Yes, I suppose that is true. Now translate that to something on the screen that will interest people who don’t give a wet shit about the math i.e. most viewers. Now do that on a weekly basis.
The closest thing to space fights would be submarine fights. At distances of 10,000 or 100,000 or more km (or miles if you think that unit makes sense in space) you can’t really see your enemy if they’re careful unless you use active radar, in which case you’re painting a big fat bulls eye on your own hull. And at sufficient distances, you have to target the radar beam fairly tightly, so even with that it takes a while to find other ships if you don’t know where to look beforehand.
Energy weapons don’t make sense, but good oldfashioned metal projectiles (which can be accelerated magnetically) are extremely effective in space because there’s usually a large speed difference between two ships. And missiles, of course.
Maybe the viewers don’t care about the math, but they do care that the writers know their shit. So solve the issue in a reasonable way: either make the hyperdrive fail when there’s a reason you’re close to a planet (e.g., you were on your way to that system anyway) or come up with another explanation, like that gravity wells bend hyperspace so you’re likely to drop out close to stars. Then you can have some tension because you’re likely to fall out of hyperspace way too close to a star when the drive fails.
That would be a cool type of hyperdrive: you can travel any distance instantly, but only in a straight line except that that straight line is bent by gravity, and you drop out at a random point between your starting point and target. You travel slowly but safely by making many jumps that steer clear from stars, or fast but risky by making longer jumps that pass closer by stars. It would then be easier to travel to the outskirts of another galaxy than to the center of our own.
Doctor Who did manage to subvert one annoying space trope of putting the term “space” in front of every mundane thing. It may look future-y to us, but not to the people who actually live there:
Clara: Looks like a Japanese restaurant. Have you brought me to a space restaurant!
The Doctor: People never do that, you know.
Clara: Do what?
The Doctor: They never put the word “space” in front of something just because everything’s all sort of hi-tech and future-y. It’s never space restaurant or space champagne or space, you know, hats. It’s just restaurants, champagne or hats, even if this was a restaurant.
Clara: What about space suit?
The Doctor: Pedant.
Although Doctor Who (and Star Trek) are guilty of a very annoying trope of the heros coming in and involving themselves in some inane ongoing conflict between two small, lightly staffed outposts within walking distance that appears to have no greater strategic purpose.
Both are also guilty of the annoying trope of coming in and solving some civilization’s 1000 year old cultural problem within the span of an episode. Particularly since Star Trek has actual rules against doing just that!
Imagine a small alien landing party coming to the US and fixing our health care system or gun laws overnight.
Energy weapons make perfect sense. They have prototype laser weapons now. You just point it at whatever you want to vaporize and wait until it cooks off. Also mirrored surfaces don’t work. No mirror is 100% reflective. Some energy will be absorbed and heat up your target.
And there is no stealth in space. The Laws of Thermodynamics state that all the heat from running the engines, life support, antimatter drives, coffeemakers and whatnot have to go somewhere. Therefore your ship will always appear as a moving hot spot against a cold background.
That is still something that matters to you. Program directors devote incredible time and energy to developing programming that will appeal either to as wide an audience as they can reach or to a particulatly valued demographic. Hyperdrive that makes mathematical sense apparently fits neither criterion. Millions of dollars ride on what reaches the screen. If space being a big, mostly empty place where it took eons to get anywhere, and when you got there the planets were lifeless iceballs, and rverybody on the ship who hadn’t died of blood-pooling in transit starved and/or froze and/or suffocated made for grat ticket sales or great nielsens, why I guess we would be seeing more stories like that.
Of course we don’t want realism. We want the semblance of realism.
If in “A New Hope” it seems to take a couple of days to get from Tatooine to Alderaan, then space travel in Star Wars should always seem to take a couple of days. It doesn’t matter how long precisely, just that we don’t want to make it seem like taking the bus across town. Unless making it seem like taking the bus across town is the way you want to play it.
The problem with all the Star Wars movies is that you can’t really tell if each movie takes place in a couple of hours, or days, or weeks. How long does Luke train on Bespin? A day or two? Months? Beats me.
SEATBELTS! Is that such an “alien” concept?
The communications I can actually envision using quantum entanglement. We can only do a short distance now but - the future - makes some sort of sense. You enter your information, scramble some atoms/particles and somewhere in space their twins arrange themselves in a mirror image to be read back.
It’s no coincidence the shirts worn by certain crew members are red…
–G!
So? Apparently they’re successful in attracting me, regardless of my demographic state, but then they proceed to annoy me. How is that helpful?
You watched. They win.
Let’s consider the effects of jet travel, satellite communications, the internet, etc in the social forces affecting us currently on Earth. Global commercialization has interwoven global economies, etc. Now project that to a future with instantaneous teleportation across a whole planet, abundant energy resources that allow “replicators” to create anything you want in seconds to minutes. In that kind of environment, the world becomes a tiny place. I could fully imagine global geopolitics simplifying through a United Nations type format, until nation states become obsolete.
