There is stuff that should never happen, and maybe a quick lunch & learn with your design teams would help. Port & Starboard are left in right, facing the bow - nobody would ever put the port side cargo bay door button the the right side of the the starboard button (as on the carrack). Nobody would ever, ever have bright white lights or holograms shining in the eyes of the pilot. Red lights on the port side, green lights on the starboard -not random lights everywhere. ADDITION: you'll want a light tail-light - or if not tail, the uppermost part of the ship, so you can clearly see which way "up" the ship is oriented - this allows people to visually see orientation and infer intentions from a ship.... to help when your in proximity to each other in darkness or fog. I should add here that you'd want, at least for military ships, be able to turn the running lights off. A stealth ship, on stealth mission with lights is kinda silly.... as light should effect your IR and EM signature. The bow is the the forward most extremity, but when you move about a ship you go forward or aft (toward the stern, but you don't move "sternward"). On any indicator on the ship, the bearing is relative to the bow - not whichever way the turret happens to point by default- because if everyone is calling out bearings relative to a different 0 then nobody can communicate. Instead of using 360 degrees, sometimes bearing will be called out in degrees from the bow (1-180). When this is done it would be "Red 45" to call out 45 degrees to port. And Green 45 to call out 45 degrees to starboard. If you were going to do this in +/- rather than Green and Red (you wouldn't, but if....) Starboard would be +and port - . It would never, ever be the other way around. Headlights would light up where the pilot can see - not somewhere underneath for dramatic effect. The bearing indicator on, say, a turret (but anywhere) would provide elevation or declination relative to the centerline of the ship, and give you a digital numerical readout of your current bearing - you wouldn't have to infer your bearing from the numbers to your left and your right - because speed and accuracy matter for situational awareness and communication. In space, there would still be some kind of bearing systems. It would have to be, to a degree, arbitrary but there would need to be an arbitrary up (relative to the ecliptic), and an arbitrary 0 reference crated in any system.... nobody, facing blackness and millions of starts, is going to orient themselves visually while moving.... It's insane. It should be very dark in the cockpit, so people's eyes can adapt. Generally, if you need lights, you'd have red light anywhere anyone was on lookout -because it doesn't wash out night vision. Any compass would have numbered markers/graduations for 0(360), 90, 180 and 270 - aka the cardinal directions or N, S, E and W. You may also focus on NE (45), SE, SW, NW.... but you MUST have the cardinal directions. There is no compasses that would put numbers over the 80 and 100 graduations, and skip 90, for example. And you'd probably use "mils" given the distances being covered, but that is probably a bridge too far for this exercise. Substantive edit: Some people have noted below that applying these "rule of the road" and navigation principle to things like the buoys around stations, etc, would also be a good idea> A note here that if you don't like the word "nautical" you also consider this "aeronautical" or "astronautical." -It started with ships, was evolved slightly for aircraft and I'm sure spacecraft - but it is one tradition that does back to longships. It's consistent because it works. It's worked for centuries, and it keeps working to help people navigate, communicate, not crash and stay alive Also, if you want, I'm not being funny but I would be happy to explain stuff to your teams..... But you could get literally anyone who has sailed a boat, sat in a cockpit, or been in a military...