Effects of a supermassive ship colliding with a planet

The basis of my story revolves around a single survivor escaping a massive colony ship gone critical above the skies of an alien world. After his escape via escape pod, the ship crashes halfway across the world on a separate continent. This got me to question what events might occur if a ship as large as say, 8.5 miles in length, made a crash landing into the planet.

I have not fully developed this planet, but I have a general idea and theme going, with a few micromanaged details here and there. But the general idea is a planet similar to the concept of a "Super Earth", with a larger diameter, thicker and heavier atmosphere, hotter climate, and stronger gravity.

For reference; let's just ask what would happen if this were on Earth instead. We can make adjustments to the data later, accordingly. Even with near-future period technology in science-fiction, the ship is already coming in for a landing when the crash occurs, so the speed must be significantly slower than say normal travel. The cause of the crash appears to be a stellar anomaly which leads to a critical engine failure.

If the failure occurs say within a few hundred KM of Earth's atmosphere whilst the ship is probably clocking close to 5 KM/S on a gradually slowing and controlled descent and in the midst of positioning a vertical landing, depending on the angle of the ship at the time of the failure, how hard would it hit the Earth as it picks up speed?

Assuming a slightly tilted angle, how would that change during the descent? If protagonist lands in Albania, and the ship lands in China, how would this affect his environment, if at all? Would this sort of thing be a local disaster, a regional disaster, a planetary event? The ship is clearly denser than most asteroids, being made of fictional metallic alloys and substances, so how would this change the scenario? Would the presumed hollowness of much of the structure change anything?

posted over 6 years ago

Don'tQuestionTheMuse‭

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