posted
Partly inspired on the Spacdock-Atmosphere thread.
Is it theoretically possible for starships to use warpdrive in an atmosphere? And what about the deflectors? I can imagine it's not very healty for the planet's ecology to just cut through the air, and pushing all small objects (birds!)out of place.
Also, how exactly do impulse engines work, and what makes them so inefficient in an atmosphere?
posted
As far as "pushing" is concerned I don't think a ship with shields up is more dangerous than a 747. At least not a Defiant-class.
OTOH the shields and containment fields should isolate any eventual noise the ship makes, so they should be healthier than modern jets, which can make animals drop their unborn babies (fetii? fetae?) in pure shock...
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posted
Of course, a starship can choose any altitude it wants, exceeding bird-levels. Plus, if you count the times a starship travels in an atmosphere per year, compared to how many times airliners complete a flight per year, which do you think would be the highest?
Besides, I'm sure the flight-computer could sense if there's an unusually big flock of birds nearby, and evade them.
But the really smart people would take a shuttle instead.
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posted
"Watch out for birds." - Chakotay to Torres in a shuttlecraft while entering the Earth's atmosphere, Future's End.
------------------ Ivanova is always right. I will listen to Ivanova. I will not ignore Ivanova's recommendations. Ivanova is God. *And*, if this ever happens again, Ivanova will personally rip your lungs out!
posted
Okay, so we can say deflectors will work, and will push the air away (or form an aerodynamically ideal shape around the shuttle or ship). Impulse engines may or may not work, and it seems they don't work well - I guess it could be the high-speed/low-mass jet vs. low-speed/high-mass jet thing touched upon in the other thread.
What about warp? The BoP in ST4 is a borderline issue - has anything gone to warp while deep within an atmosphere? Thin gases clearly don't create a problem, since ships warp in nebulae and in the extreme vicinity of stars. Is the limiting factor the ability of deflectors to push air away smoothly enough so that the fraction of a second spent in the atmosphere won't squish the ship as if it had hit a brick wall? The "fluidic space" of "Scorpion" seemed thick enough to approximate an Earthlike atmosphere - did the ships warp there? If not, did Species 8472 spend centuries or millennia in impulse-speed "interstellar" transit in their space?
What about combat shields? Surface installations can be shielded, so it seems ships could be, too. OTOH, dipping into the upper atmosphere was hard on the E-D (or the E-nil), shields or no shields. One wonders.
All the standard weapons seem to work just fine, in orbital bombarment at least. And transporters of course work as well, unless there's a lot of ionization.
quote:, dipping into the upper atmosphere was hard on the E-D (or the E-nil), shields or no shields. One wonders.
Yes, but there's a difference in diving into an atmosphere and already being there. When you dip into the atmos, you'll have enormous friction (Ent-D is a big bird!)
posted
Ships shouldn't be able to warp in nebulae at all. If "combat"-shields are disabled, like with Khan, then the other shields should go too.
And the fluidic space SHOULD pose a threat to propulsion-development for the Specians. I don't know WHY they had to complicate things like that. I mean, 8472ians are alien enough with their third leg and squiddy eyes.
Hmm, if they live in fluidic space they shouldn't be able to breathe air, much less run around on Voyager's hull during vacuum. And I doubt the average pressure of fluidic space is comparable to milky way's vacuum.
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posted
The Mutara nebula may have deprived the Enterprise of combat shields, but it didn't seem to stop her from warping out after Spock had fixed the powerplant. Then again, the ship couldn't be too deep within the nebula to begin with, since she had entered at impulse...
OTOH, the Voyager warped easily enough through a nebula that was (initially considered to be) Mutara type in "One". Not her maximum warp speed, probably, but respectable warp anyway.
So while some shields may be degraded within some nebulae, what remains is enough to protect the ship at warp speeds, at least based on these two examples.
posted
Saying that Species 8472 shouldn't breathe air because they live in fluidic space is like saying we shouldn't breathe air because we live in vaccuum space. We never saw where 8472 actually lives. Their "planets" might be air bubbles.
And uh, as far as that goes, they don't seem to breathe air. Hard vaccuum doesn't seem to bother them, anyway.
Alpha Centauri
Usually seen somewhere in the Southern skies
Member # 338
posted
Indeed, we saw an 8472 walking on Voyager's hull while it was in space. I think it was "Hunters".
Anyway, I don't think a liquid medium should pose a problem for warp drive. Warp drive is essentially a space-time continuum manipulation device. Fluids don't have continuum-altering properties, unless the concentration is very high (-> high gravity -> space-time disturbance), or when the laws of physics are different in their parallel universe, or when the fluid has bizarre properties itself. But moving at high speed through the fluid causes a great deal of friction, so you'll need an 'aerodynamic' ship (on second thought, 'fluid-dynamic' might be a better word) to survive such a high speed trip. The 8472 bioships, however, didn't seem very 'fluid-dynamic', so I think that they are impulse-only ships (however ships might have been equipped with warp drive when invading our space). Or their warp fields of shields are 'fluid dynamically' shaped, pushing liquid away from the ship when it's at flight.
I think the concentration of the liquid in the 8472-realm is far higher than the Milky Way's vacuum, and even a Class-M atmosphere. When we saw bioships swooshing through fluidic space, they left a cleary distinguished trail.
BTW: Interesting theory, that planets in fluidic space might be air bubbles. But I think that leaving the bubble/planet might be harmful for the bubble itself, not to mention the people inside. Or they use some kind of air locks to leave the bubble.
------------------ "And as we all know, a mesolytic quantumvector resonator is commonly used to polarize isogravitic plasma-flux manifolds."
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[This message has been edited by Alpha Centauri (edited September 30, 2000).]
[This message has been edited by Alpha Centauri (edited September 30, 2000).]
posted
Wouldn't that depend on the liquids tension, as to whether or not it would be harmful to it? Mayhap they developed like water bugs. As for the ability to warp in an atmosphere, the only problem for that seems to be the gravity holding the atmosphere in its place.
[This message has been edited by Ritten (edited September 30, 2000).]
posted
The main difference between our galaxies is that we have negative pressure and they have positive. For the first time in Trek, ships can actually be flooded if breached.
One of the other consequences is there's no rogue asteroids, since the fluid would slow everything down the second it starts to move.
There's prolly weightlessness but the whole galaxy evolution would be extremely different from ours. Another thing is the gigantic streams that could be created by rotating bodies, heating certain places in the fluid through friction. That is, if their galaxy even HAS a rotating core.
If there's no big external gravimetric source pulling at the galaxy, like the moon to our seas, then there's a chance their galaxy is as calm as the bottom of the sea.
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