Not really -- it was only 160 million km out from Bajor's orbit, which is a bit over 1 AU (the Earth-Sun distance), so maybe c. 2 AU from B'hava'el, give or take. That corresponds roughly to the inner edge of our Main Asteroid Belt, although how much illumination you'd get there depends on how large and bright the star is. But since they didn't use any unusual color filters/processing to shoot Bajor scenes, we can assume their star is a G-type like the Sun.
On the other hand, certain supposedly annual celebrations on Bajor do not fall on the same slots in a Paramount season aka Earth year, and Sisko seems to celebrate the third anniversary of Wolf 359 well in advance of what Earth years would dictate. Odds are that Bajor orbits its sun a bit closer than Earth does, then, and accordingly has a slightly dimmer sun that just happens to have roughly the same apparent color.
We still have a good reason to believe in the 1AU/2AU approximation from an independent source of comparison, regardless of the local value for AU. Namely, an impulse trip from DS9 to Bajor by a
Danube class runabout in reasonable hurry sometimes takes 2 hours, sometimes 6 hours, a ratio of 1:3. This makes perfect sense if the spacecraft fly beelines through space (as impulse drive would allow them to do) and sometimes deal with a situation where Bajor and DS9 are at the same side of the sun (DS9 at 2 AU, Bajor at 1 AU, distance = 2 AU -1 AU = 1 AU), sometimes at the opposite sides (distance = 2 AU + 1 AU = 3 AU).
Yorktown in Beyond was a pretty good idea. The station seems to orbit at roughly the same distance as Altamid and at the same orbital speed, always the same distance from the nebula.
How could this setup work? Altamid isn't on the other side of the nebula, but surrounded by it from all sides, or else everybody would warp there from the unblocked side, a million times faster going than trying to brave the rubble. Why would two locations equidistant from the local sun be dissimilarly victimized by the rock cloud?
We don't quite know what keeps the immediate vicinity of Altamid rock-free. Perhaps it has defenses, and perhaps those fortresses around Yorktown also primarily shoot down maverick rocks? But having Altamid orbit the local star within a spherical cloud of rubble, while Yorktown orbits outside the same spherical rock shell, might work to our satisfaction. It's just that both locations seem to enjoy a great deal of sunlight (if anything, Altamid is the one without explicitly clear skies), while the rock cloud seems almost impenetrable to sunlight (just as it should if it is to be impenetrable to standard spacecraft).
So a setup where Altamid is the party blocked from a direct view of a sun is the better match for the visuals, which luckily enough generally show Altamid heavily overcast and IIRC never show an actual sun on the sky. But we can't put Yorktown inside a rubble sphere, and we can't easily have two suns due to the distance between Altamid and Yorktown being so short that our heroes can wade across in a couple of hours at 30 mph or whatever.
So basically we have Yorktown orbiting a star, barely "inboard" of another orbiter that is a vaguely nebulaic cloud of dense rubble, in the middle (or more probably a few thousand kilometers into the Yorktown-proximal inner edge) of which lies Altamid. Which is fine - Yorktown would be situated in this special spot on purpose (namely to study the rubble nebula, and Spock's political bullshit aside), while the advanced culture that once exploited Altamid may be responsible for that planet's special location and odd surrounings.
(Although we
could also argue that this star is a busy cosmopolis with many inhabited planets, explaining how the Abornath weapon could find its way to not just one but two neighboring cultures, and indeed dictating this special placement for the Federation nebula-studying station even when at least two local worlds would have interests for or against hosting such a station! This would just assume that the long warp run during which Kirk and McCoy share their drink would be proceeding at a snail's pace, as is common close to stars anyway. And perhaps the "new" warp effect also is but a sign of the ship slowly pushing its way through the nebulaic neighborhood?)
The station rotates a lot faster than a planet giving the interior roughly even lighting during the day.
We see the source of light shift from the starboard side of the hero ship to her port side during the short time it takes for the ship glide from the edge of the station to her eventual docking point, inside a tight tunnel that doesn't as much as allow her to roll. So yes, lots of random shadows that come and go not just dozens but possibly hundreds of times per Earth day.
Then simply polarising the transparent outer shell to simulate a night.
No doubt. Although one wonders if the daylight mightn't be artificial, and generated by the outer shell, too. We never really see an external light source, after all (even though one does act on the hero ship during her approach), and the "reflection" of such a source on the station's outer shell might instead be the spot where the shell creates this fake daylight at that moment.
Timo Saloniemi
