Would you really want to risk damage to your Warp nacelles to land, or touch down on?
Intrepid Class Landing Ability
- Thread starter Jose Tyler
- Start date
Would you really want to risk damage to your Warp nacelles to land, or touch down on?
Much smaller ships and the nacelles seems to be flush with the main body of the ship. So the nacelles wouldn't be carrying all the weight.
If anything, the Miranda should be the one to land inverted, with it's engines (safely) up in the air. Four landing struts could deploy out of the roll bar.
At a Starbase it could land in some kind of cradle.
I always thought if a Constitution- or a Miranda-class ship had to land on a planet, it meant the ship was in serious trouble and had to jettison a part of it--including the nacelles--in order to do so.
Those things can take direct weapons fire without flinching. They can exert forces on the rest of the ship that will take said ship to FTL speeds - or hang onto the ship when she accelerates at hundreds or thousands of gees with the impulse engines. They supposedly contain a large percentage (perhaps even the majority?) of the ship's mass. I'd use them as battering rams by flying the ships backwards!
Really, given how effortlessly these starships accelerate, defy high speed (warp 9+!) interstellar dust or stellar heat, and shrug off impacts, all of them should be capable of not just landing on planets, but flying through them.
Timo Saloniemi
Shielded warp nacelles, until the ramming.
Other than that, unshielded they are pretty vulnerable. The 1701D was destroyed when a 80+ year old Soyuz Class scrapped her warp nacelles.
That aside, I don't think they would make good landing skids. Even with the warp plasma vented, as Voyager did whenever she landed, they are still meant to be in space where the inertial dampeners, structural integrity fields and shields all combine to protect them.
...With her nacelles!
Why turn off IDFs or SIFs at landing? The ship is supposed to have those on for years at an end. Shutting down everything is very rarely done in any circumstances; even if the mains are taking a breather, auxiliary power seems to keep the ship together and capable of going through strenuous maneuvers.
For all we know, the ship could spend thirty years hovering above a spot (a very dark and hot spot eventually!) by running her impulse engines at near-idle. No need for landing gear. Powering down is for wussies.
Timo Saloniemi
I'd say the center of balance is shifted aft by the fact that you have the numerous huge solid metal warp coils at the back of the ship.
I've often liked the idea of some type of anti-gravity field impregnated in hull plates, with the opposite in deck plates so as to allow funtion even if there were no power. In the old Iron Wolf comics, we saw an AVATAR type situation, with unobtanium wood used for true space ships, with brass for the ship hull ends itself.
