The thrusters are presumably propelling something out of their ports/nozzles/whatevers in order to work....
....
Won't this put enormous stress on the thrusters? What's that doing to the 'airframe'. And where is the heat going to go?
Firstly, regarding thrusters, our ships certainly
look like they use fairly conventional thrusters - of some sort - as the main source of propulsion but our positional thrusters are just glowy blue "nozzles" which are, apparently, capable of generating phenomenal amounts of thrust.
Seriously, if you consider that a bunch of glowy blue nozzles are generating sufficient thrust to keep a 2000t T10 aloft on a 5g planet, you have to wonder why the same T10 actually
needs those honking great main thrusters in order to make it move forwards at 300m/sec.
I haven't done the maths but I'd bet a couple of those glowy blue nozzles provide
as much thrust as way more thrust than a ship's main thrusters.
Probably best if we don't think about this too much, but I digress.
Point is, we
have got the glowy blue positional thrusters and they look a bit like the ion thrusters outfits like NASA are currently speculating might be a good way to move spaceships around in the future.
Ion thrusters don't, AFAIK, produce an exhaust that is likely to act as a source of ignition for combustible gases.
Course, currently Ion thrusters don't work
at all in anything other than a vacuum
and they only produce a miniscule percentage of the thrust ED ships would require but I guess, maybe, we can put that down to a thousand years of development.
Also, speaking of a thousand years of development, if the ships in ED
did use thrusters that might act as a source of ingition when operating within a planet's atmosphere, that's probably the sort of thing that would have been discovered (rather casastrophically) hundreds of years ago and been fixed long before the first Anaconda took to the skies.
Issues surrounding airframe stress have already been raised many times in ED and, again, it's probably best if we don't think about it too much.
An Anaconda, for example, has those 6 extra landing-legs that appear to support it's main cargo bay.
Thing is, if it
needs those extra landing-legs to support the cargo bay when it's sitting on a landing-pad, how come it doesn't disintegrate when it's hovering and all that weight is hanging off the airframe, supported by the glowy blue nozzles?
My own pet-theory is that the Annie doesn't actually
need those landing-legs to support the weight of the cargo bay and, instead, they're there 'cos the cargo bay can detach, kind of like the pod on Thunderbird 2.
There's plenty of other oddities too, though, which can't be dismissed as easily.
When you've got a ship like an Annie, that's 150m long and has a pitch-rate of around 70°/sec, the front of the ship is accelerating to around 200mph in 1 second when you pull back on the stick, which equates to about 9g - which would be enough to kill anybody unfortunate enough to be in that fancy observation area near the nose, regardless of whether they're wearing magnetic boots or not.
So, erm, yeah.
There's already a lot of oddness related to things like inertia and stress in ED.
About the best we can really hope for is that ED model the physics so it, at least,
acknowledges differences in atmospheric density so that, perhaps, an Annie that has a pitch-rate of 70°/sec in vacuum has a significantly slower pitch-rate in a dense atmosphere
and generates more heat as a result of the thrusters having to work harder to move the ship around.
Like I've said, I
would like to see stress modelled - not necessarily
accurately, but well enough that you could damage a ship by flying it erratically in an atmosphere.