Alice Averlong🏳️⚧️more sci-fi should deal with the fact that your average Enterprise starship has a fuel tank measured in Chicxulubs of antimatter
"a spaceship crashed" shouldn't be a bunch of wreckage in a forest and plucky scavengers finding neat bits of technology to resell, it should be a "so the dominant species on that planet has been forever changed"
even if it blows up in orbit, that's still 90 teratons of TNT going off. That's equivalent to a solar flare.
You're still going to Have A Bad Day.
oh, to clarify, when I say "Chicxulubs of antimatter", I don't mean, like, the amount of antimatter is equivalent to the mass of the Chicxulub asteroid: I mean the amount of antimatter has energy approximately equal to the impact at Chicxulub that extincted the dinosaurs.
that's the thing with antimatter FTL starships: they're super dangerous in multiple ways, and that's an inherent part of how they work.
even ignoring them potentially being armed, even ignoring that they can go very fast (and what happens when they crash into something?), just the power they'd need to store to be able to do all that makes them weapons of mass destruction on a scale we can't even conceive of
like, every nuclear weapon on the planet is like 1.5 gigatons. A full on world war 3 is less than ONE TEN-THOUSANDTH as energetic as the fuel tanks of an enterprise
which makes me wonder about the fact that anyone lets these starships orbit their planets, let alone sometimes they manage to land.
Earth keeping their shipyards at Mars is a good start, I'd think if I was in charge of biosphere protection, I'd be more like "yeah ya'll can park at Jupiter, and take some chemical rockets down to Earth"
Hugo Mills@foone I think it's mentioned in ST:TNG somewhere that a Constitution class starship (e.g. Enterprise) could wipe out all life on a planet in some brief period of time... and that's normal operation, *without* explosively scuttling it with extreme prejudice.