Sure, there should be diversity - visual, racial, cultural, religious, ideological, etc. But all intermingled like the American ideal - the salad bowl society (not melting pot).
It seems implausible that the defense nets of those gigantic space vehicles aren’t bristling energy cannons. However, those small fighters do play a role in space interdiction and space conflicts. And the vulnerabilities of the Death Stars are explicitly shown as flukes. The first Death Star had a hidden vulnerability to allow a plasma weapon to direct from the surface to the inner core and trigger disruption from within. Similarly, the second Death Star was vulnerable because it was still under construction, and the hull was not intact, with huge gaping segments equivalent to an incomplete skyscraper. That’s why there was a shield generator in Endor.
Intimidation, when your desire isn’t simply annihilation of the existing life, but taking over and dominating them as slaves or stealing resources or eating them as food (a la “V”).
Light sabers do have the advantage of deflecting energy blasts from the predominate weaponry - blasters. Plus, Jedi aren’t soldiers, so they aren’t intended to be infantry. Their need for a weapon is not the same, so they don’t need a range weapon.
Why do you assume they would be restricted to 1G? They obviously have artificial gravity, so they could accelerate at whatever the limit was of their engines.
A couple of posts mentioned nukes. I shouted for joy when the remade Battlestar Galactica featured them. And Aliens started with a landing team because they were investigating a (formerly, as it turned out) inhabited colony. Once they determined that everyone but Newt was dead and that the place was infested with lethal parasite-predators, “nuke it from orbit” was the most sensible strategy imaginable. But usually SF shows and movies ignore nukes because dramatically they’re usually game-breakers. I think one of the better series to address the question was Babylon 5. Clearly nukes existed in-universe and they were used on a few occasions. But what I gathered was that habitable planets were rare enough (and artificial habitats expensive enough) that destroying them was considered nihilistically insane, like if cobalt bombs were to be used in real life. It was considered an atrocity and war crime that a habitat on Mars was bombed, and that Narn was hit with enough asteroids to send it into a planetary winter.
Sure thing. 
Complaining that spaceships have wings is like complaining that airplanes have wheels. Yeah, they may be unnecessary 99% of the time, but they’re kind of important for traveling on or through denser media. I’ve seen plenty of sci-fi movies and TV shows (including Star Trek) where winged spacecraft occasionally or even routinely enter planetary atmospheres.
Wouldn’t The Force be a range weapon?
“One thought, one kill.”
Yeah, but often they then proceed to just hover in place, for which we know of no plausible mechanism. (Assuming there’s not a super conductor underneath.)
Voyager the similarly named Star Trek series lands a bunch of times (and they make a suitably bigish deal out of that) but it has no wings.
But fair enough, some of these are clearly meant to enter atmospheres.
However, the planes/wheels analogy doesn’t hold, because all planes must land at some point. Spacecraft, on the other hand, don’t necessarily have to: they can stay in orbit or they can land on bodies with no atmosphere. See the Apollo moon landers for a real life example. Not having to deal with aerodynamics, distributing the forces from the wings and a heat shield is a huge savings, so you really don’t want to make your spacecraft atmosphere-capable if there’s any way to avoid it.
But in any event, my main complaint is that in vacuum, they fly around as if there is an atmosphere. The engines keep running at all times, which is unexpected in space, and they bank and turn, which you simply can’t do without an atmosphere and wings to push against that atmosphere.
In a vacuum, you need to decelerate to get rid of the the unwanted speed vector and accelerate to gain speed in the wanted direction. In practice: turn the nose of the ship in the desired direction and burn the engines, ignoring the fact that you’re flying backwards or sideways at first.
Is it so implausible for a vessel to have multiple methods of propulsion, each suited to different types of manoeuvres? This sort of thing isn’t particularly uncommon even in today’s vehicles.
Neither do hot air balloons or helicopters (at least, not in the sense most people think), but that’s not a valid argument against their ability to fly through atmospheres. Some vessels fly through atmospheres with wings; some use other means. Again, it’s common enough today that it shouldn’t be hard to accept for hypothetical future vehicles.
I’m sure that’s a factor the in-universe spacecraft engineers weighed carefully against the convenience of having a general-purpose vessel capable of operating in both atmospheric and nonatmospheric conditions.
Through that way, the dark side lies, hmmm?
The Mass Effect series subverts this trope in a perfectly reasonable way.
You can stealth any ship with the appropriate heat capacitance, but you can’t stealth it for an indefinite period without literally cooking those aboard. You eventually have to vent all that heat, which can take a while at standard heat transfer rates. So there are stations at planets designed to “offload” the stored up heat from the heat banks. The more heat banks a ship has, the longer it can be in stealth mode. But it eventually has to vent all that, unless you want everyone to die.
From what I understand, the technology of the Mass Effect series was intentionally designed to follow basic quantum physics rules in an advanced technology universe. They have the advanced technology to bend those rules, but everything ends up being a tradeoff in the end. They can only cheat the system for so long. They’re still held to the laws of conservation, inertia, and thermodynamics.
“It means Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space!”
There was a fire. It burned up a large portion of the available oxygen.