Episode of the Week : The Galileo Seven
- Thread starter Botany Bay
- Start date
Well, let's ask some military and commercial pilots if they're allowed to have "fun" by showboating and making their takeoffs as dangerous as possible, shall we?
Umm,
No!
They needed the space to load and unload passengers and cargo. The hanger wasn't simply there to launch these little shuttles, they would also have to allow for the possible need to take in a number of different sized vessels and machinery. So why not have the launches and landings of their own shuttles in the same space instead of having a hanger plus launch tubes? This ain't the Galactica where fighter ships have to blast out of there full speed after all.
Which alternate size would fit the original shuttle deck model - the 1080'? Or even larger?
To embark craft other than the standard shuttles?
(Or course, Jefferies' original shuttle design was considerably larger than the butterdish.)
Well, let's ask some military and commercial pilots if they're allowed to have "fun" by showboating and making their takeoffs as dangerous as possible, shall we?
I could quote a commercial pilot or two I know, but they wouldn't appreciate it in the slightest...
Flying is incredibly boring in any case. Automation today isn't very good at preventing or even moderating suicidal behavior, but I expect things to improve in the very near future already. And when we get there, cutting of corners within the limits will not only become commonplace but mandatory if one wishes to keep the schedule and thus one's job. Cutting of corners for entertainment purposes won't be far behind...
The original model is false perspective, with the "region of belief" concentrating at the hangar doors where we can make comparisons with the shuttlecraft model; anything forward of those is indeterminate in size, and probably won't fit any particular ship size more exactly than another. The CGI bay in turn would supposedly be built with the "classic" 947 ft size in mind.
"Best fit" models might be divided in two categories: those that try to avoid extending the bay so far forward that the stems of the warp engine pylons would be revealed not to penetrate into the hull (because penetration would be structurally more plausible), and those that do not try this. The 1080 ft ship wouldn't suffice for the first purpose yet, but it's close... And it makes underfloor hangar spaces quite plausible in terms of deck height.
Good ideas regarding why the hangar is there in the first place. But once it exists, why bother with precision takeoff aids? Even if those are vital for the largest craft using the hangar, why not let the smaller craft fly out freely?
Timo Saloniemi
I could quote a commercial pilot or two I know, but they wouldn't appreciate it in the slightest...Well, let's ask some military and commercial pilots if they're allowed to have "fun" by showboating and making their takeoffs as dangerous as possible, shall we?
Flying is incredibly boring in any case. Automation today isn't very good at preventing or even moderating suicidal behavior, but I expect things to improve in the very near future already. And when we get there, cutting of corners within the limits will not only become commonplace but mandatory if one wishes to keep the schedule and thus one's job. Cutting of corners for entertainment purposes won't be far behind...
Timo Saloniemi
Wrong, wrong wrong.
Sorry. I have been a military pilot and currently am an airline pilot.
You could not be more wrong. After flying professionally for over 30 years, and flying with thousands (literally) of other pilots this does not happen. When you are behind the controls for hire, when you are doing your job, YOU FOLLOW THE RULES. Period. If not people die.
And thank you for saying my job is boring. Have you ever piloted hundreds of thousand pounds of aluminum, with hundreds of people on board putting their lives in you hands
through the air at 500+MPH? Flying is FAR from boring. I would thank you to not state your poorly thought out opinions as a fact.
You seem to be saying that a computer controlled aircraft with hard flight regime limits will allow pilots to screw around safely.
Well we have that now, and those aircraft are no safer than than others in the same class. In fact Airbus has a slightly higher hull loss rate, per hull in service, than Boeing.
I'm not saying Airbus aircraft are unsafe, far from it.
In any profession comes responsibility, If you can't live with that then you will be forced to find a new profession. It all works out in the end.
Back to original point of the thread.
Boma and all act the way they do in the show because conflict makes good drama, the shuttle takes off the way it does because it is visually interesting.
I just saw that the other day for the first time, and it looked ridiculously stupid. Helicopters have to account for wind and lift conditions, and in a way what is flown is the rotor "disc," the fuselage following after and a flexible joint in between. So helicopters fly in a distinctive way, but why apply it to the old shuttle scene?
With no aerodynamic or atmospheric considerations, applying thrust along various axes should be the simplest thing ever. The way it was shown, it looked like additional thrust "kicks" would have to be input to make the shuttle move like it did. God, what a stupid and unnecessary revision.
Thanks and well said, captain. The accident numbers back in the days when airlines allowed "stick and rudder" flying without exact procedures and checklists speak for themselves.
So feel welcome to thank me for not having done so. It's not my opinion, it is that of a professional commercial pilot or two who just doesn't happen to be you. (From an airline with the last fatalities or hardware losses dating back to the DC-3 era, thank you very much for not jumping to conclusions.)
That's the point of having that tech, yes. It doesn't work yet, and is making relatively slow progress, but the point is that computers are fairly good at stopping pilots from making certain common types of error, if allowed to. Computers aren't very good at responding to emergencies, but they make for reasonable and responsible guardians in emergency prevention.
Spacecraft are more benign than aircraft in certain respects, mind you: loss of power or control in one is a fairly stable situation, and could even be a default position that the computer chooses if anything goes wrong. This doesn't quite apply to fooling around inside a starship landing bay, but it works in most Trek shuttle flight regimes.
Yet we might have to account for multiple drive systems. VTOL jets fly very erratically because transition is so damn difficult, even when only a single type of engine with various nozzle or rotor-axis positions is in use; some sort of computer control of those is mandatory. Shuttles have various glowing bits plus an apparent ability to kick up dust and hover without any sign of "engine exhaust" or visibly directed thrust; we are probably dealing with a combination of impulse engines for cruise, sub-impulse drive for atmospheric flight (because the Circle trilogy implies this is superior to impulse down in the soup), and gravitic takeoff and landing systems that don't scorch or otherwise hurt the ground/floor or the bystanders or the walls of the very confined launch bays. Transitioning between the flight modes might make shuttlecraft takeoff much more akin to sailing an airship out of her hangar than huffing and puffing a satellite out of the cargo hold of the Space Shuttle, one tiny RCS blast at a time.
That said, the helicopter takeoff makes a lot of sense in "The Doomsday Machine" but less so with the responsible Spock in command... Although we do see Spock isn't an excessively conservative pilot in STXI.
(Or do we have to assume that the Murasaki effect was making the shuttle unstable at takeoff already, with Spock or Latimer taking an extra split second to compensate?)
Timo Saloniemi
VTOL jets are not comparable at all, they have to contend with atmospheric drag, airfoil lift, air flow to the compressors and so on. All the shuttle has to counter is artificial gravity, and there's no complex "transition;" a straight line right out of the bay would be a simple problem for some anti-grav lift and a little forward thrust.
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