Atmospherical crafts

[Jimmy Magnusson]

A lot of Sci-Fi books and movies have "ships" which are capable of moving about in atmosphere quite freely despite their less than optimal shape. Often these can do VTOL, strafe sideways, hover, turn well and go fast, and some can even go into space. I'm quite curious to how these actually work. I mean, very few of them actually have big enough wings to generate any sort of meaningful lift, not that that matters when they to a vertical takeoff.

I know, magic of movies and so, but come on. It would be an interesting technical discussion. What engines do they use? Are there just a few rotable ones, or a lot of them? Et cetra. And could we actually build something like it today or in the forseeable future?

 

[Somni]

From the films I remember seeing, they tend to only have a few engines, 2 or 3, often rotatable. Not sure what most were powered on some sort of nuclear I would guess.

I think that the actual construction of such a vessel should be possible. I would have thought that earlier models would have at least two types of engine - an atmospheric one and some sort of 'rocket' type to get into and through space.

The real issue on such a space craft would be power. I would think it would take a lot of power to get an ungainly shaped ship into space, and some heat shielding. The 'shuttle' is mostly fuel tanks and boosters that push it up high enough for its own engines to break atmosphere. To have all that permanently inside a craft would need some kind of propulsion system we lack now, I would think.

 

[New Ray Tech]

I guess we are talking some time into the future here.
While we are stuck with current technology and the current laws of physics, we have a problem for most SciFi ships' engines, however extrapolating in time and scientific knowledge, say into research on gravity. who knows? Anti Gravity Engine are not beyond the realm of imagination and why shouldn't they be small and powered from some remote energy source, say a dying Sun or a young star.
The skies, the limit. (pun)

 

[Dave]

I was also going to say Anti-Gravity Engines. That has been a staple of Sci-Fi for some considerable time, though I'm not sure it will ever be possible in reality. If you have internal synthetic gravity inside interstellar ships, (and on TV and Film they invariably do) then I can't see a reason why you can't also have a synthetic, but reversed gravity, acting externally. If there is such a thing as a Graviton particle, then there should also be an Anti-Graviton particle too.

 

[Scifi fan]

Don't forget that, to us planet-bound primitives, the shape of an advanced civlization may not make sense. For example, to the aviators of a bi-plane era, the shape of a chopper would not make sense, and, to the pilots of that chopper, the shape of a stealth bomber may not make sense either.

 

[Leo]

I'd love to see magnetoaerodynamic drives propel those ships.
I can't post links yet (as a newbie I'm a potential spammer) but it's easy to google the word.