this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2023
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Risa
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Come on'n get your jamaharon on! There are no real rules—just don't break the weather control network.
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Not a trekkie, do they ever land in atmosphere on these ships? You would want aerodynamics for that to reduce drag and thus heat, but I'm not familiar enough to know.
I guess they probably have good thermal protections with their future tech, though.
Voyager does a few times. The Enterprise D did...once.
There are some alternate timeline shenanigans I will not speak of here.
If you've got shields and antigravity, do you still need aerodynamics?
The ships can land and take off at least some of them can but they don't fly around in the atmosphere they just go up and down they're either on the ground or they're in space but they can't really manoeuvre.
Except for that one episode of Voyager where they just kind of forgot about that, but I think that was hand-waved away by saying that they just made the shields into a bubble and so essentially from the air's perspective the ship was a sphere. That's apparently what the shuttlecraft do too, which is why they fall like a brick whenever they're shot down.
I was thinking more about atmospheric entry and exit than flying around in the atmosphere itself... but a bubble would be weird because fast-moving spheres would create pretty unstable drag and induce spin, iirc.