>At risk of defending JJ Abrams, hadn't Leonard Nimoy already submerged the Enterprise (NCC-1701-A) back in 1986 when he directed Star Trek IV?
Huh? No, where did you get that crazy idea?
There was no Enterprise in the movie, because it was destroyed in the previous movie. The crew used a Klingon bird of prey to go back in time, and they didn't go underwater, they built a tank inside the ship and beamed some whales (and water) into it.
>On reentry the dynamic stresses on the hulls of those ships would be insane to the point of absurdity.
And how does that compare to the stresses on ships that can (in most sci-fi) accelerate to a significant fraction of lightspeed very quickly, or perform extreme maneuvers during space battles?
Even in Star Trek, they recognized that inertia and structural forces would be a big problem with the plot, so they "invented" the "inertial dampers" and the "SIF": structural integrity field, which somehow manages to make the ship strong enough to handle crazy forces well beyond the strengths of the materials it's made from.
Huh? No, where did you get that crazy idea?
There was no Enterprise in the movie, because it was destroyed in the previous movie. The crew used a Klingon bird of prey to go back in time, and they didn't go underwater, they built a tank inside the ship and beamed some whales (and water) into it.
>On reentry the dynamic stresses on the hulls of those ships would be insane to the point of absurdity.
And how does that compare to the stresses on ships that can (in most sci-fi) accelerate to a significant fraction of lightspeed very quickly, or perform extreme maneuvers during space battles?
Even in Star Trek, they recognized that inertia and structural forces would be a big problem with the plot, so they "invented" the "inertial dampers" and the "SIF": structural integrity field, which somehow manages to make the ship strong enough to handle crazy forces well beyond the strengths of the materials it's made from.