Trope-a-Day: In Space Everyone Can See Your Face
In Space Everyone Can See Your Face: Averted, for all the practical reasons mentioned. In practice, augmented reality v-tags – actually, the standard public identity tag – tell you who is who, and those who want to can use supplementary v-tags to indicate their current emotional state, etc., and perform other expressive tasks.
(The running lights on spacecraft also mentioned? There for close orbital operations and for the benefit of the crew when they have to go clamber about on the hull to do maintenance, including such things as delineating the – very hot – radiative striping so you don’t accidentally step on it. You can turn it off quite happily outside those circumstances, although a lot of captains don’t simply because with the energy budget of your average modern spacecraft1, there’s really no point in making the trivial saving of turning the lights off. Besides, someone might have a telescope aimed at you, and programming this gorgeous paint job wasn’t cheap, y’know?)
1. i.e., running on fusion, with thus-generous power budget. This was not the historical case back in the fuel-cells-and-solar-panels days.