Simon_Jester wrote:Tricky- you are, in effect, dropping the ship into the landing bay at 1 or 1.5g acceleration, even if the fighter's engine exhaust is not an issue.
Actually I'm dropping them onto a 300x280m landing
deck at a relatively shallow angle. My idea was to let them build up some overtake rather than match, actually, so they're moving slightly faster than the carrier when they touch down so the carrier's acceleration, friction (what there is of it) and possibly some sort of mechanical braking mechanism (like modern carrier birds' arrestor hooks) take up their speed advantage. But yes, I suspect 'tricky' is putting it mildly.
How big are these fighters, anyway? Remember what the exhaust from a hundred-ton mass accelerating at 1g looks like...
150-300ts, and you can't expect me to remember something I've never seen before
I would like the question answered of how durable the fighters are? If they can survive re-entry of a planet's atmosphere than they should be durable enough to last one to several seconds in the exhaust heat wise.
Depends entirely on how
fast they make their reentry. We're used to thinking 'reentry=high temperatures' because we tend to associate the term with
unpowered reentry, i.e. falls from orbit. A
powered reentry, as a fighter with these kinds of acceleration and endurance would be capable of, could be pretty much arbitrarily slow, so their ability to survive reentry doesn't really tell us anything.
