That's a neat SF concept but such casual timey-wimey tech isn't something Starfleet was ever shown having in use as a matter of course.
Respectfully disagree. All the way back to TOS, there's been no signal lag from surface to synchronous orbit. Communicators are basically FTL satellite phones. By TNG, the tech boys (Rick and Mike) had gotten around computer processing issues like read time, recall time, access lag, latency, etc., by saying the ships computer had FTL signal processors to compensate for such delays stacking up.
It is no stretch, for me, to say that sort of tech has been extended to all shipboard and landside comm systems to eliminate translation lag, transmission wait time, etc. It would effectively eliminate the irritation of asking a question, pausing, then saying more only to have the other person start answering and you talk over each other, due to the lag of your question reaching them plus their answer getting back to you, such as you hear on the radio all the time when they're on a satellite phone call to someone on the other side of the planet.
As for the starship orientation thing... The Klingon homeworld seems to be Z+ relative to Earth, as we always see Klingons ships approaching on a higher relative plane. And regardign Riker's refitted
Enterprise-D... I've never liked the -E. I especially hate the reason the -D was destroyed -- the Powers That Be didn't like how it looked in early screen tests for the big screen, so they ordered it destroyed in the story.
I thought she looked
beautiful in Generations. In my headcanon, everything after Picard goes into the Nexus has been a Nexus fantasy of his.
Sometime after the events of Nemesis, he
does manage to get out, helping Kirk get out, too, both near the time and place they went in (why, when Scotty was found decades later, he thought Kirk was still around, not having realized how much time had passed while he was in stasis). In the
real world, they don't let Geordi go back on duty until they've destroyed his clothes and VISOR and given him new ones, lest the Klingons have tampered with them; Picard points out to Soren that he'll give him a shuttle to fly into the Nexus -- doesn't matter if the ship is destroyed,
he'd be in the Nexus, and Soren goes "oh, hey, you're right". So the -D ends up still being around twenty years later for Riker to have had augmented with all the latest toys as his personal flagship.
And no one can tell me otherwise.
--Jonah