Need idea about player spaceship landing on planets

[Imaculata]

If you are tracking fuel for your spaceships, I would make takeoff / landing very fuel expensive.

This, or make landing a large ship a whole lot more difficult to do.

Also, not all areas may be suitable to bare the weight of a large spaceship. The ground could give way under the weight, and the ship could get hopelessly stuck in the soil.

 

[Dioltach]

Show them the scene from Revenge of the Sith where Obi-Wan and Anakin are trying to land Grievous's ship on Coruscant.

 

[Derren]

The fuel idea as mentioned above, or assign a chance that the ship gets damaged unless the players roll well.
Or make it so that the main ship has no landing gear and has to be landed in water which limits the planets where it can be done.

 

[Thomas Bowman]

One obvious reason not to land a spaceship is that it contains something very dangerous to people living on the ground. Star Trek spaceships are fueled by antimatter for example. So you want to put your players in charge of a huge ship that can't land?

One reason might be that a starship's FTL drive can't operate deep within a gravity well. Another reason would be that deep space vehicles operate with low thrust high efficiency rocket engines such as ion drives amd the starship accelerates very slowly but can achieve a higher velocity than a high thrust rocket which is only good for getting into orbit, and a huge amount of fuel is needed to do just that. To land a big ship would require more fuel than to land a small ship. (well actually getting back into space uses the most fuel. one can use atmospheric braking to slow down, and merely use rockets to make that final soft landing. See Space X Falcon 9 rocket stages making a landing.

 

[dco]

Size could be a problem, if something bad happens is not the same to be on orbit or to crash to the ground and annihilate life. This is a good reason why it makes sense to have orbital stations in fiction.
Antiaereal defenses.
Entering atmosphere can be dangerous or costly because of the raise of temperatures while moving air away or other fictional phenomena like magnetic storms.
If you need stealth a big spaceship is not the best option.
The design of the spaceship could not allow it to land, because of weight, shape, lack of legs for landing, lack of maneuverability, fuel usage, drivers (placement, power required to take off, malfunctioning,etc)....

 

[Thomas Bowman]

The main reason is just getting into orbit from an Earthlike planet's surface uses a tremendous amount of fuel, and the spaceship needs to accelerate at a rate greater than the pull of gravity to get above the atmosphere. A ship has to fight gravity on its way up and the fuel it uses to fight that gravity can't be used to accelerate to orbital velocity.

Once you are at orbital velocity however, it doesn't make sense to use high thrusts, it is more efficient to use a low thrust, high efficiency engine, you can achieve a higher velocity that way. This means you need one sort of vehicle to land on a planet's surface and take off again, and you need another sort of vehicle to fly through space once you have achieved orbit. If you have a spaceship which can do both, that means it does neither particularly well. You need a separate engine for flying through space, from the one you need to take off and land on a planet's surface, the engine needed for planetary excursions is dead weight when you are flying through space, and the engine you need to fly through space is dead weight when you are trying to take off from a planet's surface. So it kind of makes sense to have a larger ship that carries around a smaller planetary lander which separates and lands on a planet's surface, that way you don't need as big an engine to make those planetary landings, and you don't need to carry around as much fuel or tankage. The Apollo Moon architecture follows that principle, "lunar orbit rendezvous" saves on fuel and engines for making a lunar landing and takeoff and it allowed them to use a Saturn V rocket instead of the proposed Nova rocket for manned Moon missions.

 

[Umbran]

The main reason is just getting into orbit from an Earthlike planet's surface uses a tremendous amount of fuel, and the spaceship needs to accelerate at a rate greater than the pull of gravity to get above the atmosphere.

Admittedly, this is tech-level dependent. If you are using chemical rockets, yes. If you have anti-gravity tech, it is a different proposition.

 

[dragoner]

I'd run with the Traveller RPG's use of streamlined/unstreamlined spacecraft, I have done it this way and it works well.

Another way is that the bigger craft could take minor damage in landing, just enough to be a nuisance so that the players use the shuttle.

 

[MarkB]

Depending upon the setting and the society, you could go for an ecological angle. The shuttle is designed with atmospheric flight in mind, and has a propulsion system that works well for that context. But the ship's engines produce waste products including radioactive particles, dangerous carcinogens etc. that have effectively zero environmental impact when dumped into the vastness of space, but can cause serious issues within a planet's atmosphere. Therefore, the ship is generally only landed upon lifeless worlds except in dire emergencies.

Other considerations could be political or tactical. Maybe bringing an entire capital ship down to surface is considered a provocative act compared to just coming down in a shuttle. Or, tactically, the shuttle is stealthier and more maneuverable in atmosphere than the ship, so can get in and out on a hostile planet when the ship would be a sitting duck for artillery fire.

 

[delericho]

I would recommend something like: to enter the atmosphere you need to shut down your weapons systems and/or warp drive. It then takes 2 hours after leaving atmosphere to charge them back up.

Couple that with making pirates just common enough, and it then becomes something the players have to think about very carefully before continuing - yes, they can land the ship, but is it really worth the risk?