Have you heard of the sci-fi movie Lifepod? I think it was a sci fi original remake but it is exactly what you talked about with a group surviving in a space life pod
I liked the line in Mass Effect: Andromeda where you can ask if it's easy to accidentally launch an escape pod, and the response you get is, "Ryder, it's an escape pod. If it's difficult to use, you're designing it wrong."
"To the Escape pods!" *Unto arrival, start reading the 80 page quick-start guide of the 10 minute heat-up process for the rescue power core* "WTF? Who designed this?" "Commander Ryder, cause he accidently launched a bunch of them last time" Indeed, that would be a design-flaw the designer DEFINITIVELY will regret.
@@InventorZahran I would guess a flip-cover button or switch would be enough like it is in reality. 2 steps, easy to do even with one arm and one finger only.
Let's not forget one of my personal favorites: "We've equipped your escape pod with a science-fiction super fabricator so that you can build a high-tech planetary facility within which you can assemble your own escape vessel using only local minerals, flora and fauna. Welcome to survival game planet."
@@Ghost8492 I know you arrive in a little escape-pod like thing in Satisfactory, but that's more intentional deployment than emergency escape. I *think* Breathedge does the escape pod thing, but I can't remember that one so well... and Space Engineers has a start that is essentially "you're in an escape pod in deep space" thing too.
As someone who has been on a lot of cruise ships, every so often, you will see the crew take one of the lifeboats for a spin to make sure its engine is functioning properly. I always thought that could be an interesting slice-of-life scene for a sci-fi series.
Honestly something I would love to see in a Sci-fi series in general is just random upkeep of the ship. Ships in Scifi usually seem to just run perfectly unless there is battle damage or plot important issue. I would love to see a random engineer having to take random scans of the ships hull to check for random microfractures, needing to replace anti-grav plates that are burnt out like an old lightbulb, having to spend a minute realigning the ships guidance computer to count for inevitable discrepancies. Similar thing I want to see more of is just ships having bad designs or even a mention of a ship canceled in development due to it having too many issues to make it worth producing.
@@Nostripe361 Even though it will never be a movie or series and I may never get the book published, a sci-novel I poke along at writing has exactly that; a couple scenes with habitation engineers periodically checking the crew and passenger quarters utilities and ventilation.
@@Nostripe361 The Expanse did this, but it was mostly expressed by people replacing clogged filters and burnt-out electrical gear most of the time. Not always though
Ship size is a real issue. I spent the better part of a decade on U.S. Navy carriers. Even in a drill where nothing is actually on fire, your looking at 5 to 10 minutes to make it from the center of the ship to the skin where the lifeboats are. And you can’t really make it easier, the closures that make it hard to traverse are part of the armor and compartmentalization.
Personally I think that since spaceships share a lot more things with submarines than with surface vessels, the emphasis must be placed into modularity and survivability rather than immediate evacuation. When the outside environment is so hostile, the obvious answer is to stay inside as long as possible until a proper rescue can be executed.
Yes. The idea that the spaceship's power plant is about to blow up is often raised, but the Atomic Rockets site pointed out -- eject the reactor, not the crew....
@@davidbirr2718 unless for plot reasons or dramatics, you decide the ejections system was one of those systems that was damaged along with said reactor.
@@AnonD38 The Russians did, but I'm not aware of any other nation that designs and builds subs doing so. I think that there was only 1 occasion ever involving an old Soviet sub that had an accident where the escape pod could have been used, but IIRC it was damaged in the accident and couldn't be jettisoned. Sadly, the Soviet/Russian Navy and government brass wasted a lot of time and being fairly paranoid and overly proud at the time, refused help from the UK and the US and by the time they finally agreed to help, it was too late and the surviving crew had died.
One of the best escape pod stories in sci-fi is actually from the second episode of Star Wars The Clone Wars, "Rising Malevolence." Most of the episode is about some fairly minor (and expendable) characters stuck in an unpowered escape pod in a debris field, waiting for rescue while something is actively hunting them. It has a real claustrophobic vibe to it.
The B-58 Hustler’s escape pods are the most Kerbal escape system ever actually put into production. I just enjoy the fact that the A-12/SR-71 didn’t bother. They just put the pilot in what was essentially a beefed-up space suit. “Screw it, that’s too much weight/complexity in the aircraft, just wrap them in a better flight suit that can survive Mach-3/80,000 ft. ejection.” Which is exactly what they did. And there were multiple Mach-3/80,000ft. ejections successfully performed over the operational life of the Blackbird. (Sadly, both resulted in the pilot surviving but the back seater dying - one when he opened his helmet after landing in the ocean and water filled his suit and he drowned, the other apparently something happened during aircraft breakup/descent that caused fatal injury.)
I had to pause the video for all the laughing. Is he scared of the fact he's just ejected from a rocket, or is he scared of the _completely unbothered stone cold maniac_ to his left?!
I think the guy on the left is just experiencing high G-forces, while the guy on the right is thankful he didn’t open his lips before the G’s forced his face to lock up.
