uuuuuuuuuuureaaaaaaaahhh (tie-fighter)

There's good reason they forego realism in this aspect. Imagine watching a scifi movie where every scene where the camera is in vacuum is dead quiet.

Screw that, Firefly was awesome.
The Expanse has 6 seasons worth of quiet vacuum. The battle scenes are epic and scientifically accurate.
The show is So accurate that they have weird scenes like this
- Huh, I should rewatch it. I'm not sure I even noticed that these scenes are quiet. Maybe there's a sound track but no sounds of explosions etc?
This is what I want Every scene filmed POV in air, give me the correct sounds. Vacuum POV? That's silent
The first scene in the new Star Trek was brilliant. Crashing sound effects inside the besieged ship, cuts to the outside, silence.
BSG? Firefly?
I loved when Interstellar made that one explosion quiet. Couldn't have been a better scene IMO.

If you were designing a cockpit and wanted to relay positional data to the pilot, 3D audio would be a great way.

So my head canon is that the sounds are generated in the cockpit, for the benefit of the pilots.

I remember Wing Commander III having that explanation in the manual: sensors pick up what is happening outside the ship and simulate positional sound to increase pilot awareness.
- Such an awesome game! I played that as a kid, I wonder if that's where this idea came to me from.
Like electric cars having a fake noise for nearby pedestrians.
Star Wars is one of those franchises that depend on ideas like this. Thank you doing your part soldier! 🫡
- It's been quite literally canon since A New Hope, aka 1977
  Whether they or the fans came up with it is still a question though.

Gotta put the willhelm scream in there, but make it not too obvious.

But don't change it so much the nerds can't recognise it

Have you ever seen the "the cheese is under the sauce" meme video?

The mics are in the spaceship.

Do you understand that you need only 3-5 seconds to find a good enough realistic explanation for that?

Please explain
- Spaceships do make sounds ..... inside the spaceship
  Everything else on the outside is dead quiet
- Ok, most trivial and naive one: the listener doesn’t fly in space with their ass naked. The listener is in the spacesuit, or ship, or something. And that suit detects other emissions (light for example). And then translated it to the sound for convenience. For easier orientation. I heard that even electric cars have a special sound emitter for pedestrians. Or those cars would be too quiet and dangerous.

To me the greatest dealbreaker is that they brought aerial flight mechanics into space. It makes no sense

The sound of spaceships come from the same place the music comes from

In my mind we are just hearing the radiation, not directly but some system is converting x rays to sound, etc

Or any other kind of interference with the audio recording devices, like they did to create the lightsaber sounds.

maybe their thrusters are burning with air, or some other catalyst medium that propagates far as vibrational energy and we're hearing that?

Hot take: I'm fine with this. Film, TV and games are audio-visual mediums, they depend on the sound just as much as the image. All the awesome space battles would lose from being dead silent. No sound, no music. You're in a vacuum, where's the music coming from?

The silence of vacuum should be used when it would enhance the drama and impact of the scene, not for a slavish adherence to realism.

Interstellar and For All Mankind benefit from the silence because they're not about the excitement of space, they're about the drama of space and the characters. In those, space is a character all on its own. Star Wars and Star Trek are about the adventures and the action. Space is just the setting. And in that context, silence is jarring.