Theemile wrote:SharkHunter wrote:I think the whole Torch line of books wold imply that a smaller ship can. Impellers can be used in atmosphere -- otherwise the impeller missiles used by Kevin Usher in SVW and by Edward Martin in Flag in Exile, etc. wouldn't work. That plus Echoes of Honor makes it seem likely that a small ship can land. The key sequence I'd look at is the Assault boat having to shoot down the courier ship in the attack on Camp Cheron before they could pull out of range.
Thoughts?
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In Echoes of Honor, the dispatch boat was sitting in orbit, with some of the crew shuttled down to the surface for a break. Assault shuttles have impeller wedges for use outside the atmosphere, but we know from plenty of scenes that they use wings/turbines/counter-grav otherwise.
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Note I said METERS. Not 100 KILOMETERS on a side and 30 kilometers from the ship required for a ship the size of dispatch boat.
A 1000 ton shuttle probably has a wedge a kilometer or so in size (but still much smaller than 10 KM missile wedge), or ~1% of 1% the size of a dispatch boat's .
Agreed. My only point in mentioning those is that it shows that an impeller can operate in atmosphere, not that it WOULD do so deep in the troposphere, etc.. I'd imagine that the mining/scoop ships are impeller driven around the big gas giants, etc.
Hard crust planet wise, the only way a ship is going to get far enough clear of the planet's surface is by turbine/lift and countergrav, which is a secondary reason that I'd expect that only relatively small ships would even be built to be trans-atmospheric. Somewhere around 10Km altitude, I'd expect that a ship (like the courier ship) could start easing in impellers so that it can get to speed earlier, nothing more than that.
