If you have the power to cross the stars, surely taking off from a steep gravity well wouldn't be a problem.
But I do like the idea that you wouldn't be able to.
So instead you slingshot your orbital craft past the planet, using its gravity well itself to build up speed— And you release a cable ahead of you, that swings down through the atmosphere to zero surface velocity at the point of your perigee, so your away team and their new friends can attach it to a glass elevator and be smoothly hoisted into space.
> If you have the power to cross the stars, surely taking off from a steep gravity well wouldn't be a problem.
Different problems entirely. You don't need a lot of thrust to get to high velocities. But you need a lot of thrust to leave a planets gravity well. On a planet, your thrust needs to win not only gravity, but also any atmospheric losses. E.g. on a 3g planet, you'd need thurst in excess of 3g's to leave.
But to reach say 0.25c, a tiny ion engine over a long enough time would suffice. an engine that wouldn't even get you off of earth.
…Seriously. I tried to figure out just how much xenon you'd need to make that work. But you'd need to be able to store it in something like 15-dimensional space to even fit it within the diameter of the observable universe. And even if your ion engine and Hubble-scale fuel tank weighed less than the mass of the lightest quarks, the amount of propellant you'd need for it to reach 0.25c is still well over 10^600 times the combined mass of the entire observable universe, and would also collapse somewhere around 10^600 times the diameter of the observable universe into a single black hole:
Of course, this also shows the intent of my original comment: Energy density matters, and somebody packing enough to casually cross interstellar densities isn't going to struggle with a planetary gravity well unless Idk they're doing like a low-tech off-grid trend or something.
But I do like the idea that you wouldn't be able to.
So instead you slingshot your orbital craft past the planet, using its gravity well itself to build up speed— And you release a cable ahead of you, that swings down through the atmosphere to zero surface velocity at the point of your perigee, so your away team and their new friends can attach it to a glass elevator and be smoothly hoisted into space.