There is no possible way to answer that question without first answering the question of 'how does the starship go faster than light in the first place'. You could conceptualise pretty much...
There is no possible way to answer that question without first answering the question of 'how does the starship go faster than light in the first place'. You could conceptualise pretty much anything you wanted for whatever result you wanted.
If it's warp technology and the ship enters an alternate dimension to travel then either it enters the alternate dimension with no external effect, or it enters an alternate dimension and causes an explosion from a small bomb to a nuke to a supernova, your choice.
If it's wormhole technology same again, either the wormhole just sucks in the ship, or it sucks in the ship and a little bit of air, or it drains the entire atmosphere. Might also come with explosions if you wanted.
If it's mass elimination technology then you can make your own call as to whether the atmosphere then passes through the ship without interacting with it, or if it blasts it into subatomic soup.
This is one of those situations with a relevant XKCD. Randall's talking about a baseball moving at 90% the speed of light, but I imagine this is roughly the same situation if not worse. The main...
This is one of those situations with a relevant XKCD. Randall's talking about a baseball moving at 90% the speed of light, but I imagine this is roughly the same situation if not worse. The main problem being this:
The ideas of aerodynamics don’t apply here. Normally, air would flow around anything moving through it. But the air molecules in front of this ball don’t have time to be jostled out of the way. The ball smacks into them so hard that the atoms in the air molecules actually fuse with the atoms in the ball’s surface. Each collision releases a burst of gamma rays and scattered particles.
Going that fast near anything else just doesn't sound like a good idea.
There is no possible way to answer that question without first answering the question of 'how does the starship go faster than light in the first place'. You could conceptualise pretty much anything you wanted for whatever result you wanted.
If it's warp technology and the ship enters an alternate dimension to travel then either it enters the alternate dimension with no external effect, or it enters an alternate dimension and causes an explosion from a small bomb to a nuke to a supernova, your choice.
If it's wormhole technology same again, either the wormhole just sucks in the ship, or it sucks in the ship and a little bit of air, or it drains the entire atmosphere. Might also come with explosions if you wanted.
If it's mass elimination technology then you can make your own call as to whether the atmosphere then passes through the ship without interacting with it, or if it blasts it into subatomic soup.
This is one of those situations with a relevant XKCD. Randall's talking about a baseball moving at 90% the speed of light, but I imagine this is roughly the same situation if not worse. The main problem being this:
Going that fast near anything else just doesn't sound like a good idea.