Yeah, Gravity was far from the worst portrayal, but it made it way too easy to get from one orbital object to another. They were all much too close together, and the path you take to get from one to another is far from intuitive: You don’t just point your fire extinguisher in the opposite direction and zoom over.
If you accept the premise that the future of warfare involves manned craft maneuvering around each other, Babylon 5’s Starfuries are relatively reasonable. You’ve got a small cockpit capsule, with multiple engines on the ends of struts to rotate that capsule around various axes.
I generally did not like Babylon 5, but the fighters would reverse direction by rotating the shut down engine 180 degrees around the center of gravity, where the pilot sat, and firing the engine again.
I’m not sure what you man by “rotating the shut down engine”, but generally Starfuries rotated by firing all four thrusters simultaneously, two in the aft direction and two in the forward direction. This would be quickly followed by another thrust of all four thrusters in the direction opposite to their original thrust to stop the rotation.
I agree with both of those. I found Gravity especially impressive because I saw it in a theater in 3D on a really big screen, and the 3D effects were awesome.
Now that you post that, I’m also reminded that relative to the direction of largest accelerations, the pilots are “lying flat on their back”, which is the best position for humans to take g-forces.
