[Nate the Great]

Well, for the shooting-star warping ship, I have no response. In theory I shouldn't think any "normal" size ship should be visible from the surface to begin with. I assume "standard orbit" would be a lot higher than the International Space Station, for example.

Of course, for that matter, maybe all of those warping ships we think we see are in fact VERY coincidental shooting stars. :wink:

It's a good point. We keep seeing this whole "full impulse=0.25c" in the official Paramount reference material, yet they keep being contradictory on what is canon or not. For example, I enjoy my copy of Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise, but it's got too many holes in it. Where do we draw the line at what is canon and what isn't. I'd suggest that the true heirarchy is more along the lines of what follows. The higher sources trumps the lower sources in the case of a conflict.

1. The televised version of the episodes and the theatrical version of the movies.
2. Any other version of the episodes or the movies. (i.e. if the missing scenes from all those middle Voyager episodes have conflicting information, they lose to the televised stuff)
3. Official Paramount literature starting with the NextGen Tech Manual.
4. Older Paramount literature.
5. Semi-canon like TAS and the more recent "main-stream" novels like New Frontier and the DS9 Relaunch.
6. Anything else. Sadly this includes the Shatnerverse and the novel Star Trek Federation, both of which I greatly enjoy.

Now use the heirarchy for deciding if warping from orbit is okay. Episodes say they can, so it must be safe in theory, at least from well-known planets. "Impulse=0.25c" is in level three, but nothing in levels one or two states otherwise except "less than c," so we accept it as reality.

P.S. I'd like to add as a proviso that anything in Star Trek: Enterprise should be pushed down the heirarchy to level three at least. I hate those contiuity errors!