Okay. What I meant was that the station in question that everyone was suggesting the one from the movie resembled was not in Earth orbit. I meant "neutral" as in not in the space of any one member government. It certainly looks to me in FJ's TM that that particular station is not in Earth orbit.
Well, sure, but what's your point? Nobody's saying that the station in the movie is the exact same structure FJ drew, because it clearly isn't. Just that there's an evident design influence.
I Like F.J's space station concept, though I do NOT accept it as "Starfleet Headquarters." I don't mind it being one of a series of starbase "standard designs" out there, and don't mind one or more of these having a "starfleet headquarters" facility inside (in the same sense that there are multiple "headquarters" operations for the Navy, dependent on which fleet or operational group you're talking about). But there's simply no way to have a spaceborne facility be anywhere nearly as secure and self-sufficient as a planetbound one could be. There are advantages to being in space, but the sort of things you really want from a "headquarters..." not so much.
Well, I'm not so sure I agree that a planetary installation is automatically superior to a self-sufficient megastructure. Planets aren't really all that secure; they tend to have earthquakes and tsunamis and asteroid impacts and stuff like that, and it takes a lot of wasted energy to fight your way out of their gravity wells. Also, it's easy for an enemy to bombard you just by dropping rocks on you from orbit and turning your planet's own gravity into a WMD. It's always better to hold the high ground, and any installation on a planet surface is the low ground by an enormous margin.
A lot of modern science fiction portrays civilizations that have largely or entirely eschewed planetary living in favor of artificial megastructures. So it's hardly unprecedented for a core facility of a civilization to be space-based.
By the way, what is that in your avatar? It looks like the TMP dude "running" for his life before VGR cloud got him at the start of the movie..but is that the actual prop or something?
IIRC, that's a photo Andrew Probert took of the original filming miniature of the TMP astronaut. There was a pictorial of it on the Drex Files blog a few months back.
It's not so much the concept that bothers me, as much as the orientation. You have this big flat circular ovoid, and for whatever reason the orientation was around the center so the outer edge was the "ground" and the center of the "wheel" was the highest point of the "sky." Then you have all of these bulkheads separating each section, with a short skyscraper built into them and all this fake sky above. Why all the fake sky?
That's the part that seemed like wasted space to me. If the orientation had been where one "face" of the circle was "up" and the other "down" I think it would have wasted less space while preserving the fake planet motif.
The design is predicated on the use of rotational gravity rather than magic artificial gravity. A rotating habitat is only viable if its rotation rate is less than 1 RPM; otherwise the rotation can induce motion sickness, drowsiness, and other symptoms. But in order to have a slow rotation and still achieve 1g, you need a habitat with a large radius.
Although I don't think FJ's space station is quite big enough. The ground level seems to be roughly 700 meters from the center. Now, a = v^2/r, so v = SQRT(700 x 9.8) = 83 m/s for 1g. The circumference is 2 pi * 700 = 4398 m, which gives a period of about 53 seconds. That's just on the wrong side of 1 RPM. Although if the 1g level is meant to be at the outer edge of the station, then that might work. It'd mean a slightly lower gravity at the nominal ground level, but that's not a problem. So maybe it's just barely big enough.
Although then the spacedocks make no sense, because they're further out and therefore "below" the ground level. They'd feel a higher gravity. The text says that ships in the docks "float" in synchronous orbit, but that doesn't make any sense. Even if the interior were in vacuum, the Coriolis effect would still send them into the wall.
