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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Joshua Bell: [QB] >>> One something starts moving in space it keeps moving in the same way until something hits it. Once the ship is aligned with the position and rotation of the station, it shouldn't need to be held in place by anything. <<< That would be true in open space, but the situation is quite different in planetary orbit. The linear velocity of an orbit is dependent on the distance from the center of gravity of the object being orbited, and does not correlate to an angular velocity. Objects in lower orbits must travel faster than those in higher orbits. As an example, to if you are in a ship in orbit at 1000km and wish to catch up with something ahead of you in the same orbit, you do the following: First, fire thrusters *ahead* of you to slow down. This will cancel some of your orbital momentum, and you literally fall into a lower orbit. But your new orbit is lower, so you orbit faster - catching up with the target. Once you're close you fire your *aft* thrusters to speed up, which boosts you into a hire orbit - where you orbit more slowly and can dock with the target. What does that have to do with these space stations? Well, even a difference of a few meters is significant. The strain on a large object in space - which spans several different orbital velocities - is non-negligible. These are called tidal forces. See "Dragon's Egg" by Robert L. Forward for the more extreme example of orbiting a neutron star, where these tidal force must be compensated for. (As an aside, this is one of the reasons why shuttle astronauts experience microgravity, not zero-gravity. A shuttle-borne crystal growing experiment will have very different results than a crystal experiment in deep space or in free-fall towards the Earth or the sun.) In the case of Earth Station McKinley, since its center of mass looks to be offset by tens of meters from the center of mass of the ship, the two objects will tend to diverge, meaning energy (or structure capable of resisting the strain) must be used to keep them together. A physical contact at a few brief points along the hull might be enough - if both structures are composed of super-resilient materials (which they presumably are). Federation gravity technology or inertial damping fields might be enough to compensate for this, but some magic must be invoked. [/QB][/QUOTE]
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