wars - yeah, it's got big ships, but they action is much more about zippy little fighters tearing into each other all Top Gun style. Joe Sixpack has seen that a gajillion times, too - I mean, shit. Microsoft Excel 97 had a flight simulator easter egg in it. So we paste "air war for the pacific" over our Alderan and our Tatooine and we use the shorthand we all know, with TIE fighters whizzing around like they're ME109s and the Millenium Falcon being, for all intents and purposes, the least aerodynamic B-17 ever flown. Let's say we make the physics real - it's gonna look a lot like a game of Asteroids. Or, to Joe Sixpack, a bunch of weird drifty crumpled up pieces of shit firing invisible projectiles at each other and exploding soundlessly and without combustion.

And that's going to be fucking boring.

Now about Straczynski. He himself made a big point about how he was "abiding by physics" with Babylon 5, but if you watch it, he basically cribbed Star Wars and then allowed his ships to pivot as if they were in vacuum. they still fly around as if they're over the Pacific somewhere, unless he wants to make a point that they're not. The same thing was done by BSG, the same thing was done by Wrath of Khan, shit, The Last Starfighter played that card. It's still basically couching your sci fi in terms of a paradigm that you automatically accept.

It's kinda funny. I worked on a short once that was supposed to take place entirely in zero gravity. And we had an actress in a small space station, and she was sitting down and we shot the camera at funny angles and we did all sorts of floating effects, but she just didn't get this whole "zero gravity" thing. Then we got to the EVA stuff and threw her in the suit and you know what? She twigged to "zero gravity" IMMEDIATELY. For her, "zero gravity" is what happens when you're in a space suit. Not in a space suit? Not in zero gravity. I wish I could say that as soon as we got her back inside, she remembered. She didn't. If she wasn't in the suit, she wasn't in zero gravity. When you're inside, your feet are on the ground and the ground is on the floor. Period.

And let's be honest - "space battle" is a convention at best. Harry Harrison, no less, devotes an entire chapter in one of the Stainless Steel Rat books about what a preposterous notion the idea of a "planetary invasion force" is and how ludicrous space combat in general is, which is why it never happens. Let's take it nice and pedestrian, and presume I've got, oh, the Manned Orbiting Laboratory in a polar orbit, circling the globe at ballpark, 12,000 miles an hour. Let's say I've got an Almaz in a low equatorial orbit who feels like pointing that 23mm Nudelman at Our Boys In Blue. He's also cruising at an easy 12,000 miles an hour. Never mind for a minute the fact that our rate of closure is 17,000 miles an hour and we're trying to hit something the size of a Buick - if our friend the Almaz actually succeeds and chews up the MOL, his orbit now crosses a debris field of twisted metal flying at him at that really nasty rate of closure. The Space Shuttles needed their windows replaced no less than 80 times due to impacts from debris of less than 1mm... imagine filling the sky with that shit.

So at some point, you have to go "it's entertainment" and film what's entertaining. Maybe your pain point is further than "your girlfriend's" but if the show presents interesting speculative stories in a visual tableau that entertains you, do you really care that much?