At 04:38 PM 7/3/01, Matt Grimaldi wrote:
>Darryl Shannon wrote:
> >
> > This is a huge misconception that I blame Star Trek for. The ships
> > always lose power and start to crash into the planets. But that won't
> > happen if you are in orbit! It requires no energy to stay in orbit,
> > you are already falling into the planet, it's just that you keep
> > missing. There is no orbit that describes a spiral. Orbits are always
> > parabolic, hyperbolic, or elliptical (with circular being an elliptical
> > orbit with zero eccentricity). Alberto, help me out here!
> >
>
>I always just assumed that the orbits that Star Trek ships use
>are kept artificially slow, such as staying geosynchronous
>right at the edge of the atmosphere
Or over the planet's south pole, as in one episode of TNG . . .
>It would probably not, technically, be an orbit, either.
No, in this particular case it would be levitation above a stationary
point. Unless you have the ship rotating around its center of mass in sync
with the planet's rotation, so the front always points toward the same
longitude, in which case the ship would be spinning around but going
nowhere . . . sort of like the plot, perhaps . . .
-- Ronn! :)
