"How to Salvage a Sunken Spaceship" Topic

"This was an idea loosely inspired by a Sci-fi movie that I will not name here. But the relevant part is that it involves an interstellar colony ship landing on a planet and the crew learning that the ship had been submerged in an ocean.

Now there is something that kind of bugged me at the time of seeing it, that I thought would be a rather interesting set piece that I myself would like to work with. To illustrate this, here is a rough cross-section of a spin gravity spaceship in space.

This changes things because now there is a definite down that no longer corresponds to the floor. The bottom of the ship would be unaffected the top of the ship would be completely upside-down while the sides would be…well on their sides. Where once there was a gently sloping hallway now it's a really long curved shaft going up and an equally deep pit going down. Which personally I find much more interesting topography than what we got in the film where the deck plan was always nice and flat. Poseidon adventure on steroids. But this new orientation of the ship creates a rather interesting problem that I admittedly can't think through. How on (insert planet name or designation here) can you get around?"
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Amicalement
Armand

A Chimpanzee can do that.

A ship of this configuration would most likely not be designed to land on a planet. And would disintegrate on re-entry.

But assuming it is able to re-enter and land, the designers would have accounted for this possibility. Either by including connection points and railings to allow a crew to move while in gravity, or (More boringly) design the ship to articulate so that former walls would work a walkways. I.E. rotate you ring 90 degrees so that the axis of rotation is not tangent to the surface but normal to it.

The ships in Larry Niven's "Mote in God's Eye" series have reconfigurable cabins for under spin or under thrust. Such a design can land but would of necessity be a tail sitter.

Robert

Thanks.

Amicalement
Armand

Airbags to float it to the surface, though you'd need a lot of them, and its unclear if the structure of the vessel would hold together, especially after crashing onto a planet.

Anti-grav lifters perhaps too, though those will cost more.