One topic I've been exploring in my own writing is that in most situations, staying on the ship and trying to repair it is the safer option. Most ships that are destroyed don't explode in massive fireballs, but instead lose manuvering and/or life support. They are left drifting on the vector they were travelling. If help can reach you (the setting only has sunlight speed), it is going to take days, if not weeks, and you are better off all staying in one spot, trying to make the most of the resources you have or possibly repair the ship.
I've had the idea of a kind of "storm shelter/bunker" that functions like a mini-ship inside the mothership. It's systems are fully independent from the mothership and can "hatch" out of the mothership if the mothership is beyond repair.
Yes and no. An enemy could come along and finish you off, or capture you. So being able to escape to allied forces may be more advantageous. Also, many parts of space are dangerous, and enough damage can mean no enough protection from it. And if your ship is drifting toward a planet or star, you probably don't want to be on it when it hits it. So there is a lot to think about when deciding if it's better to stay on a ship or not. All that said, the core point is very much valid, and could add more interest in a situation where the characters have to make that choice. In Voyager's "The Year of Hell", she had them abandon ship because Voyager could no longer support them. Had they stayed, they'd have run out of food and/or air for them. It had taken too much damage to support the full crew anymore. So yeah, the ship may be "in tact", but it's like staying on a barren island. You won't survive if you stay, so you leave hoping to find somewhere you CAN survive. But if the ship can keep you alive, and hope of rescue is real, might be better to stay put and wait it out.
Ive been thinking about that with interstellar torch ships. Smaller escape pods wouldnt be able to hold enough provisions for the journey which is much longer since you cant keep the 1g acceleration. Even if they could you wouldnt be able to capture around the host star 200 years later.
I have a few similar ideas in the scifi novel I'm writing. Even in battle, ships dont tend to go up in a fireball, they break apart instead, unless the reactor itself blows, which doesn't always happen.
Love how space pods are frequently used in Star Wars as a badass way to open a great story. Apart from the iconic opening of A New Hope, the legendary KOTOR game begins with the protagonists Revan and Carth going to Taris in order to find the escape pod of the Jedi Bastila Shan
I like how the Starfury in Babylonb 5 has an ejection system similar to the Hustler: the whole cockpit just flies off leaving the rest of the fighter behind.
That would be the F-111's cockpit rather than the B-58 Hustler which had 3 individual seats which would activate encapsulation for the individual seat as it ejected.
I can't remember which universe it was in but at least one setting had capsules like that which were unfortunately just large enough to trigger the seeker head on anti-fighter missiles. The fighter would take the first hit and the pod would take the second, or if active fighters were still in the area a missile might go for the escape pod rather than the intended target.
Another fun fact about Star Trek escape pods, they are designed to connect to each other thus sharing resources and people can even travel between pods. The bridge of the Galaxy Class is also an escape pod (never used because of real life budget reasons). It would act as the core of the lattice, it had its own fusion generators, life support, and shields. With the Bridge in the escape pod lattice survival time went from a few weeks to several months, long enough for a emergency signal to reach someone even at low power.
Pretty curious to think that the lack of will to destroy a space pod literaly made possible the plot of the entire Star Wars OT. I wonder what the imperial who refused to destroy it said when he realized that the capsule with no sign of lifeforms had inside the droids that possessed the Death Star Plans 😅
In canon at least, that officer's POV is explored in "From a Certain Point of View" anthology. Basically, he didn't want to shoot as he though wasting a good shot for seemingly no reason would look poorly on his review, and once he figured out he probably should have shot at it, he had a mountain of bureaucratic papertrails made to made sure nobody could find out he was responsible. Once again, the Empire's own doctrines hurt itself more than it helped.
I would think that shooting down escape pods would be considered a war crime, which would explain the reluctance of the gunnery crew to target even an apparently empty one. I feel like you could also have a few senior officers who fought in the Clone Wars remembering the CIS destroying escape pods at several points, and this making them very uncomfortable with shooting at one.
TNG Enterprise technical manual had my favorite system. Most pods were capacity focused [8?] while others were specialist. Some were interlinking, medical suites, communication focused etc.
If memory serves, wasn't the system rigged to launch even empty pods at the last apparent moment, just to link up with other pods and increase the supplies available to those who escaped?
I've wondered about settings that subvert our lifeboat expectations. The Titanic's lifeboats had a total capacity of only a fraction of the total passengers, and this was far more than what was legally required at the time. The expectation was that these lifeboats would be used to ferry passengers to a rescue ship, as previous sinkings had shown that modern ships sank very slowly and the use of radio along trade routes ensured that rescue could arrive quickly. We could extrapolate this to sci-fi: Most of the dangers of space aren't mitigated by going from a large ship to a small lifeboat. In fact, some of those dangers get worse, as you don't have the bulk of the ship and it's hull to protect you. Most things that would be fatal to a large ship would also be fatal to small lifeboats. So what if the expectation became that lifeboats would be used to ferry folks to rescue, not to have them live in them for days after abandoning ship. And then you can double subvert it by having a Titanic situation where you do need to evacuate the large ship immediately, like due to a massive radiation leak, where getting away is safer than staying.
