Colonial Chrome

As we know, shields are a good explanation for everything.

But what is when shields go off? Or if they have to defend a continous amount of pressure?

I think, that military ships have a good reinforced hull, that will prevent heavy damage.
And I would think, that all Ships, the Mon Calamari had built, would survive under water long enough without shields.

But what is with the normal built YT-1300 or the other ones?
And how long will shields survive the constant pressure of deep water? They prevent Laser fire, but not for long.

*just thinking*

In essence I default to the classic Futurama line, which I'll have to paraphrase -

FRY - "How many atmospheres of pressure can the ship stand Professor?"
FARNSWORTH - "Well, she's designed to operate in the vacuum of space, so anywhere between one and zero I should say."

Unshielded normal ships would be unlikely to hold water at almost any depth. They're braced to keep air in, not water out, and they don't have to resist much more than a single atmosphere pressure to do it. Water is a very high pressure environment and would quickly overcome seals, welds, joints and exploit these failures to ingress. Sinking would be pretty much unavoidable. When you add in that starships are VERY heavy even accounting for their size, and once the water's coming in, you're pretty much screwed.

But as you say, shields are handy things, not least because the p-shields are very low energy usage. e-shields in this context are useless. The way you'd have to determine it is to work out the total energy required to balance the force of the water on the p-shields (Pressure in kPasPSCM by volume of shield pocket), and then work out how long the reactor can fuel such energy usage before its fuel is depleted. However, on a gut reaction, unless you're ridiculously low of fuel, you'd die of starvation long before the shields died out if you were in anything up to, say forty meters of water.

So I wouldn't worry too much.

It's also worth noting that if the Gungans can use them for entire cities in perpetual usage then I'd rule it a fair easy thing to do.

Don' do it, though, it'd be too icky

hm... Is it possible, that MonCal invented special "deep water" shields?

In "Stock Ships", they have, but this nice little book isn't canon.

Sure, yeah, I have no problem with that. As I was trying to imply, in the end once you have the tech, implementation is just an energy conversion problem. If you know the energy 'coming at' the shields then you know the minimum amount of energy you need to 'push out' the shields. By the time you get round then to working out how long a SIR can put out that kind of power, usually you're looking at very VERY big numbers - the p-shields are designed to resist small object impact at superluminal velocities, which without the DXM systems hit the ship at INFINITE energy. Compared to infinity, a finite amount of power is so insignificant it may as well be non-existent. In fact mathematically it is as close to a working definition of zero as you can get.

One thing possibly worth mentioning is that it is certainly theoretically possible to land a ship on water using the p-shields as a 'virtual hull', however actually doing so would be really unpleasant for the crew as what you'd have would be a spherical 'hull' with a very heavy weight over the waterline. The net result of this would be fairly predictable - the ship would execute a roll, eventually coming to a stop at a 90 degree bank. Not so much fun for those inside. You could counter, of course, by having your autopilot use the CRMS to balance you out, but then you'd be using just as much power as if you went into a simple hover.

I had another thought, it is possible that with the p-shields being quite tight to the hull, and with ships being very VERY heavy, they might sink through sheer weight, rather than having the p-shields work as a hull.

And move up by engines or repulsorlift... makes sense...


So you have to order a special MonCalDesign, if you want to travel beneath water...
But you can hide from CSA or Empire in a see or lake for a short time...


Thank you for ideas

Personally I'd make any party attempting to hide a ship underwater REALLy work for it, there would be leaks, electrical faults, failing systems, lights going out, a really terrifying 'we're all gonna die' thing and probably essentially make them ditch the ship.

But, yes, in theory, and I wanna stress that in THEORY, a ship ought to be able to survive submergence for a time.

This is by no means an intelligent comparison, but we do have Luke's X-wing stuck in a swamp on Dagobah for a good while. There's little indication that the poor fighter was immediately flyable after Yoda dragged it out, but it was at the least repairable with minimal work.

This means nothing much, mind you, except that key internal components withstood having the ecology of a Dagobah swamp get all in their seals; deep-water immersion is a different thing entirely.

yeah, the Dagobah thing is interesting for a number of reasons, not the least of which is we have absolutley no idea - there's no real framing reference- for how the two elements of the story are coinciding. What that leaves here is a question of how long it takes for Luke to fix it.

plus were're talking essentially it's in a puddle, so the water pressure isn't that high.

Also, Luke wasn't IN the fighter when it was underwater, so it doesn't address the issue of crew survival when submerged.

But the BEST thing about the Dagobah X-Wing thing is that twenty six years before the truly awful Snakes on a Plane, we get Snakes on an X-Wing, which is much better.

As Yoda has a darker complexion than Luke, I suppose he'd be taking on Samuel L. Jackson's role from that hellish film.

The role of swearing Air Marshal.

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I'll just let that sink in.

