The other day someone suggested that a ship might just hover raher
than using a landing cradle or the like. They pointed out that
antigravity is a very old and very reliable tech.

This bugged me a bit and I finally figured out why.

Essentially, what the ship is doing is "flying in close formation"
with the planet. So the issue isn't the reliability of the engines,
it's the accuracy and response time of the controls and pilot!

Wind gusts could be bad. And the ship has a lot of area for the wind
to act on.

It'd be rather like a ship in a river running the engines to counter
the cuirrent to stay alongside a dock.

Sure, you can do it, but that's am awful lot of mass that can crunch
anything that gets between it and the dock.

Better to just tie up to the dock except in very special situations.
--
Leonard Erickson (aka shadow)
shadow at shadowgard dot com