What Scifi Planet Hopping Via Scifi Spaceships Would Really Be Like

[Bamax]

In both Star Wars and Star Trek, spaceships are huge and have the required power to launch into orbit without any first stage drop off. They are all SSTO.

Also apparently the exhaust in either setting is non-radioactive and relativeky safe, otherwise the spaceships would not be landing near or flying low around heavily populated areas.

And both settings have vessels tgat can accelerate for days on end without refueling.... with a very high specific impulse and TWR when it comes to the relatively small amount of fuel/propellant tanks tanks they actually use.


So in such a setting, what is the safest way to transport goods to planets?

Not the way Star Wars does it. Just think, if any ship can just fly through and into a planet from hyperspace, then safety is impossible,

Part of the problem is that in SW nukes apparently don't exist or are never used. So it either takes fleets to pound away at a planet for a prolonged period or megastructures like the deathstar which can one-shot planets as easily as tiny fighter craft can one-shot it.


The safest way: Hover above an earth-like planet, do not orbit, just slow until you can use engines to hover above the planet in space. Why? You have delta v and thrust in excess anyway, and it won't take long for a planet launched ship to reach you... less then ten min if you hover over the right spot. A large Transport vessel would hover with you, let crew and cargo onboard, while your vessel on auto-pilot lights it's engines for orbit to save fuel. The transport would then fall back down to the planet.

Planetary transport vessels would be called Transports and they would be massive. Why? They would trade the really high maximum speed a long traveling space vessel needs for much higher thrust at the cost of a lower max speed. Higher thrust is needed to get as much payload off a planet and back as possible.

Top speeds for scifi vessel engines are more or less arbitrary, so lets say the massive Transporter has about 6 hours of thrust at 3g, but will last longer if it lowers thrust. For example it could last 1g for 20 hours, but 1g is only good for space, not for getting off Earth.


Meanwhile spaceships would actually be smaller or at least weigh less than Transporters. Why? Because they trade lower thrust for higher max speeds.

Example? A spaceship could travel 1000 hours at 1g before running out of fuel, but it's engines could never haul as much mass as a transporter does. Yet unlike a Transporter a spaceship could do 3g for over 300 hours.



Arbitrary? Partially but partially not.


IRL we can only dream of such high perfomance, but also it is a known fact with rocket engines you often must trade high max speeds for lower thrust (ion engines) or low max speeds for high thrust (chemical rockets).

In scifi you can just.... amplify everything.



Main lesson I learned is the great irony that vessels whose sole job is to shuttle between hovering ships in space and the planet below would and probably should easily be the biggest ships in the scifi setting.


How else do you think all that orbital infrastructure and large spacestation building material gets into space so fast?

[Tamri]

Part of the problem is that in SW nukes apparently don't exist or are never used. So it either takes fleets to pound away at a planet for a prolonged period or megastructures like the deathstar which can one-shot planets as easily as tiny fighter craft can one-shot it

What in the sense that it does not exist and is not used?

The Hacks war, the bombing of Mandalore - and this is just offhand. Nuclear reactors in the period of the early Republic were quite installed on ships.

So everything is there and is actively used. Another thing is that, starting from certain stages of development, it is easier and cheaper to shoot the main caliber of heavy ships around the planet than to make and drag special ammunition to the place.

[Demarquis]

OMG, trying to make sense of Star Wars. Abandon this futile errand now, my friends, for nothing but madness lies down this path.

[Bamax]

OMG, trying to make sense of Star Wars. Abandon this futile errand now, my friends, for nothing but madness lies down this path.

Not star wars in particular. Just a way to justify what scifi SSTO's would really be doing.


No space agency in their right mind is going to want random spaceships landing anywhere on a planet. Because unlike helicopter spaceship's make quite the entrance on landing, liable to blow down houses or sheds nearby.


Really if a ship tries to land withot authorization, I think shooting it down with some advanced cobtinous accelerleration scifi Sprint missile would be warranted.


Sprint missiles are so fast that were they capable of continous scifi thrust they could go from Earth to to the moon in about 15 min!

[Siber]

I'm confused. Are you trying to explore what various sci-fi universes would look like if you took what they do 'on screen' at face value and work out what a practical application of those capabilties would look look like? Are you trying to explore what interplanetary commerce would look like if it obeys physics and practicality as we understand them today? Because it feels like you're bouncing back and forth between both and they're pretty darn incompatible, and if it's the first then it's going to be wildly different depending on what setting you work with.

