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Originally Posted by Manchurian Taikonaut
Here are my top 5 bellyflopper
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"Thunderbolt Star Fury" based on the original Babylon-5 Starfury, JMS did great with the originals, they looked great and he kept them in space but for some reason he insisted on using the new in "Crusade" one to fly missions or leisurely trips on planets
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Still not a bad concept, though. Given that humans weren't using some of Trek's more handwavy concepts, they could get it by on vectored thrust or some kind of semi-venturi.
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4
"Battlestar Vipers" with tiny little wings I can't see how these things would fly. The new Cylon ships look like the would fall out of the sky also
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I didn't follow this one closely in the new iteration, but in the old school version, some kind of repulsor system kept'em off the ground in atmospheres.
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3
UFO ships in "ID4" Independence Day, considering how vulnerable these things were to some windows bug I'm sure the flight control software was a disaster
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Supposedly those were some kind of gravitic system. Not aerodynamic at all.
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2
Star Wars "X-wing", Boba Fett ship etc Most of these ships look like they would drop out of the sky. The Falcon still looks great though
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Star Wars used a technology called "repulsorlift" to explain severely non-aerodynamic flight. One book mentioned the launching of an Executor class super star destroyer from a planet's surface on a massive repulsor sled. It only worked up to about 40 kilometers, then you're either unable to rise farther, or you're powering out on engine thrust.
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A the winner is our "StarTrek Shuttlepods". Built like a brick I've never understood how these things fly, I suppose they have some tractor beam, anti-grav technobabble to overcome that stuff. Apparently it can fly at Mach 8 but it still looks like it would fall like a rock
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Star Trek leaned heavily on inertial dampening. Dial down the shuttle's mass, and the thrust to mass ratio goes through the roof. The only thing you compete with there is aerodynamic drag, which was mitigated by navigational shield geometry (according to the books moreso than the films/shows).