In the Honorverse, it is established that some of the bigger warships dont carry enough lifeboats for the whole crew. The setting is often very... pragmatic, and it is acknowledged that if you are in the depths of a superdreadnaught, then either A) the situation develops slow enough for you to escape via small craft, or B) you wouldn't have time to make it to the skin. Note, the senior officers on such ships are some of those buried away in the most heavily armoured sections, where they are most likely to survive, but unable to escape if it goes fully belly up.
@@ParanoidMarvinMk2 Also everybody in the Honorverse goes into action wearing an EV skinsuit and helmet because they aren't bloody stupid. So the smallcraft and lifepods/boats have a secondary role of hoovering up everybody who survives a wreck but is basically floating free.
I am impressed that someone here remembered how lifeboats were viewed prior to 1912. Indeed, only a few decades earlier, if a ship was in distress, you'd be lucky if *anyone* survived. Disasters like the _Clallam_ and the _Lusitania_ also show how lifeboats do not guarantee survival, and that not entering one does not necessarily doom a potential survivor. This can be translated with spacesuits essentially being lifebelts, and just as with a real ship, you need to be certain that your spacecraft is doomed before launching escape pods into the vast reaches of space.
@@stamfordly6463 They even deliberately pump unoccupied spaces down to vacuum when they clear for battle as an additional measure to prevent damage (fire, etc.). So if you were cleared to move from one compartment to another when at battle stations, that suit becomes a necessity. This doesn't exactly have an analogue in modern vessels, since its not like submarines flood unoccupied compartments. The lifebelt analogy is a decent one though, in that even if you get blown off the ship, you have a (probably small) chance of survival.
That's how I imagine escape pods in Star Trek, in reality most maritime disasters occur close to shore, lifeboats are just a way to get to shore safely. I'd imagine most starship disasters would happen in orbit or in a solar system, where you could get to a planet in a short amount of time.
You missed the opportunity to talk about escape pods that are able to connect to multiple other pods and form some kind of 'mini-station' until rescue.
@@astebbin We never see it on screen (that I know of), but Star Trek tech manuals say the escape pods of TNG and after can do just this. And some are even designated as medical or supply pods. Not meant to be loaded with people.
Not sure about escape pods. But I ran a Sci fi game in my own setting, where may of the asteroid miners would live in effectively a space motor home. These ships will often be rigged up together to create a trailer park IN SPACE.
Really love the episode of the clone wars where they're stuck in escape pods and there are drones hunting them down in a debris field. Attempting to contact other pods. The slow realisation that they're in danger. The desperate battle in space with suits that only have a few minutes of air in them. Amazing episode and concept, real nasty close-in stuff.
Something i really like from the TNG technical manual is pods on larger ships are made to dock and cluster up. Lets engineers and medics get to the whole crew and share power, a few of the pods are even made with more then two docking ports to help the packing density and structural integrity of the cluster.
the biggest issue I keep coming to with escape pods / lifeboats is the supplies they can hold. They basically are their own ships that you have to squeeze in somewhere. If you are abandoning ship because you're under attack, what is stopping the enemy from just popping the escape pods? You already have limited space on a ship on account of it needing to be self contained, now we need to tack on hundreds of tiny things, that are only supposed to be used in an emergency that need their own life support, supply hold, propulsion etc. To have what they need to act as a lifeboat, even solo-occupant, they would be roughly the same size as space fighter craft.
Tin Can is a game about surviving in an escape pod made by the lowest bidder, as you frantically try to repair malfunctioning life support and other systems.
Do Warhammer 40K ships feature escape pods? - Probably not for the thousands of "thrall"-type crewmembers manning the engines and loading the guns - Probably not for the servitors hardwired into their stations - Maybe for higher-ranking crew members if they don't have a permanent plug connection to their vessel - Maybe for passengers, if they are of the nobility
Nah, if an Imperial ship is abandoned, the survivors will be left to fight over the dwindling resources since they're essentially moving cities that most inhabitants are born, live, and die on.
It's called savior pods and can support two people for three weeks comfortably so yea they do. The thing with 40k tho, by the time the order to abandon ship comes around most of the crew is dead from decompression
@@Darqshadow In fairness, they were intended to carry more than that (based on the number of weapons in the survival kit, at least 20, with sufficient food, water and air for two weeks), but Jurgen and Cain were the only ones aboard (and the only ones that needed to board it, as everyone else got out of the breached compartment before it vented to vacuum), so it was a little more comfortable for them. At least until they attracted the attention of an ork fighter pilot on their way down from orbit...
@ala5530 yea. But my stance is that unless you're able to get to a pod readily, you're dead when the ship is vented. Lost Fleet by Jack Campbell explores this. The ship itself is made in such a way so a weapon compartment going out doesn't screw up the rest of the ship but unless the bulkheads are able to seal, the gun crew are dead.
I've read military sci-fi from David Weber and others and those ships are designed with less life-pod capacity that the full crew count on the assumption that by the time "Abandon ship!" is declared, much of the crew will already be dead or stuck in sections with no access to a pod.
