The shuttles couldn't deal with the supervolcano's ash cloud, rememeber? Sulu's died right after dropping off Spock.
Starships underwater?
- Thread starter Rayleo02
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back in the 1960's/70's a lot of the sketched out ideas for Project Orion were very stoutly build ships that were more nuclear submarine than spindly lunar lander. they would have had to have been built to handle the shock of the drive mechanism (look up Orion nuclear pulse drive if you've never heard of it. its' interesting and it actually could have happened). So much thrust would have been developed that the extra mass of that construction wouldn't have been a problem for delta-V getting around the solar system or beyond. So yes, i suppose one could have went underwater.
In fact since I am bringing up gargantuan space plans for post-Apollo that never happened, you cant discuss underwater and space without..
Sea Dragon!
A rocket that makes SLS and Falcon Heavy and the BFR look like economy models.
From Encyclopedia Astronautix:
Status: Design 1962. Payload: 450,000 kg (990,000 lb). Thrust: 350,000.00 kN (78,680,000 lbf). Gross mass: 18,000,000 kg (39,000,000 lb). Height: 150.00 m (490.00 ft). Diameter: 23.00 m (75.00 ft). Apogee: 185 km (114 mi).
Sea Dragon was too large for any land based launch pad, and would have had to launch mostly or semi-submerged. Oddly enough one of the things it would have been useful for was to launch Orion ships into orbit.
So short answer, yes.
In real life nebulas are hard vacuum thinner than anything that can be made on Earth. There is basically no external pressure in nebulas.
Maybe in Star Trek and other science fiction movies and shows there are as yet undiscovered hyperdense nebulas that are many times (at least millions of times) denser than the nebulas known to astronomers. They would have to be very tiny compared to known nebulas - but still vast by Earthly standards - to be undiscovered by early 21st century astronomers.
Gas giant planets have no solid surfaces. Their atmospheres get denser and denser and denser with depth, eventually becoming many times denser than any oceans on Earth. So a spaceship could theoretically dive deep enough in a gas giant to experience water pressure similar to an Earthly ocean, and maybe be able to get out again.
I wrote a short fanfic titled "A Not-So-Strange New World" which addresses starships underwater in the prime universe. The story established Deneb Kaitos V as being a mainly oceanic world with spots of islands, and underwater starbases where ships as big as the Galaxy-class could dock. I posted it in the Fan Fiction forums a while back, you can check it out here: https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/a-not-so-strange-new-world.292788/
In real life, parts of some nebulae become dense enough to form stars. Density is certainly not uniform.
Please don't. You're not the only person to've ever read a cosmology book.
The NuTrek movies have their faults, but I never understood why Submarine Enterprise was such a big deal with the science folks. The Big E isn't just a modern aircraft carrier or space shuttle, it's designed for exploration of who knows what (not just nebula - what about giant green hands in space?) and potentially conflict with unknown hostiles (with weapons that can level unshielded planets or vaporize ships), not to mention the stresses of going Faster Than Light! Between SIFs and hull plating and force fields and whatever mystery tech we haven't yet heard about, this is significantly different than the wonderful Dr. Farnsworth's 0-1 atmospheres of pressure. It's handwave science, but it has to be. On the other hand, if the D has those strange glass windows that break when they crash in Generations, then probably no deep dives for Picard and company.
The problem with this whole line of justification is that it explains why Spock was in trouble - it does not explain why the Enterprise needed to be underwater in the first place (and explicitly against the advice of her chief engineer, to boot). Clearly the fact that Spock and Sulu were sent in a shuttle to begin with is proof that the original plan had absolutely no need for the Enterprise to be in the planet's atmosphere, so it remains utterly nonsensical that they didn't just hide the ship in high orbit/behind a moon or something similar. Not only would that've been much easier, it would in fact have been less likely to expose the Enterprise to the natives. In the end, the ship being hidden in the ocean actually caused its exposure - the Nibirans saw the ship up close because it rose out of the ocean right in front of them - whereas a spaceship flying into a dark cloud directly from space would've been much harder to see, especially if you're busy running from a volcano.
A key element in the opening part of ST:ID is that everybody is frantically improvising.
