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An airframe-hull ship can actually fly to or from orbit, its hull generating lift so that the ship’s drive doesn’t have to do all the work of overcoming gravity. This will work even if the ship’s space acceleration rating is lower than local gravity.
If they were using contragravity, the acceleration of the drive wouldn't matter for liftoff.
This also means that we're going to need runways.
That got me to wondering about the take-off profile.
A ship with full zero-g, zero-atmosphere maneuvering systems is perfectly controllable at stupidly insane angles of attack.
If the ship is lighter than the thrust available, then it can maintain orientation even in a stall while the ship still accelerates upward. It will also, eventually, get past stall speed with this profile.
So I can see airframe-hulled ships using just enough runway to get the nose pointed up then powering their way awkwardly skyward with the vernier thrusters keeping it pointed where you're wanting to go.
Overloaded airframe-hulls are just going to have to use the whole runway and claw their way up normal like.
Streamlined and unstreamlined hulls are going to be tail-landers. If you can't overcome local gravity we call that landing a crash and we call the "take-off" a ground display.
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