Flight Dynamics

As I've said before, they never get that right. In Alien, Nostromo ignited its engines in the direction of orbit to "Drop" from orbit. But, this would actually push it to a higher orbit. It need to retro-fire to drop.

Flight Dynamics,,In many Space rerlated movies there are ships turning almost instantly rather than in a wide arc...(Also they depict sounds in space during explosions,,or engine thrusts..) If there are limitaions to the ION engines,,to my mind there might be a third type of engine on board to attain true inter steller space travel.. 1-The basic jet engine for landing 2-Ion Engine for sub-light speed 3-Inter steller propulsion(unknown at this time) There was a time delay between engaging the Prometheus ION engine and the collision..so clearly an ION engine alone would not have made the trip from Earth in under 3 years..

Avatar got it right :)

Speaking of the Prometheus engine placement...refer to the landing. It looks to me like the Ship is moving slowly forward,,and the engines are also facing forward and slowly rotate down to the ground,,to soften the landing. If the same engines are used for forward movement and landing..seems unusual. I guess it could be possible to rotate engines 360 degrees,,but the engines were sort of fixed..facing forward till actual landing.. There could be separate engines for each funtion,,,but I don't know about that design. THe use of landing engines sort of makes sense,,but still the location of power jets and it rotation into position seemed curious..

This is the one part that seemed correct to me. Slightly forward facing and downwards would kill forward motion and maintain height so that it didn't drop like a stone. Near the ground, the engines swivelled into a vertical alignment. Exactly correct. I've not seen a Harrier Jump Jet close up, but I imagine it would work in a similar manner.

Yes I see what you mean and the scenes shows a landing in a similar fashion to Harrier.. I sometimes forget that the year of the movie,,is not too far in our future,,and the basic flight basics could...and should still be used. I want it all to be like Star Trek!

@Indy John I think you are correct on their being a separate engine besides the ION system. As stated in my thread about them obtaining faster than light speed travel, traveling 35 light years in just over 2, they would have to use something unknown. I'd like to think it were an engine based on the Alcubierre drive. This theory was proposed by Miguel Alcubierre, and seems to be the only plausible engine to travel that distance in such a time. The only thing my brain can wrap around at this time anyway.

Creating a wave bubble could be a useful propulsion system..to attain faster than light speeds.. It is that Hawking Radiation problem that has me concerned,,needs to be solved before a functional system can be used by future adventureres

"..operating engines.." In the opening flight scenes the Prometheus is shown moving through space,,with all the engines blazing away..(this before arriving at the moon). If they are at ..or near Lightspeed(by any propulsion method) would the engine be in use that way? Based on other movies(may not be the best source of info)..most of the energy is spent getting to the needed speed..then (with no space restrictions that would reduce speed) that travel speed would pretty much stay the same,,until needing to go to sub-light speed. The engines being used in that opening scene,,just seemed to be not applicable to the ships location in space. If there was some unknown sort of light speed power source would there even be flames?

a wizard did it