I view the stationary stuff in much the same light as the very close firefights. Any time the weapons move much faster then the ships in terms of acceleration and we assume they can't blow each other up in one pass then they might as well be portrayed as basically stopped and visually large, so that doesn't bug me as much.

Well that has two legit handwaves. 1) They're not really holding a natural orbit but basically just hovering above the spot because they have the engine power to do so. If you wanted to be right over the atmosphere but remain over the same spot, and your engines failed, you'd fall like a rock. Or, 2) They're in a stable orbit and someone just smashed them with a bunch of kinetic force. They're usually implied to be hitting each other with 'nukes or worse', so if your ship megaton suddenly absorb a megaton nuke it's going to change your position just like if you parked your one-ton car over a ton of explosives. Something in orbit's kinetic energy is really about the same as if you burned it's mas in regular combustive fuel, so hitting the enterprise form above wiht a H-bomb if its engines were off would shove it right down into the atmosphere and pretty damn fast. #1 is purely lazy either, if you've got away teams on a planet you presumably want to stay on the same side of the planet as them, but geosynch might be a bit too far away, tens of thousands of miles instead of hundreds of miles over the ground. If you've got the thrust to maintain that because it's equal or less to your normal drive thrust you may as well.

Mars is a bit of exaggeration, but first, Earth is not at its blackbody equilibrium, which is 255 K, or 0 Fahrenheit. A bowling ball sitting 1 AU from the sun will be that temperature. You can drop that to 21-220K or so if it's spending half it's time in Earth's shadow side, in low orbit. That doesn't apply to Apollo 13 but the equilibrium temp is still 255 K and that's uncomfortably cold to say the least... plus the hull's don't have a zero albedo so they don't absorb it all, same reason astronauts have white rather than black suits. Color and reflectivity are much bigger issues in space.