Ah, now that's an answer to my Q. And a good one IMO. Kinda like we are doin' with the ISS. Thanks dude. MOVIE TIME!
deg
ST XI Enterprise conjecture
- Thread starter judexavier
- Start date
Ah, now that's an answer to my Q. And a good one IMO. Kinda like we are doin' with the ISS. Thanks dude. MOVIE TIME!
deg
as opposed to the utterly trivial amount of energy needed to accelerate it to a significant percent of the speed of light, warp the fabric of time/space, or shield itself from withering disruptor fire. of course.
as opposed to the utterly trivial amount of energy needed to accelerate it to a significant percent of the speed of light, warp the fabric of time/space, or shield itself from withering disruptor fire. of course.
That is an important point. But we also have neo-Trek's assertion that the whole structure of a starship is held together with a "structural integrity field". Turn that off and a starship might act like the old AMT model. Droop droop crash.
Fields on -- atmospheric flight is possible, just ill advised. It screws with too many systems, blinds too many sensors, makes the warp drive act crazy.
Fields off -- anything but floating free in space is ill-advised. Accelerate and the ship tears itself apart, and everyone turns to goo. Go in an atmosphere, and you burn up and fall apart (a'la "The Naked Time").
Unless you are flying the separated saucer section, in which case you can just glide in for a rough landing.
as opposed to the utterly trivial amount of energy needed to accelerate it to a significant percent of the speed of light, warp the fabric of time/space, or shield itself from withering disruptor fire. of course.
Those two are two completely different aspects of consideration IMO largo.
I'm merely speaking about the actual physics of flight and atmo planetary mass to thrust ratio considerations, not warp drive and warp field generation. That's a whole other theoretical discussion eh.
deg
Yeah, that would be mine as well. It makes sense. Why waste the money with the necessary equipment to construct a vessel in outer space, when you could build it on earth. And it would make for a cool scene hopefully, with some sort of space tug system lifting the sections into an orbital spacedock.
Knowing Abrams though, we will see the ship on the ground, and then later in space, with NO explanation how it got there. Then people would really be freaking out.
How good was tractor beam tech in TOS?
E's overall structure built but not completely outfitted in atmosphere, pulled up with the aid of booster rockets/engines and a few tugs in very high orbit with tractors/teathers. Or they are simply using a artificial atmosphere that would make construction 100x easier.
Up she goes.
E's overall structure built but not completely outfitted in atmosphere, pulled up with the aid of booster rockets/engines and a few tugs in very high orbit with tractors/teathers. Or they are simply using a artificial atmosphere that would make construction 100x easier.
Up she goes.
If she has downward facing RCS thrusters, then activating all of them at full power directly downwards could push her high enough to engage the Impulse engines and apply enough thrust from both to achieve orbit and head to the dockyards up there.
But seriously hasn't Abrams and the staff finally admitted she'll be launched by other means in large sections into orbit then assembled there?
But seriously hasn't Abrams and the staff finally admitted she'll be launched by other means in large sections into orbit then assembled there?
Really? If so, that sounds plausible and remains within Trek/E mechanics, insofar as I interpret them, for nothing other than my own self.
deg
Ok, let me try to be more clear.
"Can the ship land/take off?" This little chestnut falls into the tiny, tiny
region of Trek known as "Unestablished". However, I am of the opinion that there is no reason it can't. Let us review some circumstantial evidence:
-The shuttle, which has the same rear-facing impulse vent + warp nacelle combo and non-aerodynamic shape can land and take off. Granted, it's a smaller ship than the Enterprise, but I think that whatever magic invisible thruster operates the shuttle take-off system should work just as well, if not better, on the Enterprise.
-Same seems to go for the BOP
-And the VOYAGER
-The Enterprise has landing gear details, as does the refit ENT. So it can clearly at least land. Something as non-aerodynamic as that must use thruster power to land properly, and it would seem that reversing the process should be fairly simple.
The whole notion that SF engineers are too incompetent to build a ship that can hold together under 1g without some magic force-field is another one I’d just as soon ignore.
"Can the ship land/take off?" This little chestnut falls into the tiny, tiny
region of Trek known as "Unestablished". However, I am of the opinion that there is no reason it can't. Let us review some circumstantial evidence:-The shuttle, which has the same rear-facing impulse vent + warp nacelle combo and non-aerodynamic shape can land and take off. Granted, it's a smaller ship than the Enterprise, but I think that whatever magic invisible thruster operates the shuttle take-off system should work just as well, if not better, on the Enterprise.
-Same seems to go for the BOP
-And the VOYAGER
-The Enterprise has landing gear details, as does the refit ENT. So it can clearly at least land. Something as non-aerodynamic as that must use thruster power to land properly, and it would seem that reversing the process should be fairly simple.