[Bamax]

I'm confused. Are you trying to explore what various sci-fi universes would look like if you took what they do 'on screen' at face value and work out what a practical application of those capabilties would look look like? Are you trying to explore what interplanetary commerce would look like if it obeys physics and practicality as we understand them today? Because it feels like you're bouncing back and forth between both and they're pretty darn incompatible, and if it's the first then it's going to be wildly different depending on what setting you work with.

Why?

I thought I was being clear.

More the first.

I know all too well that IRLand even theoretical space tech won't permit space opera.


I am just using tge setting more rationally.

[Siber]

Why it's confusing is statements like "unlike helicopter spaceship's make quite the entrance on landing, liable to blow down houses or sheds nearby."

If you're trying to take the universe at face value, then spacecraft in both star trek and star wars are very capable of landing and taking off with much less fuss than a helicopter. We see them do it, often. Now I won't dispute that a space port like Mos Eisley seems pretty dangerous, reason ultimately demands that it's only one drunk smuggler away from being wiped off the map, but I can believe places like that exist anyway. Other more careful places I would expect might have a safe waystation and then bring goods and people in with carefully secured shuttle circuits between there and real civilization like your transporter scheme, or be brought into docks via tractor beam, or escorted in by coast-guard like ships ready to take ships down if they deviate dangerously, like in the approach to Cloud City.

Really, unless you have some form of magic planetary shielding technology(which, depending on source and flavor, star wars at least does) then you're not going to find a safe way to have interstellar commerce and life on planets together, the potential for catastrophic disaster is inherent to the topic.

[Moik]

"Warp" style technology could be lifting off and landing without blowing things away if we assume that the "warp" effect is essentially buoyancy, like a balloon that uses anti-gravity rather than density differential, or that the "warp" is using traction/friction along a 4th spatial dimension rather than the three cardinal ones. People and buildings aren't affected because they don't have a fourth spatial dimension.

[Bamax]

Why it's confusing is statements like "unlike helicopter spaceship's make quite the entrance on landing, liable to blow down houses or sheds nearby."

If you're trying to take the universe at face value, then spacecraft in both star trek and star wars are very capable of landing and taking off with much less fuss than a helicopter. We see them do it, often. Now I won't dispute that a space port like Mos Eisley seems pretty dangerous, reason ultimately demands that it's only one drunk smuggler away from being wiped off the map, but I can believe places like that exist anyway. Other more careful places I would expect might have a safe waystation and then bring goods and people in with carefully secured shuttle circuits between there and real civilization like your transporter scheme, or be brought into docks via tractor beam, or escorted in by coast-guard like ships ready to take ships down if they deviate dangerously, like in the approach to Cloud City.

Really, unless you have some form of magic planetary shielding technology(which, depending on source and flavor, star wars at least does) then you're not going to find a safe way to have interstellar commerce and life on planets together, the potential for catastrophic disaster is inherent to the topic.

Yes.... I know Star Trek does that since their vessels do not even show exhaust.

Yet my personal reasoning is that force requires force, and lifting any object into space no less, requres a lot of force applied to a small area.

There should be nothing gentle about that, since the reason gravity seems gentle is because it is only 1g.

Let's say Star Trek uses antigravity or whatever non-exhaust drive, in such a case you need at least 2g to lift off, as 1g is not enough. The effect would be antigravity invisible waves or beams hitting the earth at 3g as the ship rose up.

Waves woud be devastating as they widen with distance, so any people around would fall to the ground at 3g. Unless you put your launch facility in a remote desert.

Beams would be better, since they have less spread of collatteral damage since they widen less.



Now regarding FTL and and warp, they can both be arbitrarily made safer.


1. Planetary shields, although I personally dislike them unless they are glowing always while active..... like in Star Control 2. If I did it the generators would hover over the poles of the planet via some kind of resisto-grav plating, which means they won't fly up like antigravity but neither will they fall.

Once launched up they will slow as gravity tries to pull them back until they just hover instead.... a kind of balancing effect.

2. The easiest way to make FTL safer is having realtime FTL sensors and vessels that can intercept and drop out other vessels from FTL/warp. That also implies that whoever has a large fleet capable of such would be the local superpower. Basically the process of customs control would be done a lightyear or a few lightyears out, and customs starships would transport passengers and cargo from the trader starship to a local planet where transporters would in turn take the payload and passengers to the planet itself.

In other words, the way to make space travel safest requires splitting it into stages, not doing it all with a singlular starship... since that is a death machine.


So those are two ways, both of which could keep planets safe.... too bad for the folks who cannot afford FTL sensors and planetary shields though.