Can Starfleet ships easily travel in planetary oceans

[Nerys Myk]

Starfleet has force fields and gravity control. I think their ships can go anywhere simply by manipulating those.

 

[Stuart Wilson]

I have no problem with a fictional, faster than light starship with force fields and the ability to warp space being able to do something that we were able to build a ship to do over a century ago.
Now, does it make sense to actually do it? Probably not in ST: Into Darkness, but there are bigger things wrong with that movie.

Stuart

 

[mithril]

I'd imagine that pressure wise starfleet ships would hold up fairly well, as we've seen them inside the atmospheres of gas giants several times, and the only concern they had was when they took systems damaged that degraded structural integrity fields. Many of these were at depths where atmospheric pressure levels would exceede oceanic depth pressures.
(The delta flyer was designed for such gas giant diving, we see the defiant perform one such dive, and we've seen the oberth class USS Raman spend a prolonged period in the depths of a gas giant despite being damaged.)
We've also seen that the delta flyer is adaptable to aquatic operations in the Monean water-sphere, and given that voyager was able to adapt its impulse egines to operating in Fluidic Space which was a similar enviroment, I'd imagine that yes, federation ships could adpt themselves to such use.

But i doubt that many ships ever do, since there is little reason to bring a full starship down t the surface of a world much less its oceans, when you have shuttlecraft and transporters.

 

[fireproof78]

Starfleet has force fields and gravity control. I think their ships can go anywhere simply by manipulating those.

Yup. To me, a starship in the ocean is a nonissue.

 

[David cgc]

When people were still upset about the Enterprise being built on the ground in ST09, my stock line was that with the amount of force involved in regular use of the impulse engines, SIF, shields, and so on, the ship could probably “launch” by being pointed down, going to full impulse, and burrowing through the planet and out the other side without getting a scratch.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

When people were still upset about the Enterprise being built on the ground in ST09, my stock line was that with the amount of force involved in regular use of the impulse engines, SIF, shields, and so on, the ship could probably “launch” by being pointed down, going to full impulse, and burrowing through the planet and out the other side without getting a scratch.

The hull should be fine, the paint will be worse for wear.

 

[fireproof78]

The paint wasn't installed until Tuesday.

 

[Deks]

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.

Space is hardly 'nothing' and most of the time SF ships DO encounter massive resistances in space via anomalies and other things that increase the pressure on the hull.

If USS VOY is any indication, it was said that in order for the ship to reach certain depths, several weeks of modifications would be needed to make it happen.
Meanwhile, the Delta Flyer just needed thruster modifications because it was already designed to operate under environments that exert high atmospheric pressuers onto the hull... like the gas giant in which the multispatial probe was hidden (and eventually retrieved) by VOY crew from the Malon.

Generally, it seems to me starfleet ships CAN operate underwater... VOY was only said to need weeks worth of modifications to go to a certain depth though, nothing was said it couldn't operate under water at all (which is probably what the 1701 in Into Darkness did too - they stayed closer to the water surface and didn't go down too deep).