Scotty may have his objections to hiding underwater, but this odd predicament is extremely recent news to him. He's still bitching and moaning about it, after all, and being all jumpy about the sight of fish. Meanwhile, McCoy and Kirk are on a time-critical mission where neither knows what the other one is planning to achieve, while Sulu and Uhura are operating hardware unsuited for the task at hand and Spock is busy committing suicide preparing in situ a device Ensign X'Pendable or NCO Nowan could have deployed if pre-prepared. Clearly, forethought is something the heroes have had no time for here.
So it is up to the audience to speculate upon the reason for hurry, and the steps that preceded or precipitated the hurry instead of being mere responses to it. To wit, did Kirk go underwater because of the hurry? Or did going underwater allow him to realize there was a hurry? Or did going underwater appear sensible to him before he realized he was in a hurry?
If Kirk's mission when entering orbit were to stop the volcano from blowing up, he no doubt would do it from orbit. But the hurry suggests this is not a mission, but rather a reaction to a major shift in original mission parameters. Meaning two distinct interpretations appear:
1) Kirk planned on setting up shop underwater in order to conduct an innocent longterm survey, perhaps not (just) of the natives but of some phenomenon best studied underwater. A submerged base would cater for the regular deploying of underwater craft better than the flying of all those craft down from orbit, say. An aquashuttle like the one from TAS would need to spend unacceptable time puttering from a distant, beyond-the-horizon clandestine insertion point to the operations area if launching from orbit. The emergence of the crisis meant the mothership herself had to emerge from water at a non-clandestine spot, though.
2) Kirk planned on conducting an ordinary orbital survey, but the crisis he discovered prompted him to take his ship underwater instead. For what reason, we can further speculate... He was always planning on violating the stricter interpretation of the Prime Directive anyway, in getting the natives to leave their town. For all we know, his Plan B or C all along was to shepherd the natives into the Enterprise if everything else failed, an action better conducted physically than via transporter, considering the numbers supposedly involved.
Whether we pick 1 or 2, it's up to us to worry about the details. They don't alter the actual plot one iota, as Kirk's defying of common sense and the PD is a fixture no matter what, well established in dialogue.
Timo Saloniemi
Scotty may have his objections to hiding underwater, but this odd predicament is extremely recent news to him. He's still bitching and moaning about it, after all, and being all jumpy about the sight of fish. Meanwhile, McCoy and Kirk are on a time-critical mission where neither knows what the other one is planning to achieve, while Sulu and Uhura are operating hardware unsuited for the task at hand and Spock is busy committing suicide preparing in situ a device Ensign X'Pendable or NCO Nowan could have deployed if pre-prepared. Clearly, forethought is something the heroes have had no time for here.
So it is up to the audience to speculate upon the reason for hurry, and the steps that preceded or precipitated the hurry instead of being mere responses to it. To wit, did Kirk go underwater because of the hurry? Or did going underwater allow him to realize there was a hurry? Or did going underwater appear sensible to him before he realized he was in a hurry?
If Kirk's mission when entering orbit were to stop the volcano from blowing up, he no doubt would do it from orbit. But the hurry suggests this is not a mission, but rather a reaction to a major shift in original mission parameters. Meaning two distinct interpretations appear:
1) Kirk planned on setting up shop underwater in order to conduct an innocent longterm survey, perhaps not (just) of the natives but of some phenomenon best studied underwater. A submerged base would cater for the regular deploying of underwater craft better than the flying of all those craft down from orbit, say. An aquashuttle like the one from TAS would need to spend unacceptable time puttering from a distant, beyond-the-horizon clandestine insertion point to the operations area if launching from orbit. The emergence of the crisis meant the mothership herself had to emerge from water at a non-clandestine spot, though.
2) Kirk planned on conducting an ordinary orbital survey, but the crisis he discovered prompted him to take his ship underwater instead. For what reason, we can further speculate... He was always planning on violating the stricter interpretation of the Prime Directive anyway, in getting the natives to leave their town. For all we know, his Plan B or C all along was to shepherd the natives into the Enterprise if everything else failed, an action better conducted physically than via transporter, considering the numbers supposedly involved.
Whether we pick 1 or 2, it's up to us to worry about the details. They don't alter the actual plot one iota, as Kirk's defying of common sense and the PD is a fixture no matter what, well established in dialogue.
Timo Saloniemi
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