Teaos wrote:Ships have mass reduction technology.
I dunno, that seems kind of liability, I thought one of the points of landing was for repairs but you can't land too well without power I guess and some repairs are easier to do in space, vice versa.
Tyyr wrote:The problem with Voyager is that they have those anemic little nacelles and that huge fat saucer extending way out to the front. You'd need super dense nacelles compared to the rest of the ship to have a prayer of that thing being even remotely balanced. You also have to deal with the issue of such a huge overhang and that it would likely require the structural integrity field to still be operational to prevent the saucer ripping off the hull.
I guess that rules out landing to conserve power....
Then there's the size of the landing feet. We have a concrete number for the mass of Voyager, 700,000 tons, and you can pretty quickly estimate an area for the landing feet. They had 700,000 tons sitting on maybe 160m square. That's about 2.88 tons per square inch, 5,760 pounds per square inch. For comparison the surface pressure of an M1A2 Abrams main battle tank is only about 10psi. Without anti-gravity canceling out about 99.5% of Voyager's mass it would instantly sink into the ground until it hit bedrock or the bottom of the hull was crushed until it reached a ground pressure able to support the ship.
I have no reference for this and I'm just not that great at math in general, so I looked up the saturn 5 which apparently had a mass of 6.2 million pounds; 700,000 tons apparently equates to 1.4 million pounds??
I'm sure I'm missing something there...
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