What's Wrong With These Pictures?

[Lucky]

What's wrong with this picture?
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http://voy.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/ ... d1_334.jpg

[2046]

Light brightness on the hull in the TOS shot.

Light angle and brightness on the TNG shot, a constant issue.

Vessel orbital angle in the Voyager shot, assuming all ships usually arrange their orbit to keep the port side toward the planet.

And of course the fact you can see stars, but we can pretend that's a function of the camera.

Am I missing something else?

[Lucky]

Light brightness on the hull in the TOS shot.

Light angle and brightness on the TNG shot, a constant issue.

Vessel orbital angle in the Voyager shot, assuming all ships usually arrange their orbit to keep the port side toward the planet.

And of course the fact you can see stars, but we can pretend that's a function of the camera.

Am I missing something else?

I was talking about the fact that the ships can't be seen from the ground, but the visual effects teams made them clearly visible to the view.

[Sideswipe]

Also there is not a single lens flare in any of those pics.

[Cocytus]

I was talking about the fact that the ships can't be seen from the ground, but the visual effects teams made them clearly visible to the view.

So you're arguing they should be easily visible to people on the ground, thereby compromising the timeline/alerting people below?

Well, that would only be a problem when traveling back in time or attempting first contact. I believe B'Elanna said they could modify the shuttle's shields to make it resemble a period aircraft when viewed from a distance, and that something similar was done with the Enterprise in one of the time travel episodes of TOS. So basic shielding can be modulated to make the ship inconspicuous unless you're right on top of it, and serves well enough to fool any sensors they expect to encounter. Rain Robinson detected the presence of something in Earth orbit, but couldn't do any more than that. The E-D apparently completely eluded detection by the Malcorians.

This would make good sense since the shields are explicitly based, per "Generations" on manipulating gravitons. The ship could bend light around itself to an extent sufficient to disguise it as something else or otherwise fool the comparatively primitive detection methods they expect to encounter on time travel/first contact missions.

[Lucky]

So you're arguing they should be easily visible to people on the ground, thereby compromising the timeline/alerting people below?

I'm arguing the visual effects teams screwed up the exact same way every time, and that the visuals are just eye candy that at time have little connection to what the reality of the setting is, but this is something i believe for all media be it books, comics, Tv, or movies. One can remove things from context and be honest.

Well, I could be wrong, but I seem to recall man made satellites being visible with the naked eye, and they are much smaller then the Enterprise, Enterprise-d, or Voyager, and the twentieth century U.S. military in Star Trek has had several run ins with aliens so they should be trying to watch the skies with every possible method .twentieth century has at its disposal.

Given the dialog and the way the episodes play out we know the ships are invisible or close enough.

Well, that would only be a problem when traveling back in time or attempting first contact. I believe B'Elanna said they could modify the shuttle's shields to make it resemble a period aircraft when viewed from a distance, and that something similar was done with the Enterprise in one of the time travel episodes of TOS. So basic shielding can be modulated to make the ship inconspicuous unless you're right on top of it, and serves well enough to fool any sensors they expect to encounter. Rain Robinson detected the presence of something in Earth orbit, but couldn't do any more than that. The E-D apparently completely eluded detection by the Malcorians.

1) That's another VF goof on the visual effects crew part. They used the standard shuttle animation rather then some sort of jet or distortion.

2) It looks like they may have all been different things though the Enterprise-D hiding from a warp capable planet has to be harder then hiding from twentieth century Star Trek Earth.

Spock just turns on the shields of a heavily damaged ship.

Jainway turns on the shields and does something to make them more effective at hiding the ship.

Torress does something to create relatively detailed optical illusions around the shuttle.

Tomorrow is Yesterday
SPOCK: We've achieved a stable orbit out of Earth's atmosphere. Our deflectors are operative, enough to prevent our being picked up again as a UFO. And Mister Scott wishes to speak to you about the engines.

Future's End
JANEWAY: Maintain a high orbit. And modulate the shields to scatter their radar. We don't want to alarm the natives.

Future's End
TORRES: Interferometric dispersion is online. That should take care of any radar detection. And I've configured the shields to disguise our visual profile. Unless somebody gets right on top of us, we should look like a small twentieth century aircraft.

This would make good sense since the shields are explicitly based, per "Generations" on manipulating gravitons. The ship could bend light around itself to an extent sufficient to disguise it as something else or otherwise fool the comparatively primitive detection methods they expect to encounter on time travel/first contact missions.

1) Not so oddly, real world physicists have ran the numbers to see if it would work on paper.

IV. CONCLUSION

We have presented a two parameter family of space-times which demonstrate the effective cloaking of objects placed within them as a result of the gravitational lens-ing. The analytic tra jectory of the null geodesics moving through the cloaking geometry is known, and it is shown that initially parallel geodesics entering the cloaking geometry will splay away from the center, re-converge, and then reemerge in their original, parallel configuration.

The description of this geometry as effectively cloaking derives from the way in which an ob ject placed at its center will eclipse fewer null geodesics than it would in flat spacetime. This is due to the splaying of the null geodesics away from the center and around the ob ject. Thus, we use the geometry to make an ob ject appear arbitrarily small from the outside.

Several attributes of this geometry make it arguably physically unrealizable. Firstly, the matter used to construct it must violate the null (and thus the weak and dominant) energy condition. Secondly, this geometry requires an infinitesimally narrow shell of stress-energy to transition between interior and exterior geometries, and it is unclear what effect allowing a transition of finite width will have on the cloaking properties. The requirement for exotic energy is, however, the the same shortcoming found in traversable wormholes and warp drive spacetimes.

I find it amusing that in order to cloak using gravitational lensing you would need the same technologies needed to create traversable wormholes and warp drives which the Federation has.

If you can use gravitational lensing in such a way then you would be both invisible and immune to photons and most other things.

2) Actually the gravitational nature of Star trek shields first shows up in season 7 Episode 24 Preemptive Strike.
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