What if the ship is struck with slow-working malady that will inevitably doom it, and yet there is no one close enough to bring aid before the ship is lost? You may have hours or days to load everyone on escape pods, but simply have not enough space for everyone? Those left in the ship will know they are sentenced to death, and might even mutiny! If you can afford it, have pods for everyone AND more. Extras can be placed strategically around the ship so that no matter where crew are, they are within 30 seconds distance from the pod or something like that. Computer virus could infect the ship and slowly shut it down. It will progress slowly so you have time to escape via pods (before this system is also shut down, or even rules of space combat mighy require such electronic warfare 'munitions' to be specifically designed to not disable, or disable last, the escape pods. First it could kill the engines/FTL and radio. You cannot purge it manually, nor contact/reach your command to help you, or anyone else to help offload the crew. You end up 'dead in the water', with the ship slowly sinking, and crew that won't fit on escspe pods. Shit way to go to be honest.
Being able to swim wasn't a requirement in pretty much any navy until after WW2 because before then it was assumed that if you went into the water because the ship sank and you hadn't made it to a life boat (if any had survived the battle), it was better to drown quickly than tread water hopelessly for possibly hours before finally succumbing. Same kind of thinking and it has a grim logic to it. Of course, by WW2 the chances of you being picked up in the water had drastically increased since the Age of Sail and they realised good sailors were dying needlessly when all they needed were a few swimming lessons.
In the Expanse, you never see scapepods. There's surely small ships or sciffs attached for scape, like the Tachi was in the Donnager, but no the actual scape pod. They go for the "either die or survive in a presurized room" as they find survivors in the damaged corvette further in the series.
happens a few times in Larry Niven's "Known Space" universe. Often times give the entire ship's hull a stasis field, incapacitated indefinitely but not destroyed.
5:07 I feel obligated to point out that this particular thing is in fact an empty torpedo that Scotty modified to be controlled via padd inside of five minutes, so the flying coffin thing is justified in this one case.
One of the Stargazer books had a backstory about the crew of the SS Valiant (the first ship to try to cross the Galactic Barrier and got a crewmember turned into a proto Gary Mitchell). They ended up in escape pods before the captain detonated the onboard nukes. Some were damaged by the blast. The survivors kept their pods together and did their best to try to find a habitable planet nearby. Weeks later, they began developing psychic abilities. Apparently, all of them were affected by the barrier to varying degrees. They ended up finding a planet and formed a colony there. They made contact with the Federation in order to inform them of a new threat
Unless your spaceship is made of explodium, the best lifeboat is to just not abandon ship. Even if it's got holes in it, it still gives you radiation protection, you might have some kind of emergency balloon to inflate inside a compartment to hold air, and above all -- in Newtonian physics you and the ship you're abandoning are going to the same destination whether you like it or not.
Space ships do tend to be full of (depending on setting) rocket fuel, munitions, fusion reactors, antimatter, energy converters, or various other things that tend to make being on board lethally inadvisable. Frequently the speed of life pod launches in such settings is indicated more by the need to get away from such hazards as anything else.
@@willythemailboy2 Yet there is a very high probability that by getting in an escape pod, all you've achieved is exchanging a quick death inside the ship for a slow one outside it.
Thought for larger ships - escape pods are located ajacent to whatever peoplemover system (turbo lifts, elevators, trams, whatever). The lift tubes extend to the inner hull and a section blows out of the outer hull during abandon ship. Then the escape pods use the lift shafts to exit the ship. Advantages are that you can escape people from deeper in the shop this way. And even if one point of egress is destroyed you can ideally travel through the shafts to an undamaged ejection point. Multiperson larger escape pods can be located closer to the outer hull.
The novel of Starship Troopers has the Mobile Infantry deploy from orbit in what are essentially single-use pods. They coat the trooper in an egg-shaped goo, harden it, then drop them. The shell then burns off as ablative protection on the way down, and by the time it's completely worn away, they're at the kind of altitude/speed for parachutes
@@Darqshadow In the novel, the military found roles for those with different abilities and limitations One of the examples they gave is a situation where someone with severe learning difficulties wants to serve, so they gave them a job counting the matchsticks in a pile for their term of service. The key element for them is the desire to serve the nation, and the willingness to see it through
@@Darqshadow The other guy answered your question, but i just want to elaborate that military service was only one of the many ways someone could perform a term of service and earn their franchise. The only way you could be disqualified from serving is if it could be proven that you were genuinely unable to understand what swearing an oath of service meant.
Star Trek actually has some lore regarding the viability of life rafts, if one follows your lead and considers escape pods something different. The Galaxy class escape pod life raft could apparently support three people up to 96 days, and they were able to dock with each other, to share vital resources and enhance survivability in deep space. They also carried subspace radios to summon help, which, given the ludicrous speeds of Star Trek vessels, should arrive within days if not hours, unless you had the bad luck of drifting through the delta quadrant. The also did a pretty good job designing them with a shape that looks at least plausible for reentry, that is, sporting a big flat featureless surface instead of the classic tin can shape known and loved from Star Wars IV.
I imagine those pods were designed with deep space in mind. If you were in range of a habitable planet or another ship. Your transporter would be your first means of escape.
