Landing starships - crazy or inexplicable?

[Crazy Eddie]

On the other hand, you're talking about landing a starship on a planet (presumably with suitable surface for landing and a habitable biosphere for the crew to exploit), thus exposing the ship, crew and planetary environment to the risk of landing a matter/anti-matter-using spacecraft on its surface. What happens if something goes wrong? What if the ship develops a problem during planetfall or while on the surface? And the ultimate issue: what if U.S.S. Starfire has successfully landed and powered down, then a Klingon, Romulan or other alien hostile ship settles into orbit high above? The hostile ship doesn't have to even come close to scoring any direct hits; just one nuke nearby will ruin everything for the Starfire's crew.

I fail to see how this doesn't apply to, say, civilian cities/towns or even away teams on the surface. Certainly Cestus-III had that problem when the Gorn showed up in orbit, so it's an issue one way or another.

The only difference is, starships have deflector shields and the ability to power up and run away if something bad happens. There's no particular need for them to "power down" after planetfall.

There's also the question of what would happen if you had a crew and ship settled on the surface and some natural disaster were to occur (tornado, forest fire, flood, earthquake, meteor strike, you name it). Would a landed starship, in essence, become a "sitting duck"?

Again, shields, deflectors, antigravs, etc... a starship would be in a better position to withstand those things than, say, a starbase located on the ground.

Starfleet may also have protocols in place to discourage planetfall. If a given planet is habitable, the Federation is unlikely to want to "take the plunge" into an alien biosphere. One issue that has been mostly glossed over in the STAR TREK Universe is the exposure of the crew to biological agents (a la "The Omega Glory").

Hell, they gloss over that every time they beam down to a planet without making even a token attempt to check for biological contaminants. It's gotten them into trouble more than once, and they haven't seemed to learn their lesson. At least they seem to take some measures to avoid letting those contaminants loose inside the ship but they never seem to avoid being exposed to them in the first place.

What about the security risk? (Imagine a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court scenario, only with King Arthur scheming to lead Mongol hordes in the conquest of the prize Starfire.)

I'm imagining it, and I think the Starfire's security department could probably use the target practice.

Anyway, standard operating procedure is to enter orbit and either beam down or send down crews using shuttlecraft. 99% of the time this is more than sufficient. But there are various reasons why a starship might want to enter the atmosphere or even land. Most of these are tactical/strategic, situations that would require the ship's physical presence to defend a particular area of land or quickly load/offload material faster than shuttles or transporters could accomplish. There's also the possibility of "extreme deep space exploration" where a starship operating thousands of light years and many months' travel from a starbase might plop itself down in a crater somewhere and then have its crew build a temporary starbase around itself. They setup temporary buildings, laboratories, some industrial replicators and the like, then the ship takes off again to explore the surrounding star systems, having left itself a convenient base of operations where it can resupply if it needs to.

I would venture a guess that many starbases were actually founded this way; possibly a tradition that dates back to the old NASA days when a space mission would land a crew on the moon or Mars and then leave them there until the next ship arrived.

 

[Timo]

Interesting... When was such a mode of lunar or Martian exploration pondered?

I mean, yeah, there's the general concept of "escalator orbits" to supply Mars missions, but how would that apply to the Moon?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Search4]

Interesting... When was such a mode of lunar or Martian exploration pondered?

I mean, yeah, there's the general concept of "escalator orbits" to supply Mars missions, but how would that apply to the Moon?

Timo Saloniemi

If you recall Kennedy's speech he said "...and return him safely to the earth". At that time, it was recognized that it was much more practical to do a one-way trip and establish a lunar base with the astronauts. Plenty of volunteers.

By the way - if we had done that, we would HAVE a lunar base instead of the silly situation we are in now.

 

[Timo]

I find any of that very hard to believe.

Life support was the least developed aspect of technology in the early days of spaceflight. In order to have a politically successful mission to the Moon, or to space in general, the engineers would have to create something that lasted as short a time as possible. Creating a "base" would mean near-certain death for the astronauts and disaster for the administration; a quick in-and-out would offer at least some chance of success.

Although going in with multiple spacecraft at the same time (with plenty of return alternatives if one or two were lost) was one of von Braun's better ideas, it was never affordable or practicable in reality, so that option was out as well. Risk mitigation was absolutely paramount, to Kennedy at least; the Soviet competition could quite plausibly send suicide missions to reap the glory, so an emphasis on the survival and safe return of the astronaut was the American way to preempt such claims to glory. "One-way missions" never existed as a NASA consideration.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Patrickivan]

I think it needs to be looked at from a different perspective. It's not like have a modern day vessel dock. It's like asking a modern day vessel to crawl up on land and park...

I've never really liked the idea of making ships be able to land on a planet as part of it's everyday operations if needed. I would think that ships that are designed to do that are smaller, can handle the gravitational effects sans any power assist, and are mission specific vessels.

We've seen the Enterprise in the atmosphere. We know they have collosal power to stay aloft. But shut all that power down and we have a vessel designed for space now interacting with conditions completely different. It's like thinking a submarine can be refitted for space. They can't because the environmental designs required are opposite.

Voyager was a ship designed for it in an era with more advanced technologies. It can make sense that her mission intent (for that class) included planetfall. The design of that class would be intrinsically different from any other class that wasn't supposed to land outside of some emergency situation.

I actually don't have too much doubt that the original E's saucer couldn't take off again if the conditions during landing were favourable. I just think it wouldn't a simple operation in the very least.

