- 86,274
- Rule 12
- GTP_Famine
Who said anything about flying the interstellar space ships into the atmosphere?Always amazes me people conflate traveling in vacuum to traveling in atmosphere which has millions of variations . It would be unwise to assume your intergalactic ship could fly in any planets atmosphere where it could be subjected to corrosive gasses , extreme heat, wind , liquids , electricity etc. The vacuum of space can be mapped and traversed with ease and is virtually uniform if you stay out of the way of any celestial phenomenon. What im trying to say is , just because you traveled the stars with ease , doesn't mean your ship can travel in atmosphere with ease , there are billions of planets with billions of unique atmospheric conditions which can vary within planet..
I mean, for starters the supposition here is that these balloons that are amazingly easy to see and obliterate and only operate at high cruise altitude of terrestrial civilian aircraft rather than say any other part of the 60-mile high atmosphere have come from somewhere, and since it seems unlikely they're capable of interstellar travel (or indeed getting any higher than 40,000ft) it appears that the premise is that they have come from the interstellar spacecraft.
Bearing that in mind, why don't the interstellar spacecraft have something... you know... good in the balloon hangar bays instead of... that? I mean if your notion is "they can't know the atmospheric composition" why ferry extremely atmosphere dependent inflatables which can only operate in a narrow window on Earth instead of something a bit more rigid, less pressure sensitive, and with the same level of technology as the interstellar spacecraft, rather than a bag of slightly pressurised gas?