Fair point. When the Enterprise was orbiting the Earth in the late 1960s (twice!), the deflectors might have helped them elude primitive radar, but any goofball with a telescope could’ve spotted them overhead.
Not if they stayed in orbit over the daylit hemisphere… :dubious:
“Orbit”, huh? :dubious:
They would have to time it to the rotation of the Earth, yeah, but it wouldn’t be just hovering. They’d have to stay between the Earth and the Sun, requiring them to move in some fashion.
You work out the mechanics of it! 
Earth-Sun Lagrangian point…
Or just use impulse engines to maintain position.
(TOS seemed very averse to using this obvious solution – which makes some sense, given that the “Age of Sail” was the model. Nelson and Hood would have tried to avoid using topsails to maintain station except in tight blockade of an enemy port or when transferring personnel by boat. In Star Trek terms, “orbit” is much the same as “at anchor.” I believe these resemblances were intentional and deliberate, part of Roddenberry’s “style book” for TOS.)
Remember, they’d have to stay within 30,000 km of Earth in order to use the transporter. At that distance, the planet’s gravity would dominate over the Sun’s.
I think the Star Trek “standard orbit” must have required power to maintain it, though - it’s a plot point once or twice that the ship’s going to fall out of the sky if the engines go off. That makes sense if they need to be both planetostationary and within comparatively short range to use the transporters - you need to be over 20,000 miles out to be geostationary, and the Enterprise is never depicted that far out when it’s in orbit.
However, you can’t stay on the daylight side of the planet and be in orbit - being in orbit requires going around it, at whatever speed you care to stipulate, so you have to spend half your time on the night side. (Or all of it over the terminator in a circumpolar orbit.)
They were at 30,000 km in “Obsession,” to avoid the worst of the anti-matter blast. That’s the maximum range of the transporter, which in Whitfield’s book is given as 16,000 miles (and they almost lost Kirk and Garrovik, at that).
The Earth orbits the Sun at about 66,000 mph, or roughly 0.9884 degrees a day (360/365.242). Looking down from the north, it revolves counterclockwise around the Sun. So for the *Enterprise * to remain between the Sun and the Earth, it would have to match Earth’s orbit degree for degree, rather than going around the planet itself.
In other words, it would be in a solar, rather than a terrestrial, orbit. And the ship would also be travelling ounterclockwise around the Sun at about 66,000 mph, since its orbit would lie no more than 30,000 km inside Earth’s (a very short distance in astronomical terms). Power would in this case have to be applied to counteract the attractive force of Earth’s gravity and stay in solar orbit.
They would also have to apply power to account for the irregularities in Earth’s orbit, which is not a perfect circle.
A previous discussion of TOS-era standard orbits: How long could a starship stay up in orbit? - Factual Questions - Straight Dope Message Board
Something I hadn’t considered earlier: the faster a planet rotates, the stronger its gravity tugs on a satellite, perturbing the latter’s orbit. It would have to be moving pretty damned fast for the affect to be immediately appreciable, but it would have to be compensated for eventually.
I believe this is referred to as “frame dragging.” It would become increasingly acute were the planet to collapse, as its radius shrank. I think something like this happened in “The Naked Time,” since the fluctuations in gravity were what caused the water to transform into something that mimicked the action of alcohol. (I think that was the explanation offered in Blish’s adaptation of the episode.) It would also explain why the Enterprise’s orbit was decaying so quickly.
I love this website. 
Where else can you get such wonderful geeky-analysis.
That is all.
Forgot to allow for the equatorial radius of the Earth, which is 6378.1 km (I assume that’s a mean figure). I’m not sure the Earth’s center lies exactly on its orbital track, however, since the Earth and Moon revolve around each other.
Of course, the Moon would perturb the ship’s solar orbit as well, and this would also have to be compensated for. Meaning more power would have to be applied.
“Geeky-analysis,” indeed! This is science, lad. Pure science!
Just don’t ask me to do all the math. I hate math! 
Neither is the Earth’s axis perpendicular to the plane of its orbit. Goddamn, this is complicated stuff! :smack:
Which is why we have the Stellar Cartography display room.
Seen in how many eps/movies? 1?
One movie (Generations), although the USS Voyager later had one, too.
“Turnabout Intruder” was not a great TOS episode, but it was the last one. Check out the awesome remastered final view of the Enterprise at the conclusion (at 49:47): - YouTube
Is that like Astrometrics? :dubious:
Seven of Nine, mmmmmmmm! :o
Awesome indeed! 