Thinking about this: the best solution definitely does depend on what the craft is doing. A mostly automated mining craft or station would be expected to stay relatively close to infrastructure and thus could do with simply using the shuttles it would need to transport the mined goods. A passenger transport would probably not have escape vehicles, instead focusing on minimizing and mitigating the risks involved and fixing any problems before they reach that point. That being said, they would likely design so that the "habitation module"(bit where the people sleep) is in a separate hardened bulkhead A cargo ship might use a cargo shuttle if needed, or follow those principles. For military ships it depends a lot but I could see them simply going with the small craft they already carry and instead focus on defending the bigger targets so they can do their thing. I definitely see the hardened habitation module being used here. For long term exploration I would do the approach of sending every ship at at most half capacity. Therefore, there is plenty of slack before things start going bad. I would think such ships would have plenty of shuttles to ferry people and supplies(especially after accounting for redundancy) to act as temporary escape craft.
I may be mistaken, but I was under the impression that the life pods in Babylon five were basically just little boxes with life-support that could hold a few people in it and had a radio or something as a distressed beacon. The idea was just to cram into one of these things, and then just basically drift through space until somebody rescued you.
There should be an extra factor in escape pods and lifeboats: the rules and laws of war depending on the setting. Are the enemy prohibited from shooting lifeboats? Are they legally obligated to take them in as POWs?
The Ruthari Imperium in my setting actually take that sort of thing very seriously. Before an engagement they'll contact the enemy commander to ask which one of their ships is their designated rescue ship and if they don't have one they will order one of their own to break formation and serve as theirs. Firing upon escape pods or ships that are in the process of evacuating or undertaking rescue operations is strictly prohibited and not in the "A diplomatic protest will be issued and reprimands will be given out" sort of way but in a "Shoot my escape pod and we glass your planet" way. So far in the entire history of the Imperium, it's only happened twice. The first time the enemy high command thought to break their will to fight by using a policy of no mercy, this was shown to be a mistake. The second time it was done by a pirate faction was hired to try and start a war between the Ruthari and a political rival which almost worked but the plot was uncovered and the pirates found themselves on the receiving end of a century long hunt until not only all of the original members but the descendants of that clan were eliminated from existence. You do not want to know what happened to the fool that hired the pirates in the first place
In the game Nebulous Fleet Command you can destroy enemy lifeboats but doing so has no benefit and will (in an upcoming update) hit you with a War Crimes penalty after the battle. I was playing a few days ago and realized my explosive shells were going to hit the lifeboats if I kept shooting them so I had to switch to a different shell type, it was a neat moment, even though the penalty isn't in place yet I thought it was good practice. I believe in the lore both of the main factions are required to pick up enemy lifeboats after battle, and both do so.
@@achillesa5894Realistically, incidental kills on escape pods wouldn't be punished. Its their own bad luck to be stuck between you and a valid target. Expecting a combatant to handicap themselves in the middle of a fight against a legit target in order to avoid hits on escape pods is ridiculous.
The moose may have been absolutely insane in its pursuit of minimalist materials for a viable system but it at least paved the way for gundam's balute system which was a far more practical use of the concept lol
Still doesn't beat the special heat resistant plastic wrap the Gundam could wrap itself in during the OG tv show (cowardly replaced by a shield and some kind of cooling medium in the compilation movies) The Ballute system isn't actually an emergency system, just a method to quickly invade contested territories from orbit. Preferred methods would still be transportation pods or actually landing entire ms carrying ships that are atmospheric re-entry capable themselves or with a ballude. I still wonder how they got Bright's Ra Cullum into earths atmosphere to have it flying around in MS Unicorn tbh.
Scavengers Reign is about a bunch of people who survive of escape pods. They aren't the flying coffin kinds but are large enough to house a few people. Its mostly an early plot point, the show itself seems to be mostly about the very alien nature of the world itself.
I often think about Worf in the DS9 episode where he got lost. The man just sat inside a little pod, out in the vast nothingness and blasted klingon opera for the hole time enjoying his solitude xD
"It's fairly unlike that the Earth will be out of range of the ISS." I like that Spacedock hasn't ruled out the possibility that Rick Sanchez provokes an AI to heist the entire planet.
See, my solutions in KSP (not that KSP usually requires it, but sometimes, its still good to have, even at the expense of extra part count) have tended towards 2 options: the real life ISS one of keeping the craft docked to the station, or the Galaxy-class option of just separating the habitation area from the rest of the ship and separating with minimal RCS and maximal supplies so they can wait out a rescue. The ISS option is only viable near Kerbin (or, if the station is in orbit around a body with a colony with extra capacity and the transfer vehicles can safely land near by). Usually, stations are pretty safe, with the exception of rendezvous and docking operations, in case you (or Mechjeb) fatfingers the RCS and knocks out a bunch of essentials (like solar panels). The Galaxy option is more broadly viable, though admittedly suffers from "putting all of your eggs in one basket", but that's less of a concern considering anything that would kill the hab generally kills the crew anyways, either immediately or through loss of consumables.
I once had an early-game ship make it to stable orbit with zero fuel remaining, stranding the pilot up there. Was going to consider some sort of rescue, then just had the pilot get out and push instead - the suit RCS could impart /just/ enough ΔV to de-orbit the capsule.