I'm curious as to how much effort it would take to modify a starship's hull so that it can safely travel underwater without the need to rely on special shields.

I've always wanted my character to have a Ghtroc 720 that could go deep sea diving!

The whole pressure and water thing is very interesting and I don't think it can be answered too easily.

First of all, the obvious factor of pressure is relevant, of course. Unlike the ship of Professor Farnsworth, most ships in Star Wars are likely designed for a wider range of atmospheric pressures. A starship should be able to deal with atmospheres that go beyond the atmospheric pressure of earth, simply because there will likely be planets with very diverse atmospheres. Adding in some safety margin, I would assume that most starships designed for air-breathing humanoids can stand up to twice the terrestrial pressure guaranteed and up to four times that much as maximum safety.

Keeping air in and not water out is not so much of an issue. An airtight ship will automatically be watertight as well, but that is only relevant for the people inside. The ship itself is something completely different.

After all, the ship is a complex piece of machinery and water has much more to offer than just pressure. It is a totally extreme counterpart to vacuum itself. We already looked at the pressure difference, but something much more important for the survival of the starship itself as a technological system is not the pressure, but the water itself.

While vacuum is an insulator, creating numerous heat problems for a starship under normal circumstances, water is a pretty good heat conductor. Massive heat exchangers, needed to keep a starship from overheating, might easily react problematic if their efficiency suddenly spikes through the roof. It may not even be possible to prevent that and you could end up with your main reactor and life support systems shutting down because they lose too much heat. The mechanical stress of sudden immersion in water might be another such factor. Unless we assume that the ship is indeed completely protected by a watertight particle shield, the heat conduction itself will be a problem, maybe to the point of being catastrophic.

Starship engines, designed to run at insane temperatures, would probably be chunks of junk the very moment the ship is immersed in water. Mechanical stress, following the sudden heat exchange, might literally tear the ship's structure apart in multiple places. Even windows might burst, if the vessel ended up in water only moments after atmospheric re-entry.

Then there is also corrosion and conductivity. Vacuum does not corrode and even air does not have impressive conductivity. Water offers plenty of both. My computer could probably work quite well in a diverse range of atmospheric pressures, even with some more exotic gases around, but the instant I dropped it into a pool of water, it would be nothing but junk. Destroyed in an instant.

For reasons like these, I think any starship that is not specifically designed to withstand such circumstances, simply won't.

And why would you want to do so anyway? Detection? Water offers little to no protection against getting found. Not unless the starship sunk very deep into an ocean. Most modern submarines have that problem already. With the right satellites, you can track them down easily up to a certain depths. I doubt that any terrestrial military satellite competes well with the sensors of a Star Wars military starship. It would probably only work well as a means of camouflage, if nobody is looking for it anyway.

Well, if you're using the ion engines when you splash down, then sure, yeah, that's going to go all kinds of bang. Then again, if using ion engines in an atmosphere you're going to have all sorts of interesting problems anyway. Most ships would be using repulsors when entering a non-vacuum environment, and those have only a slight energy signiature.


I've always assumed that shielding technology accounts for thermal stresses incurred during re-entry.

In any case, if theships in Star Wars were generally THAT hot when they landed, would that not at least imply that even when landing on land, you'd have serious concerns?


I have to be nerdy here and observe that in fact water is a near perfect electrical insulator. Its actually the salts in unpure water that are very good at conducting a charge. If you put a PC into a tank of distilled water, it's run just fine. Actually probably better than it did before. Not that this is relevant, the odds of finding even a small pool of distilled water naturally are pretty long.


This discussion spawned from a conversaion between myself and Karanor concerning an idea he was mulling over about a scout / recon ship.

Depending on how the atmosphere processors work, it would be fairly straightforward to covert a vessel to survive submersion.

After some waterproofing of any exterior electronics, it would just be a question of increasing the air pressure inside the ship as you gradually submerge, keeping the pressure inside the ship slightly higher than the water pressure outside.

Of course, you'd need to ascend slowly afterwards to avoid giving the crew the bends on ascent, so it wouldn't be ideal for ships that might require a fast get-away from their aquatic hiding place. . And you'd need to adjust the atmospheric mix to avoid nitrogen narcosis at around 40 meters deep, and oxygen toxicity at around 80 meters.

I believe Mon Calimari are immune to getting the bends and so it seems likely they would use this method, at least partly, with their amphibious space vessels as it reduces the need to massively over-engineer the hull.

I don't see that as being especially easy - the outer plates of a starship are not air tight, they don't need to be, so you'd have to essentially waterproof every square milimeter of the ship.
Plus, the electrics are not the only device in a ship that would be badly affected by water - you'd really not want water in the ion engines, for example, and by their nature they are exposed to the outside world.


Actually the Mon Cals simply flood their ships - they're quite happy breathing water.