The whole notion that SF engineers are too incompetent to build a ship that can hold together under 1g without some magic force-field is another one I’d just as soon ignore.
the actual physics of flight? fine. forget the impulse engines entirely for a second. the enterprise's thrusters are evidently capable of making significant course changes in arbitrary directions. based purely on visual reference of starfields swinging around, i'd hazard to guess that pulling 1g is well within their capability. if so, then getting out of the earth's gravity well on thrusters alone is possible.
further assuming that the enterprise's impulse engines are just as capable of operating in an atmosphere as, say, a klingon bird of prey's, they really only need to gain sufficient altitude to orient the ship, then they can get a serious kick in the pants. the acceleration which the impulse engines are evidently capable of could bring the ship to escape velocity very easily.
this perhaps leaves 'aerodynamic stresses' to contend with. fortunately, these are proportional to velocity, and thus easily managable, and not a serious concern for a vessel designed for the sorts of things we see the enterprise do on-screen as a matter of course. if it can't take a bit of air turbulence, it sure as hell isn't going to withstand a disruptor barrage.
feh. my final 2cp. a star trek which is has been made so limited and tiny that the enterprise cannot fly is no star trek of mine.
I can see the merit in most of that resaoning. However, for myself, I feel the reason E can turn, is what the attitude thrusters are for, that's it. That's pretty much what attitude adjusters rockets/thrusters were designed for, to alter a craft's attitude and direction, and they don't need to be all that powerful, as well, there's nothing to resist in space, to my limited knowledge anwho.
I wonder if the Eagle could break free the Moon's pull and make orbit without using it's main downward facing thruster, just using the downward facing ones in it's multiple collections of lil' four-pack attitude rockets?
deg
Last edited:
Thats very much how I feel about it myself, that you need a SIF to prevent people (and ship) being turned into a icky paste when accelerating to Warp, yep, okay, no problem, but needing it for flying around at sublight to prevent the ship from collapsing, nope, no way, nein, njet, nee... not with the way the building materials are described which would be like totally indestructible compared to what we can come up with...
I agree, E should be a hearty E, and I have not even considered all the SIF stuff at all, I am just looking at from basically a "rocket-science" POV.
deg
It has to fight the inertia of the ship, which is going to be considerable on a ship the size of the Enterprise. Any reasonable margin of error, I think, would allow for enough thrusting power to fly through the atmosphere and/or get off the ground, especially if a warp field is around to magically lower the mass. Assuming, of course, that TOS engines allow for that (which I prefer to think that they do
).As for the SIF, I hate the concept too. The less said about it, the better, I think.
It has to fight the inertia of the ship, which is going to be considerable on a ship the size of the Enterprise. Any reasonable margin of error, I think, would allow for enough thrusting power to fly through the atmosphere and/or get off the ground, especially if a warp field is around to magically lower the mass. Assuming, of course, that TOS engines allow for that (which I prefer to think that they do
As for the SIF, I hate the concept too. The less said about it, the better, I think.
I could be wrong Manticore, but the inertia would be in the direction that the ship is already going. Other than a reverse thruster firing opposite that forward direction, a lateral thruster firing in at a differing angle would not be fighting so much the direction of the main thrust. Like I said, I could be wrong, I'll have to go brush up on my physics to be sure one way or the other.
Not sure about the warp field lowering mass, that's a new concept to me.
deg
You're thinking of the momentum, which is related to an object moving. Inertia is an object's resistance to changing its rest state; if an object is at rest, it has the same inertia (essentially, until you reach absurdly high relativistic speeds.It has to fight the inertia of the ship, which is going to be considerable on a ship the size of the Enterprise. Any reasonable margin of error, I think, would allow for enough thrusting power to fly through the atmosphere and/or get off the ground, especially if a warp field is around to magically lower the mass. Assuming, of course, that TOS engines allow for that (which I prefer to think that they do
As for the SIF, I hate the concept too. The less said about it, the better, I think.
I could be wrong Manticore, but the inertia would be in the direction that the ship is already going. Other than a reverse thruster firing opposite that forward direction, a lateral thruster firing in at a differing angle would not be fighting so much the direction of the main thrust. Like I said, I could be wrong, I'll have to go brush up on my physics to be sure one way or the other.
). It'll still take a great deal of work to rotate the ship if it isn't moving.It's popped up from time to time, notably in the episode where Q is a human and the alien moon is going to crash into the planet, and similarly in the DS9 pilot, when they have to move the station to the wormhole to protect it from the Cardassians.
You're thinking of the momentum, which is related to an object moving. Inertia is an object's resistance to changing its rest state; if an object is at rest, it has the same inertia (essentially, until you reach absurdly high relativistic speeds.
Def 2 is what I was thinking in terms of inertia:
inertia |iˈnər sh ə|
noun
1 a tendency to do nothing or to remain unchanged : the bureaucratic inertia of government.
2 Physics a property of matter by which it continues in its existing state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line, unless that state is changed by an external force.
deg
I used to feel this way, until I stopped and thought about the fact that every single deck by definition has one gee of artificial gravity, so there is already a counterforce filling every cubic cm of the ship. It only makes sense that if that's the case, it wouldn't be ignored when deciding what building materials are going to be used. I was exaggerating when I said the ship couldn't move without these fields, but hell, just try riding on a roller coaster and experience only 3 or 4 gees and see if you think you could function normally in that kind of environment. Accelerating to half the speed of light in even an hour? Thousands of gees. The result? Paste. So, maybe you wouldn't have to have these fields to keep the ship together at six or even twenty gees, but thousands? And you would have to have such fields to survive anything more than one gee acceleration, or do without them and take six months to accelerate to half the speed of light at one gee.