It occurs to me, a former AB Lifeboatman, that massed small escape pods, like the ones in Star Trek properties, would best be designed to be docked with each other after escape, to make search and rescue easier. It's a crucial tactic in maritime abandon-ship procedure, whether swimming in immersion suits, floating in liferafts, or dubiously navigating in motorized lifeboats, to join up with your fellow survivors and become "larger, oranger, and brighter" and therefore more visible to rescuers, who will initially likely themselves be working in hazardous conditions and poor visibility. It also allows for sharing of resources, and most internationally-mandated survival equipment on the market tends to be cheaply made and overpriced, so in a survival situation, you *will* be missing important resources due to defects and failure.
Some of the Star Trek tech manuals, as others in the comments have noted, explain that escape pods are designed to do exactly that. I believe the never-seen escape pods on the Galaxy-class ships were cuboid pods with multiple docking points that could form into a sort of lattice space station.
On your last comment regarding a setting involving survivors in pods: I remember an episode from Andromeda (I believe) where the pods of a destroyed ship had been connected together to combine energy and resources. Found it pretty interesting at the time.
That reminds me of something that happened shortly after the RMS _Titanic's_ sinking: Fifth Officer Lowe brought together a flotilla of five lifeboats, namely numbers 4, 10, 12, 14, (Which he commanded) and Collapsible D, with the idea that a rescue ship would more quickly spot a larger mass in the water.
How much escape pods make sense likely depends on how the main vessel is used. I.e. an orbital factory / raffinery will have a higher risk of an accident warranting a plant evacuation, while also not being too far away from other infrastructure where to escape to. Similarly Cargo Ships might already carry a crew shuttle which can double as an escape pod. and it makes sense for a small crew shuttle to be significantly faster than a huge cargo vessel, and having about the same range. Speaking of Shuttles: for vessels exclusively carrying crew / passengers* escape pods don't make any sense since in total they wold have to be the same size as the whole ship. In this case it is far more sensible to focus on insuring that accidents don't happen in the first place and any consequences are mitigated as far as possible. (wich is the strategy used in the air travel industry) An alternative to escape pods would be reinforced emergency shelters EDIT: *: l'm specially thinking about vessels which are similar to an airliner, which takes relatively short trips for space travel (maximum maybe 20 h) and the hole cabin being filled with seats.
Ever see the size difference between a cruise ship and its life boats? Ever seen a tour of the inside of one? They're designed to hold 150 people packed like sardines. They are designed for survival, not comfort or elbow room. No one would willingly take a six day cruise on a loaded life boat the way they would the full size ship.
@@willythemailboy2True, for a more cruise ship style vessel escape pods make also sense. I was thinking something more like an airliner with passengers relatively closer packed. Should have been clearer about that.
Not sure I agree on escape pods not making sense for passenger ships because they’d take up as much space as the ship itself. Look at cruise ships, for example the icon of the seas can hold 5,000 passengers and 2,000 crew. and can fit all 7,000 of them in 17 450 person lifeboats. Those lifeboats take up hardly any space in the side of the ship. Even if you proportionally doubled the size of the lifeboats to accommodate all the additional stuff you’d need for a escape pod to survive in space they’d still be tiny compared to the ship itself. The only way they’d ever be as big as the ship is if they had all the amenities of a ship, cabins with double beds and en suite bathrooms, cafeterias etc. On a lifeboat/escape pod you’d have a place to sit, and under your seat you’d have enough protein blocks and bags of water to last you a month or two. I’d say it’s completely feasible that Space cruises or passenger ferry’s could have vessels for the purpose of abandoning ship.
A good showing of EscapePods is in the Star Wars Republic Diplomatic Shuttle. (the Red ship in Episode 1) The strange cup at the front is both a meeting room/life pod. It can be full detached. It also comes with shields and a small propulsion drive.
I dont think most spaceships would need a escape pod in the first place. In the ocean ships sink, so people need to get out of the sinking craft and get on a smaller, floating craft. But in space a dead ship is just a drifting hulk. The only thing that needs to escape are the explosive parts(reactor, ammo racks etc.) eject those parts and you could still inhabit the hulk and scavenge whats left.
@@TwinPeaksIndustries Yes, that is a good point! in that case you will need a small craft to escape from a falling orbit. But remember, most spaceships still fly in a stable orbit! a ship wont simply plunge in a falling orbit when its destroyed, they will still orbit whatever body they are orbiting, but just as a drifting hulk that is.
There was a good not-quite-escape-pod story in the Star Trek novel "The Kobayashi Maru" about 30 years ago. Several Enterprise crew are stuck in a damaged shuttle drifting between planets. They all tell stories about Academy experiences while waiting to die. Although since one of them is Scotty, you know a half-destroyed shuttle is only an opportunity for wild MacGyver solutions. (There's a reason MacGyver had a Scottish name, I think...)
I would say EVE online has one of the best escape pods in my option. First off, you are in your escape pod at all time. You control your ship inside your pod. If your ship is destroyed your pod automatically ejects and if your pod is destroyed your consciousness is automatically uploaded into a fresh clone inside a station.
