Can Big Honorverse Starships Ground On planets? ...

HB of CJ wrote:Can big Honorverse starships physically land on planetary surfaces? One would think aerodynamics and physical FTL drive systems would be basically non compatable.

Could very small private hyper capable yachts land on planets? Can they handle re entry through various atmospheres? How many times? Could Courier Boats repeatedly ground?

HB of CJ wrote:Can big Honorverse starships physically land on planetary surfaces? One would think aerodynamics and physical FTL drive systems would be basically non compatable.

Could very small private hyper capable yachts land on planets? Can they handle re entry through various atmospheres? How many times? Could Courier Boats repeatedly ground?

Theemile wrote:

HB of CJ wrote:Can big Honorverse starships physically land on planetary surfaces? One would think aerodynamics and physical FTL drive systems would be basically non compatable.

Could very small private hyper capable yachts land on planets? Can they handle re entry through various atmospheres? How many times? Could Courier Boats repeatedly ground?

Land? Why yes, everything can fall through an atmosphere. In a controlled way? No. Can it take off again? No, not without ripping up a portion of the planet the size of a medium sized state, even if it survived the fall.

No hyper capable ships are desined for reentry and landing, the wedge/sail geometry doesn't allow it, and the primary propulsion, the wedge, is havoc on planetary surfaces and atmospheres.

The wedges on shuttles are much smaller and they use turbines near the ground.

