[TML] Firefly, wait no it is a Subsidized Merchant ship.

[Tom B]

On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 10:27 PM, Timothy Little <tim at little-possums.net> wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 11:33:27PM +0200, Knapp wrote:
>  > First, at what point is a ship to big to land on the surface?
>
>  With internal contragrav, probably the limit would be dictated by how
>  much room you have to land and how much you want to avoid tidal
>  effects from its mass.

What does a ship mass? Even a type S? How many metric tons mass? And
what about a really decent sized ship (say a 5000 ton destroyer)?

Now, the type S has three landing pads. Anyone care to take a ballpark
calculation for the surface pressure those exert in psi or some other
unit? I recall Striker used to force you to calculate the ground
pressure of units to determine some aspects of their mobility. Well,
I'm just guessing but a 100 dton scout may weigh enough (without
contra grav factored in) to sink like a stone into anything that isn't
really solid (like landing pads). Makes the whole 'landing in the
wild' thing seem sort of unlikely if you consider it too much (if you
don't count water landings, which could work fine).

I'd guess that the scout doesn't have more than 3 at 3ft x 3ft. That's
27 square feet. I use feet because I determined a 4" concrete pad
should load bear about 4000 lbs/square foot (call it two metric tons).
So that's 54 metric tons borne by 27 square feet. Is a scout more than
54 tons? possibly... (I don't know).

Figures I found for bedrock seem to suggest up to about 6 mtons per
square foot and as low as about 1 ton for clay based soil.

So, you'd still have to be pretty careful where you landed, if your
ship weighed any amount. And if it weighs more than the trapped air
inside, it won't be bouyant in water either.

T.