One recommendation I'd follow is making boarding escape craft and their deployment as mechanically simple as possible. If your electronic instruments on-board are disabled for any reason, you wouldn't want your escape to be halted in any way. I think rescue and tug boat style craft make great assets for escape, especially from large craft with multiple decks and sections.
my head canon for escape pod function is that they are launched using SRMs, Even if they have their own higher tech propulsion system. You cannot beat a solid rocket for long term storage stability and immediacy in its reaction time. A few equals to real world JATO bottles could easily kick a pod out of a tube.
"Good news sailors! Our escape pods have been upgraded to seek out the nearest planet and land there!" "What happens if the nearest planet is a gas giant?" "Ah. Um... Science I guess?"
Something similar to the M.O.O.S.E. is seen in Halo Reach, with the Emergency Re-entry Kit that Noble Six wears like a parachute bag while piloting a Sabre fighter. It's only shown fully inflated in some concept art rather than in the game itself, but it's what allows Noble Six to survive the space jump from the Covenant corvette at the end of the level The Long Night of Solace.
I'm really glad you mentioned long-term survival pods in this video, because I'm of the opinion that in anything short of Star Wars, with cross-galactic travel times measured in hours, you're just not gonna be able to stuff all the supplies you need for multiple weeks of waiting for rescue into one little craft. Another really good example of this is in The Lost Fleet, where in the first book, our hero Admiral Geary is rescued from such a survival pod after having drifted for about a century. I'd be really surprised if you folks weren't familiar with The Lost Fleet, but if you aren't, please for the love of Christ go read them. You could get at least a dozen videos out of the series. Maybe two, if you tried hard!
In *Red Dwarf* a salvaged escape pod had emergency terraforming equipment that could make a planet habitable in only a few days, and a Cloning suite that could create functional fully adult Clones, either male or female - irrespective of the donor's gender. Great unless only one person is using it and they're a complete and total *smeghead.* And the last thing you want is a society solely of _them._
Well in Alien the Narcissus drifted through space for 75 years before Ripley was woken out of hypersleep and questioned on what happened to the Nostromo.
I think escape systems without FTL have to be the scariest thing in Sci-Fi. Life boats work as well as they do because they go adrift in places like shipping lanes where help will be by soon. Who the heck is coming to help an explorer crew trapped on an unknown planet or worse: in-between stars.
also in 2023 a life boat is not ever out of contact assuming its equipment is working, They send out a distress call over radio and possibly even satellite with their precise GPS location. And since things like Iridium provide complete global coverage with a mid orbit satellite mesh you are never out of range of some means to send a signal. I think this is why so much scifi leans on the feeling of pre satellite age ocean exploration.
The supersonic ejection problem really depends on altitude. For example, at the altitude Maverick was flying many have calculated that regular ejection would've been totally safe due to air density. This is also why high speed planes fly so high usually, it's just easier to go fast in thinner air. Many planes also tell the pilot outright, with a separate speed dial that tells you how much air resistance there is in terms of how fast you'd need to be going at sea level for the same resistance.
4:20 from what I remember, and it's common enough to just use Starfleet terminology but, nearly every solar system from what we can tell has "m" class or near enough to sustain human life for a period of time for a proper rescue, though if one isnt in range, there is the clump method where they just ball up and transmit emergency beacons
Wasn't there an Enterprise episode about this? Where Tucker and some other crew members were off the NX-01 in a shuttle, and they somehow assumed the Enterprise was destroyed, while they were all in interstellar space, yet at that time Starfleet shuttles were not capable of warp, so they were looking for a decades long flight to the nearest star system.
Yep, "Shuttlepod One" was the name of the episode. It was Tucker and Reed stuck in a shuttle. Tucker wanted to hold out hope of rescue and Reed was set on their fate considering they only had hours of air and nowhere to go, since it would take decades to get anywhere at sublight speeds.
It would be interesting to have a setting where the crew survivability offered by escape pods is debated and not everyone agrees on whether or not they're worth their mass. Like how Russian nuclear submarines each have a single escape capsule for their entire crew (another concept that might be interesting in sci-fi) while nobody else considers such systems to be worthwhile.
Honorverse has that - in that universe abandoning your warship in a lifepod mid-battle does not really improve your odds of survival in comparison to staying onboard a wreck, so it is rarely done.
That gundam in the intro grabbing the escape pod ... is that a war crime? One thing about the Star Wars: incredible cross-section books that struck me as baffling is that the rebellion ship had armed lifeboats! No wonder they got shot down they were legitimate targets. However, my favorite space life boat story has to have been an episode of Red Dwarf where if the planet you landed on is uninhabitable, they have the technology to terraform the planet and even populate it! It goes wrong (in the most bonkers way possible) but still impressive! Great video 👍🏻👍🏻
Two of my favourite nonfiction books are The Wager and Endurance, both of which involve making long trips across stormy seas in small boats. Really is a lot of untapped potential for story telling here. Space could even have its own version of the custom of the sea, where you realise you only have enough oxygen if someone is killed.
There's a classic sci-fi story like that, not with lifeboats, but with a stowaway on a ship on a long journey. They had calculated just enough supplies and oxygen for the passengers on the trip, and now were stuck with the prospect of ejecting the stowaway into space or potentially all dying themselves.
