Can Starfleet ships easily travel in planetary oceans
- Thread starter Garak234
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Didn't the USS Enterprise rise from the ocean in ST: Into Darkness?
If your StarShip is "Air Tight" enough for space & has a tough enough hull; it can probably stay under water and move around to some degree.
Probably not as well as a dedicated Submarine, but it should be do-able.
Obviously it won't have any stealth capabilities like modern stealth submarines.
The limits as to how deep it can go will probably be not that great due to it not being a purpose built submarine.
If your StarShip is "Air Tight" enough for space & has a tough enough hull; it can probably stay under water and move around to some degree.
Probably not as well as a dedicated Submarine, but it should be do-able.
Obviously it won't have any stealth capabilities like modern stealth submarines.
The limits as to how deep it can go will probably be not that great due to it not being a purpose built submarine.
A ship designed to travel through nothing is going to have to work harder to travel through something, but Into Darkness shows that at least one Starfleet vessel was capable of hanging around underwater for hours. The biggest drawback is that it'll get the chief engineer complaining all the time and the salt water will ruin the... something.
Yes. No. Sometimes.
If you did engage warp underwater you wouldn't be underwater for very long. Well, unless you were in fluidic space I suppose.
It didn't demonstrate Warp Drive from Under Water, but that would be a heck of a scene to witness.
StarShips generally aren't all that AeroDynamic due to it being designed / optimized for Space.
It brute forces it's way through the atmosphere inefficiently since that is a tertiary domain to operate in.
The resistance of water should be far greater than air, which is already significantly greater than the vacuum of space.
In ST:ID, it looked like it was opereating purely on Anti-Grav, no RCS manuevering thrusters at play.
Ergo, the slow lurching rise out of the water and into space from Atmosphere.
I'm sure StarFleet thought of most situations, including water to some degree.
But it will never come close to a purpose built design for under water.
In TOS "The Immunity Syndrome", the Enterprise dived into and then swam thru protoplasm of the Earth-sized innards of the space amoeba with impulse power and shields. The density of the protoplasm was enough that firing phasers would've "cooked the Enterprise". Swimming to the nucleus would've meant the Enterprise traveled up to 1,500 miles deep to the center.
In TOS "Tomorrow is Yesterday", the Enterprise is able to stay airborne after losing power from the time warp and with minimal emergency impulse power and no shields slowly make orbit.
In "The Voyage Home", the Bird of Prey at impulse went from San Francisco to Bering Sea in 12 minutes without any sonic booms and dived in on and blocked a hunting ship from making a shot without disturbing the air. She later warped while in atmosphere.
So with impulse power, at least under the old stuff like TOS and the TOS movies, moving at high speed in a medium like air and water (and thick Mutara nebula) is as easy as traveling in space. I'd argue that the same would apply with warp power but just faster... With the new Trek stuff, it's different or not as easy. All IMHO.
Apologies in advance for the ear worm:
Any ship that's sealed against a Vacuum is seal against an opposite of a vacuum. In this case Voyager for example's biggest weakness is shuttle bay doors that water pressure would force in. Force fields and structural integrity fields do their part for ships needs of durability enhancement. NEVER THE LESS; the ships hull is a marvel of engineering, that's still classic tech of a sustained hermetically sealed environment to keep in atmosphere, to keep air in, it can keep fluids OUT. The exterior hull of the spacecraft consists of multiple layers which afford structural and atmospheric integrity for the spaceframe which of itself is made of plates, blankets and weaves of tritanium and duranium on a network of structural bulkheads; materials Beyond current strength thresholds of real world materials of steel/titanium.
Voyager episode "Scientific Method"
Tuvok: Hull stress is at forty five teradynes.
For anyone unfamiliar with a "Dyne" it's a unit of pressure exertion....... 45 Trillion dynes is equivalent to 652 million psi of pressure....40,000x more pressure than the Marianas trench.
Voyager episode "Scientific Method"
Tuvok: Hull stress is at forty five teradynes.
For anyone unfamiliar with a "Dyne" it's a unit of pressure exertion....... 45 Trillion dynes is equivalent to 652 million psi of pressure....40,000x more pressure than the Marianas trench.
The Marianas Trench has a pressure of ~16,000 psi
so it's actually:
~40,750x more pressure than the Marianas Trench.
=D
They fly though black holes and crazy space anomalies all the time. Have rival ships explode antimatter munitions against their hulls.
H2O got nothing on it.
H2O got nothing on it.
They...fly through black holes?
Voyager VI survived the trip through a black hole, and that's made mostly of tin foil. Also the Narada and Jellyfish in ST'09, and maybe Voyager? I can't remember.
Who Mourns For Adonais? established the hull pressure limits of the TOS Enterprise:
GSC is grams per square centimeter. 1000 GSC is only 14.22 PSI (pounds per square inch) which is below one standard atmospheric pressure of 14.7 psi. The Enterprise seems kind of fragile...
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Not really. "Who Mourns for Adonis?" establishes a starting point for the Enterprise's hull pressure resistance but not an upper limit.
SCOTT: One thousand GSC and climbing.
12 seconds later
SCOTT: Becoming critical, Captain. We can't handle it.
8 seconds later
KIRK: All right! Whatever you're doing, turn it off! You win!
12 seconds later
SCOTT: Becoming critical, Captain. We can't handle it.
8 seconds later
KIRK: All right! Whatever you're doing, turn it off! You win!
We do not know whether Adonis is applying a linear or exponential curve so the episode does not establish an upper limit. We can guess at some of the upper limits as in a later episode, "The Immunity Syndrome", the Enterprise goes swimming up to 1500 miles deep into the space amoeba.
With the help of inertial dampers and structural integrity fields I can't imagine submerging a starship would pose very much difficulty in terms of water pressure - bit thicker than operating in an atmosphere certainly but we're talking 24th century technology here.
The TAS aqua-shuttle was specifically designed for water surface and underwater travel, in addition to space and atmospheric travel.
Well, space isn't exactly 'nothing' (Warp even less so considering it puts a strain on the hull and SIF). And SF ships frequently encounter all kinds of obstacles in space... coupled with anomalies, deadly nebulae, stellar remnants, planetary remnants, space-time anomalies, gravitational wells, stars (studying stars up close)... and they usually keep their distance (obviously), but they also know that this isn't fool proof and that due to unexpected circumstances, ships have gone right into these... so it makes sense SF ships would be designed to withstand plethora of 'problems' and 'obstacles' along the way.
Even on VOY it was stated that the ship itself could be modified to go underwater and that such mods would take about a week... but the Flyer was designed to withstand high pressure environments from the get go (because it was originally going into a gas giant to retrieve a multispatial technology probe that was stuck into one of the layers).
So, generally speaking, it seems SF ships CAN be at least modified to go underwater... unless they were already designed with hull materials that resist high pressure environments.
One thing to think about: you can design something to hold pressure in (space travel) or keep pressure from coming in (underwater travel), or both. A starship would have to be specifically designed for both to be able to do both.
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