The dialogue explained it
...Hopefully we get a transcript soon.
the Franklin was never physically made to work inside at atmosphere
But that's totally false - she went in intact, she came out intact, she had no problem flying around. That a character would claim so just makes the character look like a total fool.
If the character just says "these things were built in orbit, so we might have some problems here", then we have more leeway. But that leeway must be used to accommodate the fact that ships from that era, such as NX-01 and the
Franklin, worked just fine in atmospheric flight and under gravity. Which is what we would expect of a ship that flies through space and mountains with equal ease anyway.
terminal velocity was needed to engage the thrusters to gain them any lift
Why would the thrusters need velocity, though? And it wasn't the thrusters that lifted the ship to space anyway, it was the impulse engines, supposedly. What was wrong with
those? So this "explanation" just makes matters worse - we now have to dismiss it somehow.
so the ship pointed remotely the right way to fire the impulse engines and blast off like we do now.
She would have been pointed the right way when resting on that mountaintop. Just blast straight ahead and soon you are out of the atmosphere.
But while on the mountaintop, she was actually
in the mountaintop, for unknown reasons (Avalanche? Materializing inside solid rock after exiting the wormhole?). And getting the engines out of the rock might have necessarily resulted in the nose dipping and the ship falling...
And Scotty said several of the Franklin's driver coils were missing from the impulse assembly.
Now that would sound pretty serious. But how would the big dip help there? It didn't gain them any altitude or speed - it decreased their altitude and speed from the original, giving a big minus sign in front of both!
And she was working at 70% capacity, so a builup of speed wouldn't hurt.
Not if she were going in the wrong direction. It would hurt and nothing but hurt then...
Timo Saloniemi