Can Starships Hover?

[Crewman47]

Yesterday I was watching an episode from the Hidden Frontier fan film series where a Starship has been sent back to the time the Titanic sank and there we see the Ship hovering above the Ocean while rescuing survivors (I assume some of you may know the episode I'm talking about). As I watched this I was thinking should a Starship be able to do this as there not really built to enter an atmosphere in the first place and if they do I doubt they would have the means to hover and would have to keep moving.

I realise that ships with landing capablities like the Intrepid and Nova may have some form of hover control to lower there descent but this ship in the episode was a Sovereign and I doubt that ship might have had the ability to hover?

Any thoughts?

 

[Timo]

Basically, if starships can travel between Earth and Jupiter in mere hours (ST:TMP), they should have enough oomph in their impulse engines to hover above a neutron star until fuel exhaustion.

The question would mainly be twofold:

-Can impulse engines work within atmospheres? If they rely on hypervelocity exhaust, it might not be a good idea to fire them against atmospheric pressure. And in DS9 "The Siege", Kira seems to be claiming that impulse drives do not work within atmospheres, at least not very well, so that the odds are even for Kira's own sub-impulse craft against impulse opponents.

-What are the limits on thrust directing? Does the ship have to hover with her stern pointing down, or can she be oriented in other ways as well? Bow down should be possible as well, because impulse engines can be used for slowing down... But belly down might not work, at least not for ships like the various Enterprises with the secondary hull blocking downward impulse exhaust paths.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[iguana_tonante]

Crewman47 said:
As I watched this I was thinking should a Starship be able to do this as there not really built to enter an atmosphere in the first place and if they do I doubt they would have the means to hover and would have to keep moving.

Since in every case the flight ability of a starship has nothing to do with aerodynamic lift (since obviously they do not have wings, rotors or lighter-that-air gas pocket), I would say that moving or staying still is pretty irrelevant.

So yes, if they can fly in the atmosphere (using some sort of anti-gravity or similar exotic mechanisms) they can hover.

 

[All Seeing Eye]

DUH HUH!! Hello!! anybody heard of Anti-Gravity!! the ship doesnt need to use impulse engines to hover its not a flaming Harrier Jump Jet its a starship capable of interstellar travel, gravity manipulation and the warping of space time.

 

[SonicRanger]

Bird of Prey over the whaling boat, anyone?

 

[Squiggy]

And the Argo. If that can over, then so can a starship. Same principles, just a simple matter of "weight ratios".

 

[Vanyel]

Crewman47 said:
Yesterday I was watching an episode from the Hidden Frontier fan film series where a Starship has been sent back to the time the Titanic sank and there we see the Ship hovering above the Ocean while rescuing survivors (I assume some of you may know the episode I'm talking about). As I watched this I was thinking should a Starship be able to do this as there not really built to enter an atmosphere in the first place and if they do I doubt they would have the means to hover and would have to keep moving.

I realise that ships with landing capablities like the Intrepid and Nova may have some form of hover control to lower there descent but this ship in the episode was a Sovereign and I doubt that ship might have had the ability to hover?

Any thoughts?

Why did it need to hover close to the surface? The transporters and transporter scanners work from orbit.

However in general, a starship like a Sovereign or Galaxy class seems to use directional thrust to move. They don't need the ability to hover because they can do what they need to from orbit. Ships that can land, shuttles, Runabouts, Intrepid or Defiant classes most likely do have an ability to hover.

I would think, from what we've seen so far, the larger the ship, the more limited the ability to hover. Intrepid's and Defiant's long enough to settle gently onto the ground; while shuttles and Runabouts should be able to hover for much longer periods.

 

[Crewman47]

The plot was that a someone had stolen a Federation Timeship in the future (presumably the 29th century) and had gone back in time, attacked the Sovereign class ship, forcing it into a temporal vortex which led it into the year the Titanic the sank. The end of the vortex actually ended within Earths atmpsphere placing the ship there not far from where the Titanic was. As the crew weren't sure if the sinking was meant to happen or not, as the Iceberg looked as if it had been moved by a tractor beam, then they had the ship taken over the Titanic and extended a gang plank, of all things, from one of the lower aft cargo bays yo offload as many stranded survivors as they could. I think they couldn't use the Transporter because of some technical problems (obviously as usual in cases in these situations). There is a scene where we see survivors walking up the gang way and the starship gets attacked and then the gang way is knocked away resluting in the deaths of a few survivors (they were static figures of course, no CGI or actors).

 

[regemet]

Has everybody forgbotten that starships have stearing thrusters so if you use all the ships thrusters useing them y together at the same time they should hover.

 

[Timo]

I don't think steering thrusters would necessarily have enough strength to fight one gee of gravity. I mean, they could have it, but they wouldn't necessarily need it for any other application besides hovering.

Nor do I think that starships would have an antigravity system as default, for operating under the pull of one gee. We have no evidence of such a system being aboard any ship, really - all we know is that there are systems that regulate onboard gravity and acceleration.

But all starships need impulse drives that can produce hundreds, usually thousands of gees, if they wish to move between planets as shown. Those drives should trivially easily allow the ship to hover over a one-gee planet.

As for "gently settling" on a surface, if starships are tough enough to withstand the accelerations of their own impulse drives, they should be tough enough to land on any hard surface. No landing gear needed. Landing on water would be more problematic, as most ships would probably be dense enough to sink, and a starship might require vacuum or at most thin air around it in order to function properly. After all, even the versatile Delta Flyer in "30 Days" couldn't operate underwater for extended periods of time without special modifications. But those modifications might not be such a big deal; theoretically, any starship should also make for a reasonably good submarine.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[AlxxlA]

The warp engines could probably do some sort of complicated thing through the relationship of imaginary negative time and temporal velocity to neutralize the gravimetric pull of the earth directly around the ship.

 

[Vanyel]

Timo said:
As for "gently settling" on a surface, if starships are tough enough to withstand the accelerations of their own impulse drives, they should be tough enough to land on any hard surface.
Timo Saloniemi

I wasn't worried about the starship as much as I was worried about the area and those in that area where the starship lands.

Something as big as an Intrepid Class starship, landing with the same force of a 747, should produce one hell of a shock wave. At least I think it would.

 

[AlxxlA]

Actually, now that I think about it more, I realize that since gravity is simply a distortion in the "fabric" of spacetime, and warp propulsion utilizes a similar effect, the warp engines could probably "smooth" out the spacetime continuum and neutralize gravity.