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.
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"
yeah it's a one in a million chance that the warp core ruptures, but if that one in a million chance hits, it kills BILLIONS.
so... no. keep that shit far enough away. Maybe if you're nice you can park on the far side of the moon
maybe that's the depressing answer to the Fermi Paradox:
The kind of energy storage needed to travel the stars is so high that every civilization that attempts is eventually has a Bad Accident that Chicxulubs their whole species.
@foone Any society which harnessed FTL travel would either maintain tight control over it (the Space Guild from Dune says hi) or would tend toward self-destruction. Possibly one, then the other?
Yes, I know, thinking too hard about Star Wars...
@sethrichards @foone I'd say in the star wars universe FTL is *somehow* inconcievably more efficient. Sure that in of itself is improbable, but that's the setting.
Meanwhile star trek embraces the fact that their starship require immense amounts of power without seriously considering the implications of that.