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"

because, yeah, they may be very safe normally, but when even one of these spaceships could sterilize a hemisphere from orbit, you really don't want them anywhere near you, no matter how well-maintained and friendly the operators of that star ship is

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 In the context of Star Wars, I've always thought the Millennium Falcon is a social-political impossibility even if we pretend it's a technical possibility. The energy levels required are far too high for Han Solo to win such a ship in a card game. Even if there are no accidents, imagine what such a ship could do if intentionally crashed by a terrorist group?

@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.

@kevingranade @sethrichards @foone Funnily enough, the closest I can come to an example of Star Trek dealing with it is in Lower Decks, the silly version that is also my favourite version lately. (In "First First Contact" the Cerritos crew have to find a way to stop a damaged Federation ship from destroying a planet's civilisation by crashing into said planet on what's supposed to be a first contact mission.)