My points in the end are this. Era should be looked at. Mission requirements for the class vessel being designed are a consideration. Emergency vs routine. Will shuttle compliment and emergency lifeboats (or ship separation) accomodate the need over landing during an emergency? If there is an emergency, is a controlled landing really an option anyway? After all- it's an emergency! Size of the vessel and a space faring design- how well does that fare in an atmosphere without any power assist?

I think there are fewer vessels that can actually land. Larger then runnabouts really. But in the grand scheme of space exploration, and the varying conditions from planet to planet, it's just not plausible or possible to design every ship to accomodate planet fall...

 

[Christopher]

It's like thinking a submarine can be refitted for space. They can't because the environmental designs required are opposite.

Well...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Battleship_Yamato_(spaceship)



On the other hand:

Fry: How many atmospheres can this ship withstand?

Farnsworth: Well it's a spaceship, so I'd say anywhere between zero and one.

 

[Patrickivan]

It's like thinking a submarine can be refitted for space. They can't because the environmental designs required are opposite.

Well...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Battleship_Yamato_(spaceship)

heh... Well put... I loved that ship as a kid. It was a battleship in space! How cool was that? On the other hand, I'll just enjoy the memory of loving that show- I'd probably be disappointed if I saw it now.

 

[Tiberius]

The ability to actually shut down all the magical gadgets and come to a rest on a planetary surface is something the engineers might consider a challenge. Probably not even the Voyager comes close to that; she'd tip over, collapse and sink to the bedrock if power really were turned off on everything that makes a starship a starship.

Timo Saloniemi

Actually, since Voyager has a pair of warp nacelles at the back with the VERY HEAVY warp coils (they are huge rings of solid metal and weigh many tons each, and Voyager has lots of them), I'd say Voyager would be back heavy. It's a fallacy to assume that the weight distribution of a starship is even.

 

[Patrickivan]

The ability to actually shut down all the magical gadgets and come to a rest on a planetary surface is something the engineers might consider a challenge. Probably not even the Voyager comes close to that; she'd tip over, collapse and sink to the bedrock if power really were turned off on everything that makes a starship a starship.

Timo Saloniemi

Actually, since Voyager has a pair of warp nacelles at the back with the VERY HEAVY warp coils (they are huge rings of solid metal and weigh many tons each, and Voyager has lots of them), I'd say Voyager would be back heavy. It's a fallacy to assume that the weight distribution of a starship is even.

Of course- but in a ship that is designed to land, balance would have to be some consideration. Especially in the case of total power failure.

 

[Tiberius]

The ability to actually shut down all the magical gadgets and come to a rest on a planetary surface is something the engineers might consider a challenge. Probably not even the Voyager comes close to that; she'd tip over, collapse and sink to the bedrock if power really were turned off on everything that makes a starship a starship.

Timo Saloniemi

Actually, since Voyager has a pair of warp nacelles at the back with the VERY HEAVY warp coils (they are huge rings of solid metal and weigh many tons each, and Voyager has lots of them), I'd say Voyager would be back heavy. It's a fallacy to assume that the weight distribution of a starship is even.

Of course- but in a ship that is designed to land, balance would have to be some consideration. Especially in the case of total power failure.

And it does. The heavy warp coils at the back balance the big beak at the front.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

I think it needs to be looked at from a different perspective. It's not like have a modern day vessel dock. It's like asking a modern day vessel to crawl up on land and park...

For early starships, it would be more like asking a submarine to sink all the way to the bottom of a very shallow ocean/river/continental shelf and "bottom" itself there, essentially landed under water. The equivalent of this for a starship would be landing the ship on the surface of a small moon or asteroid with low gravity and no atmosphere; this much would have been possible even for early starships like NX-01 (which nevertheless proved capable of controlled flight at very low altitude in Earth's atmosphere).

By the 23rd century, they would gain the capability to land under more difficult conditions, higher gravity and atmospheric turbulence. By the 24th century, a galaxy class could probably hover indefinitely fifty feet above the ground using only battery power.

When you consider that artificial gravity is the one system on the ship that almost never fails, anti-gravity is probably even more reliable. There's some canon reason for this too; in "Peak Performance" we learn that Commander Riker once evaded an enemy by "hanging over the planet's magnetic pole" to obscure their sensors. The exact altitude is never established; it's possible that Riker actually took the hood down to the planet and parked it DIRECTLY over the pole -- maybe a couple hundred feet in the air -- so that the magnetic signature from the ship's hull would look like a relatively small mountain.

 

[Timo]

Also, the extremely high accelerations that even the most primitive starships demonstrate would essentially mean that the analogies could be even more extreme. Can a submarine, designed to operate under water, endure something as demanding as being tossed by waves on the surface? Or being subjected to temperature changes between day and night? Or having a seagull land on the sail? Those things are trivial, because "operating under water" calls for quite a bit of structural integrity. Similarly, use of impulse drive means that starships, despite being optimized for that one thing, and indeed because of being optimized for that demanding thing, can quite trivially pull off planetfall and takeoff.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[YARN]

It's not a well-kept secret but Federation starships are equipped with "Emergency Reality Sever" and can do anything that the plot and effects budget allows.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

^ Of all the factions in the Temporal Cold War, no one had more invested in humans and the Federation than the Timelords. Of course the Federation ended up with some of their technology; that's why some of their starships are bigger on the inside, have interiors that inexplicably shift position for no reason, and why the same technology-of-the-week can never be used twice.