Other than teleportation what else have sci-fi writers novels, TV & film come up with to used to get the crew on & off the planet from/to the ship?

submitted by SnowAssMan from self.ScienceFiction

It's too time consuming, expensive & indiscreet to have the vessel land each time you want the crew to disembark. I've noticed that most writers have gone for teleportation as an alternative.

Doctor Who probably has the best of both world with the TARDIS, which can materialise anywhere & is much smaller on the outside, while the outside resides in a different dimension.

What other methods have you noticed writers employ?

all 4 comments
sorted by:
top
newinsightfulfun

[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 2 fun1 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

Shuttles

[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

There were some good old books from the sixties/seventies that has rocket powered suits. Some suits were quite bulky and the occupant was suspended in a webbing so a hard landing was scifi possible. I don't think they went into much detail about the propultion mechanism but they made excellent reading. In one the novels hero circled half a planet in a suit, up above the atmosphere. Very cool.

It was A.E.van Vogt, The war against the Rull

[–]SnowAssMan[S] 7 insightful - 1 fun7 insightful - 0 fun8 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

thanks, but I'm looking more for something that is very quick, easy, practical, yet somewhat believable – a tall order, I know.

[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Forget believable, it's Scifi after all so only the clueless would confuse that with reality (which unfortunately several million do) You either have a Newtonian physics solution or a quantum solution, the latter being teleportation however that happens up to and including "gates". personally I think that a Newtonian method would be novel as the teleportation concept has been flogged to death.

Travel in normal space is much more interesting and could be made fairly quick by say a combination of an inertial damping field generated around a vehicle to protect it and the occupants from the harsh accelerations produced by say a graviton drive. Essentially employing the enormous forces of gravity pent up in a large body like a moon or planet to fling the transport away from or towards a body at phenomenal speed. You could make it as simple or complex as you like, with say a projected graviton collector that funnels gravity flux and can be expanded to any diameter you choose to increase or retard the velocity. Like the hydrogen collector fields on the ram ships of older scifi.

With this method of transport you could add in complex situations where the vehicle's limitations in low gravity-well situations call for drastic solutions. You could incorporate quantum black holes held within restraining fields as a drive upgrade. the inertial damping, the modification of space-time around the transport could be explained away as an extension of the typical anti-grav plating employed in most scifi and that is universally accepted without explanation.

Anyway perhaps there is something in my thoughts that can lead you to a new concept. We need one, the 'beaming' 'stargate' business has been so overdone it's a joke.