Echoes of Honor, Chapter 10 wrote:"What's that line to the east?" she asked after a moment.
"How far from the camp, My Lady?" Jasper Mayhew's voice came over the com.
"It looks like—what, Scotty? Twenty or twenty-five klicks?"
"Something like that, Ma'am," Tremaine replied. "Chief?"
"I make it twenty-three from here, Ma'am," Harkness said from the tac section after a moment, studying the frustratingly vague output of his passive sensors.
"In that case, I think it's a river, My Lady," Mayhew said, and she heard the rustle and crackle of plaspaper as he studied the hardcopy map he and Russell Sanko had put together. "The Tepes download didn't give any terrain details, but that's what it looked like from the weather sat maps we picked up. If it is a river, it's not much of one, though."
"Um." Honor laid the binoculars back down and rubbed her nose in thought, then looked at Scotty. "Think you could take a shuttle through there without counter-grav?"
"Without—?" Tremaine looked at her for a moment, then inhaled sharply. "Sure," he said, far more confidently than he could possibly feel, and Honor chuckled.
"Don't get your testosterone in an uproar on me now, Scotty. I'm serious. Can you get us in there?"
"Probably, Ma'am," he said after a moment, then added, grudgingly, "but I can't guarantee it. With one of our own pinnaces, yes. But this is a big brute, Ma'am. She's a lot heavier on the controls, and I haven't really experimented with her vectored thrust yet."
"But you think you could do it."
"Yes, Ma'am."
Honor thought for several more seconds, then sighed and shook her head.
"I'd like to take you up on that," she said, "but I don't think we can risk it. Chief Harkness?"
"Aye, Ma'am?"
"Go ahead and fire up the plant, Chief."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am. I'm starting light-off now. We should be nominal in about four minutes."
"Thank you, Chief. Signal Commander Metcalf please, Scotty."
"Yes, Ma'am." Tremaine banked the big shuttle to expose its full wingspan to Metcalf's lower position and flashed both wingtip lights twice.
"Answering flash from Shuttle Two, Ma'am," a Grayson voice reported.
"Thank you, Carson," Honor replied, and leaned back beside Tremaine. Firing up the fusion plants and bringing up the counter-grav added somewhat to the risk of detection if any recon sat happened to be looking their way. She'd hoped to avoid that, but she'd also known she might not be able to. That was why she'd arranged a signal to warn Metcalf without breaking com silence. At least the plants shouldn't be on-line for long, she told herself, and the counter-grav would make it much, much safer—and easier—to get the shuttles down.
"I've got power to the counter-grav, Ma'am," Tremaine reported, breaking in on her thoughts, and she nodded.
"See that 'S'-curve to the south?" she asked.
"Yes, Ma'am."
"It looks like the widest break in the tree cover we've got. See if you can get us in there on its west bank."
"Yes, Ma'am." Tremaine almost managed not to sound dubious, and Honor felt the right side of her mouth quirking in another grin as he banked again and came back around. Her hand dropped down beside her to rest on Nimitz's flank, and she felt a wiry, long-fingered true-hand pat her wrist in reply, and then Tremaine was dumping altitude and speed alike.
Despite his comments about the shuttle's controls, he brought the big craft in with a delicacy a Sphinx finch might have envied. The counter-grav let him fold the wings, which had been swept fully forward for their low-speed examination of possible landing sites, back into their high-speed position without losing control, and she heard turbines whine as he held a moderate apparent weight on the shuttle and vectored thrust downward. The sixty-three-meter fuselage slid almost daintily towards the ground, hovering with ponderous grace, and Honor peered through the armorplast windscreen.
The break in the canopy was a river, and shallow water rushed and tumbled over mossy boulders in a torrent of moon-struck white and black. The trees grew right up to the banks, but the humidity was far lower here in the center of the continent than it had been at their peninsular landing site, and the growth looked less lush and thick. Or she hoped it did, anyway. It was hard to be sure, and the last thing they needed was to suck something into a turbine.
"Over there, Ma'am. To port," Tremaine said. "What about there?"
"Um." Honor twisted in her seat to look in the indicated direction. It looked like one of the trees—and a titan among titans, at that—must have fallen and taken two or three others with it. The result was a breach in the overhead cover that seemed to offer a way under the remaining canopy.
"All right," she said finally, "but take it slow. And take some more weight off her so you can cut back on the VT. Let's try not to kick up trash and FOD a turbine."
"Yes, Ma'am. That sounds like a real good idea," Tremaine replied, then grinned tightly despite his gathering tension. "Chief Barstow would appreciate it, too, I'm sure."
"Hey, the heck with Chief Barstow," Harkness growled over the com. "This here is my bird, Sir. She can look after Two."
"I stand corrected—or at least chastened," Tremaine said in a somewhat distracted tone, his hands flickering over his controls with the precision of an absent-minded concert pianist while his eyes never left his intended landing site.
The pilot in Honor wanted to help him, but she knew better than to try. Her single hand would make her slow and awkward, and it was better to let him handle the entire load rather than risk getting in his way.
The shuttle came in very slowly, gleaming in the moonlight, and the black shadow of the jungle reached out for it. Tremaine slid it forward, no more than half a dozen meters above the ground, and Honor watched with carefully hidden nervousness as foliage rippled and danced below them. Even with the reduction in downward thrust, there was a lot of small trash flying around down there, and foreign object damage to a turbine could have deadly consequences this close to the ground.
But the turbines continued their whining song of power, and Tremaine eased the shuttle carefully down and forward. The long fuselage slid in under the tree cover, and he fed in some side thrust, edging to port.
"We're not going to be able to get as deep as we were at Site One, Ma'am," he observed through gritted teeth. His voice was still conversational, despite the sweat glistening on his taut face, and his hands moved the stick and thrust controls with smooth delicacy. "Best I can do is scrunch over as far as I can this way and let Gerry have the right side."
"I'll go with your call, Scotty," Honor said softly, without commenting on the fact that he'd given himself by far the tougher landing spot. But he was a better natural pilot than Metcalf—as good as Honor herself, but with more recent practice and two hands—and he brought his shuttle another twenty meters to its left, then nodded to himself.
"Deploy gear, please, Ma'am," he said. That much she could do, one-handed or not, and she pulled the big handle. The landing legs deployed quickly and smoothly, and Tremaine let the shuttle sink slowly down onto them. There was one scary moment as the outboard starboard leg flexed alarmingly and a red light flashed on the panel, but assault shuttles were designed for rough field landings, and the computer controlling that leg adjusted quickly. The red light died, and Tremaine gradually reduced his counter-grav, watching his readouts carefully for several taut seconds. Then he exhaled explosively.
"We're down, Ma'am," he announced. "Chief, kill the fusion plant."

saber964 wrote:What RFC is describing is an assault shuttle getting ready to land. Pinnaces and assault shuttle's (cutters?) are the only small craft that can land on a planet. IIRC pinnaces and shuttle's are about the size of RW jumbo aircraft like the 757 and 747.

Rincewind wrote:It would make sense actually as otherwise can you imagine the number of shuttle flights it would require to load a single 4 megaton freighter.