posted
A truncated version of a blog post of mine here . . .
In brief, the terminal velocity of a Type-6 shuttlecraft . . . the speed it would reach if dropped from a great height . . . is approximately equal to Mach 1 (340 m/s^2) at sea level, and greater than Mach 1 at higher altitudes . . . for instance, at 7500ft, it would be 390 m/s^2.
To calculate this, I used a mass of 29 tonnes based on the density of Voyager and the Delta Flyer, a guessed-at drag coefficient of 0.55, and was able to use SketchUp and a decent model of the shuttle (or at least it was decent until I flattened it like a pancake) to obtain a frontal area of 7.55 m^2, and plugged this in to an equation for estimating terminal velocity.
The interesting visual takeaway is that you could, in principle, have a shuttle diving to the surface and producing transsonic condensation clouds around it right before it smacks, just like in those nifty pics of fighter flybys.
Registered: Nov 2001
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