Ringo Vinda: An oddly tiny planet?

[2046]

Just a few extra notes on "Jedi Crash":

1. I didn't go into detail on the acceleration required to drop from 0.999968c to zero in 8.33 minutes, but basically that's going from 299,782,865ish meters per second (a mere 9,500 meters per second or so off from full lightspeed) to zero. That's just shy of 600 kilometers per second squared, or over 61,000g.

Needless to say, that's more than enough to have allowed the ship to stop dead in space or otherwise avoid a low-velocity crash landing. Ergo, it didn't happen that way, for both this and the other reasons provided.

2. Lest desperate detractors try to latch on to the point, let me address it beforehand . . . the angle of the ship's crash is not straight down, thus the 30 kilometers or so of worthwhile atmosphere I reference really ought to be very much greater. The ship's angle upon atmospheric entry and crash is pretty consistent, but rather than do the math all proper-like with accounting for the curvature of the planet or even just employ trig, let's just inflate it and say that the ship will travel through one hundred times more atmosphere than I initially stated. That brings us down to a mere 2 gigatons per linear kilometer, or 125,000 Hiroshimas per linear kilometer.

That still doesn't fly, but I figured I'd throw that out there just in case someone wanted to get too smart by half.

(For reference, however, assuming a 30 degree angle for the ship, the distance only doubles. Even at 15 degrees it only quadruples (not quite, but close enough). S

So, that'd still be something like .5 to 1 teraton per linear kilometer.)

3. Oh hey . . . Ex Astris Scientia is doing the TNG-R observations and recently did "The Masterpiece Society", which reminds me . . . when it comes to hanging around near a compact quasi-stellar object, this flyby doesn't beat the Enterprise-D parking a handful of kilometers away from a neutron star core fragment and dragging it around with a tractor beam just to show off to the arrogant fartcatchers of Moab IV:

http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/obser ... ociety.htm

I suppose, though, that if we are trying to pretend the universes are the same, then this does provide precedent for naturally occurring tiny quasi-stellar objects . . . and indeed, a small neutron star would fit the bill size-wise, but I really wouldn't expect a happy planet hundreds or thousands of kilometers away. The gravitational differential would be hellacious.

Also, the dull yellow star we see in "Jedi Crash" would need to be surrounded by gas or debris or something for that whole thing to work, I would think, not to mention the whole aspect of the world being stable enough to have an atmosphere and life develop on it.