Going to warp while inside a planet's atmosphere
How dangerous would this be?
- Thread starter Gingerbread Demon
- Start date
Star Trek 4.
Oh...
1998 Don West would do it in a heartbeat. It would seem cool on the first viewing.
I would think that either the air resistance would turn the ship into molten slag, or the violent air displacement would cause massive atmospheric disturbance for miles around. As in, that whaling ship the Bounty scared off is subsequently battered to flotsam by a massive hurricane. Either way, not a good idea.
Since I think by now warp has been firmly established as “it massively twists and deforms local spacetime around you” drive, I’d think the main damage would be to the locale — like being hit with a gigantic blender. Whether that would also damage/destroy the warpdrive ship itself is up to you. If it doesn’t, I could see that being used as a vicious close-in anti-ground-forces tactic the Klingons would love.
He would
When they did it in Star Trek IV in a rusty old Klingon ship it didn't move a cloud. I suspect it's happened since with shuttles in Discovery but am not sure.
Then you get the occasional episode or movie when warping in a solar system at all is a big no-no
Then you get the occasional episode or movie when warping in a solar system at all is a big no-no
Yeah, air resistance wouldn't be an issue, since the ship isn't actually moving, it's altering the topology of spacetime to change its spatial relationship to the rest of the universe. Any air in the bubble with it would be dragged along with it, stationary relative to the ship. (When Futurama said the Planet Express ship's stardrive keeps the ship in one place and moves the universe around it, that was essentially correct.)
A warp bubble is a severe spacetime distortion, though, so it'd basically be like a black hole passing through the atmosphere. If it's engaging warp from anywhere near the ground, it could cause significant structural damage. However, the gradient seems to drop off pretty sharply, so if the ship goes to warp in the atmosphere like in TVH, the impact would mainly be on the atmosphere itself -- it might promote turbulent winds and a hazardous vortex, plus the intense energies required would probably inject a great deal of heat. So it might produce dangerous storms.
Now, in a lot of science fiction, it isn't practical to use warp drive or hyperdrive too close to a planet's gravity well, since the influence of the gravity well would disrupt the drive to a greater or lesser extent. Hyperdrive worked this way in Asimov's Foundation universe (a later book explained that you had to be well clear of a star's thermal and gravitational influence to compute a jump course accurately), and Star Wars hyperdrive seems to work similarly. Star Trek has been inconsistent about it; in ST:TMP, the Enterprise had to get past Jupiter's orbit before engaging warp, in contrast to what TVH showed, and DS9: "By Inferno's Light," IIRC, referenced going to warp inside a star system being dangerous. In my own original SF (and some of my Trek prose fiction), I go by the physics principle that a spacetime metric's topology is shaped by the mass and energy around it, so it's difficult to form a warp field if there are intense or variable energies or gravitational fields in proximity to the ship (so that, for instance, a ship under bombardment can't escape at warp). However, it might be possible to warp close to a planet if you calibrate the field for its gravitational influence first. In Star Trek: Ex Machina, I reconciled the discrepancy between movies by saying the E's engines weren't properly calibrated in TMP, hence the wormhole.
I reckon it'd be fine. They're always going to warp next to space stations or in planet's orbits and they seem fine.
I don't know what the asteroid has to do with anything in the previous conversation, but asteroids range in size from one meter to hundreds of kilometers, so obviously one can't apply a uniform standard of destructibility.
Atmosphere tends to amplify effects that are less harmful in vacuum. For instance, a nuclear explosion is far more intense in atmosphere because of the blast and shock waves resulting from the forceful expansion of a large mass of superheated air, as well as the extreme heat of the air/plasma itself. Similarly, the energy and gravitational distortion of a warp field might cause serious atmospheric disruptions while being relatively harmless in space.
Warping within a solar system is only a no-no whenever they want to make a dramatic point of the fact that they need within a solar system.Then you get the occasional episode or movie when warping in a solar system at all is a big no-no
Well, nothing happened when they used the spore drive to enter the underground cavern on Qo'nos, nor when they used the spore drive to leave that cavern.
Needs of the plot, then.
I think it's far more dangerous coming out of warp inside a planetary atmosphere. The margin of error would have to be zero and hopefully it would be a planet with no local aircraft flying around, IMO.
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