I don't know about any kind of fandom consensus on the AOS setting, but Voyager could make planetfall, and ships like modern supertankers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batillus_class_supertankers) are able to support themselves structurally in drydock and survive storm-stresses in a seaway. Given the assumption of working antigravity and the implied power loads needed for warp travel, there'd be no reason that an equivalent vessel - or one much larger - couldn't be designed for planetfall.
The thing is, though, that that ability'd have a major influence on the design and layout of the ship - its structure would need to be laid out to accept gravity loading while landed and powered down, it'd need landing gear, re-entry shielding, heatproof design features, and the like. Mechanically, it'd be simpler to design a large cargo ship with warp and sublight ability and use specialized surface-to-orbit shuttles to handle the transfer to planetside - that is, from a builder/buyer's perspective, not having to hassle with the 'landing' features for the mothership would save more money than buying the shuttles.
OTOH, depending on the cost of operating the antigrav and the 'maintenance costs' of running through a re-entry, de-and-re-orbiting the interstellar 'deadweight' equipment of the combined function design might be cheaper than the labor/handling costs of shifting cargo to the shuttles, which'd be telling for a commercial carrier like might be converted for 'Red Cross' work.
The Atomic Rocket Project (http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/) is more aimed at hard sci-fi work than Star Trek's space opera conventions, but I've always found that it still had a lot of useful things to say about some of the less flashy aspects of spacegoing, including logistics and this very design question.
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Date: 2009-10-29 03:56 am (UTC)The thing is, though, that that ability'd have a major influence on the design and layout of the ship - its structure would need to be laid out to accept gravity loading while landed and powered down, it'd need landing gear, re-entry shielding, heatproof design features, and the like. Mechanically, it'd be simpler to design a large cargo ship with warp and sublight ability and use specialized surface-to-orbit shuttles to handle the transfer to planetside - that is, from a builder/buyer's perspective, not having to hassle with the 'landing' features for the mothership would save more money than buying the shuttles.
OTOH, depending on the cost of operating the antigrav and the 'maintenance costs' of running through a re-entry, de-and-re-orbiting the interstellar 'deadweight' equipment of the combined function design might be cheaper than the labor/handling costs of shifting cargo to the shuttles, which'd be telling for a commercial carrier like might be converted for 'Red Cross' work.
The Atomic Rocket Project (http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/) is more aimed at hard sci-fi work than Star Trek's space opera conventions, but I've always found that it still had a lot of useful things to say about some of the less flashy aspects of spacegoing, including logistics and this very design question.