how does it fly??

[gravy]

I couldn't get sensible answers to this elsewhere so trying here.

I was watching phantom menace the other day and I happened to take particular note of queen amidala's spaceship (amongst her other assets). Now this machine is silver, very stream-lined and has two massive donks down the back which are impressively large ("so's my johnson") and obviously capable of propelling the thing and everyone in it at skid-mark-loosening speeds.

So what, you ask? Well, if I may, I would like to point out that both of these monster donks face AFT.

NOW, the keen observer may notice that on, not one, not two but a COUPLE of occasions the ship is seen performing what we in the industry refer to as A VERTICAL TAKE-OFF. How is it so? And... if it's that easy, why don't we do it??

I re-played the scenes and see NO sign of any other powerplants underneath the thing.

Also, during the VERTICAL TAKE-OFF in the sand, you'd expect to see piles of DUST, sand, house bricks, stray cats and sh!t flying everywhere just like in blackhawk down --- but there's nothing. Anti-gravity? Good point, BUT why have that just for take-off and not for the rest of the flight, as in that saucer-shaped thing klaatu turned up here in, years ago?

Also, bare-metal finish? Do they know how many man-hours are involved in polishing? Ask American, they'll tell you. I had to polish one during my brief time in GA and it is not a pleasant task. It was a bonanza and it weren't capable of VERTICAL TAKE-OFFs, neither.

I have applied reason, logic, brainwork, navel-gazing, meditation, deliberation, estimation, cerebration, contemplation, rumination, mass-tuhbation, introspection, outrospection, scrutiny, study, and solicitude but I can't find anything in the books that explains this. Am I missing something? I DID sleep a lot during my aerodynamics classes, and I "taught" myself BGT so that could explain SOME of it. But still...

[Young Paul]

Apparently, Gene Roddenberry [sp?] had quite long discussions with the team whilst working how Warp Drive would work on the Enterprise. His comment at the end was something along the lines of that it should work by somebody saying "Engage warp drive."

[Phoenix_X]

Q: "How does your spaceship's vertical take-off work?"
A: "Very well, thanks for asking"

:D

[Genghis the Engineer]

Won't help much with Star Wars, but for the serious techno-nerds, and I firmly class myself in this bracket, I recommend an actually quite serious book called "The physics of Star Trek", ISBN 0 853 51149 X, which goes into all the various exotic devices (Warp Drive, transporters, etc) and tries to analyse how they do or could work within the current understanding of science.

Incidentally, "Warp Drive" is a brand of carbon-fibre propeller made in the USA and used mostly on microlight and homebuilt aircraft. The UK distributor is Mainair in Rochdale.

G

[Pdub]

Well, lets assume it is anti-gravity, which of course will only work in the presence of a gravity field. Now out in the depths of space long long ago in a Galaxy far far away, there is precious little gravity to go around, the best you could manage would be a gentle wafting to the next star. You can't build an interstellar Empire/Republic at sublight speeds.

So anti-grav to take off - max acceleration 1G BUT only directly away from the planet (assuming a roughly Earth type planet). Now due to the inverse square law, once you have doubled your distance from the starting point on the planet surface to the core, say at 3500 miles altitude, a mear nothing in interstellar terms, you are only getting acceleration of 1/4 G

Fire up the the phallic symbols on the back for a bit of forward motion, maybe using a couple of auxillary anti grav units positioned front,rear,port, and starboard, to give you directional control(basically use the whole lifting body as a control surface). Then when you're up out of the atmosphere fire up then Hyperspace engines for some superluminal travel.

The real tricky bit is going to be the yaw just after lift off, not going fast enough for any usefull aerodynamic effects, maybe need a little bow thruster as used on boats.

Edited for inverse square law thingy, which I remembered just after pressing submit........

[SpinSpinSugar]

Looked kinda vaguely like an SR-71 someone had dipped in a tank of liquid mercury.

<anorak>

Personally, I disapproved of going "back" in time in the series to a place where space ships looked all shiny and advanced whereas in the "later" films everything looked all beat up, non-aerodynamic and cobbled together. Doesn't scan. And the Phantom Menace was a terrible film. Which reminds me, must try and download "The Phantom Edit".

As to your original question - this applies to all the spacecraft in the series, for instance you see X-wings hovering without any obvious thrust vectoring in Starwars. Ditto the Falcon, although there is some evidence of conventional puffer jets/rockets to stabilise the thing when landing on the pad in Cloud City, for example. The main burden of these ships weight though, is clearly borne by some other means, as described by Pdub.

</anorak>