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Date Posted: 09:13:37 12/22/02 Sun
Author: CW
Subject: As you are pointing out, it doesn't
In reply to: Finn Mac Cool 's message, "Um, why does flying have to only happen in atmosphere?" on 08:08:36 12/22/02 Sun

It's a long story. But I may as well tell it.

A ship that has the power to travel between stars or even between planets with in a single system, has very different requirements from one that travels in the sea or in the air. In fact to efficiently travel in space, you'd like to use so much power that it would be extremely dangerous to use that kind of system in the atmosphere, both to the ship and to the atmosphere. For my own writing I've sat down and calculated the kind of power necessary to drive a ship at what I think would be a reasonable speed between stellar systems. Even figuring in our absolutely total ignorance of how to accomplish such a thing (and it may be, as current physics tells us, simply be impossible) the results are astounding. You wouldn't want a ship capable of that anywhere near a planetary atmosphere. One mistake and you'd kill everything on the planet. I assume that in everybody else's sci-fi there are unbreakable safeguards on ships so that they can safely enter the atmosphere using other kinds of power. In my own writing, I've imagined, both safeguards for navigational mistakes and fuel consumption issues in the relatively dense space very near stars (as evidenced by solar wind) that keep the run-of-the-mill deep-void craft away from the vicinity of habitable planets. A different kind of veseel, and an immensely less powerful one, ferries people and goods to a station far distant from the planets where deep-void ships would carry them between the stars at the speeds necessary for commerce.

But, in this society I've created, there still might well be a need for commerce carried in the atmosphere of the planets, or in simpler words flying. Even in the ferrying vessels I described, the realties of nature are such that they will behave differently when they are 'flying' through the atmosphere than when there are in the space near planets. I can imagine emergencies where it will make a tremendous difference whether the vessel is 'flying' in the atmosphere or not. The quick answer to a distant controller's question "Are you flying?" might easily mean the difference between life and death. The difference between flying and being beyond that is important in terms of physics and engineering, and I've reasoned that it's one that will continue to be important more or less forever. Hence, 'flying' and 'in the air' should always be one thing, and space travel and in space should always be distinguished from it, especially for those who are going to make their living in space travel as the folks on Firefly do. Tourist and passengers, as you point out, don't need to be so picky.

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