In the early 90's there was a TV movie called Lifepod, a group of people stuck on a, wait for it.....lifepod, after their transport is destroyed. There were supplies and bunks for sleeping and a separate area, a cockpit, for a pilot.
The starship troopers animated series did do an episode on this but not with an escape pod but with a faulty decent with a drop pod leaving Johnny Rico drifting off in to space. The main issue with these kind of story scenario's is that they either are solitary ones where they selfreflect like in starship troopers (to an extend Rico had to figure out how to propel and ration his oxigen as well) or it becomes lord of the flies situation where people fight for command over the few resources left in the escape pad. Sadly there is never one where the pod just does its job and ferries them to a safe harbor like a planet or space station.
Why waste weight on escape pods? If the crew can’t bail out they’ll use their bodies to plug the holes. Now let me just refuel my methane tanks before the my IRST detects another cruise missile
There was one aspect not considered, from the often forgotten Andromeda series. There, the escape pods could daisy-chain together to support each other, and even attach to a rescuing craft. You would then be able to common share their volume, plus atmosphere reprocessing capabilities, as well as just the shear space for the evacuees.
There in fact is a movie about a spaceship getting lost off course on what was supposed to be a three months trip and the movie follows the protagonist struggeling with the implications of their situation, personal tragedy and the increasing scarcity of resources over the years - a story of decline and loss of hope. Unfortunatly I can't remember its title..
I can't remember the title, but I did read a novel in which an generation-type starship wreck was explored - FTL having been discovered since it was launched and archaeologists caught up with it. One character did ask about escape pods, but another points out that the ship doesn't have any. Because as a starship traveling into the uninhabited void, there's no point.
So glad the B-58 was mentioned here, it was such a neat solution for ejection at high altitudes and supersonic speed. That plane is mostly forgotten these days, but it was a technical marvel.
Random idea hit me with the last shot of the video: Depending on the setting, it could be mandated that escape pods are like parachuting pilots from a legal perspective- no longer combatants, and allowed to be taken as POWs (Which is probably preferable to staying on an exploding ship, but that depends on who you're up against).
Escape pods are interesting, and one thing I've thought about is what about armed escape pods? In Star Wars, the Tantive IV is equipped with larger escape pods that double as gun turrets. Now, this brings up a dilemma. I would think that it would be a war crime to shoot at escape pods, as like an ejecting pilot from an aircraft, they would be considered non combatants. But, what happens if the escape pod is armed? And what about using armed shuttles as escape craft? It could make laws and customs of war in this situation complex and messy. It could be interesting to have this as world building, to show the protocols of that nature, and possibly as moral dilemmas for characters to face. My take is that armed escape pods are fair game, but only if they actually engage in combat. But, armed escape pods are uncommon, simply for the reason that it opens up the possibility of them being shot at. One exception to this is cases where a navy is facing an enemy that does not respect the laws and customs of war, and will shoot at escape pods regardless. In that case, armed escape pods would be more common, to give the occupants at least a fighting chance. Another thing that I have considered for my own world building is ships having multiple options for escape pods, including ones that are rigid, and ones that are inflatable. Especially if you have access to materials that are sci fi tech, these inflatable pods could be made to be quite strong and tough. I think pods like this would be most useful and common on smaller ships, which would have less space for escape systems. They would also possibly be common on warships, where space is again at a premium. As a counter point to the above, I have watched Battleship New Jersey's channel, and curator Ryan has talked about escape craft for wet navy ships, and how historically warships don't really have any means of evacuation. It's only with the advent of inflatable rafts that things get better. For instance, battleships with boats tended to have said boats shredded by enemy fire, or the ship was destroyed in a way that precluded any sort of evacuation. Depending on the setting, this could justify a lack of escape craft. Basically, any kind of destruction of the ship would happen so quickly that evacuation would not be possible. But, there are several counterpoints even to this. For instance, unlike the ocean, ships don't sink. So, unless the ship exploded, evacuation should still be possible. Also unlike the ocean, humans can not survive in space for any length of time, meaning that unlike with a wet navy, having survivors waiting to be picked up by a friendly ship is not an option. Unless every crew member is wearing a spacesuit, but even then, escape pods or rafts would be preferable, as they could have more robust life support, and would be easier to find in space. Not directly related to escape pods, but for my own world building, I have come up with other aspects of ship survivability. One aspect of this is that all ships, especially warships, have reinforced parts of the hulls called shove points. If a ship loses propulsion, then a friendly ship can shove them to redirect their course, which in a deep space battle would be back to your own lines. Because there is no friction in space, the disabled ship would keep going until it reached friendly territory, and could then be repaired, towed using an FTL tug back home, or evacuated if there was too much damage. However, the shove points are even more important in orbit. If a ship is disabled, and is not in a stable orbit, than another ship can shove them, and push them in to a stable orbit. Or, failing that, get the disabled ship stable long enough to evacuate. Space is hard, which is why you need all kinds of systems available for when things go wrong.
The other side of spaceships not sinking is that, unless there's some imminent peril that can't be removed by throwing the offending object overboard, there's little reason to leave a damaged spaceship. If you can bring extra life support systems to equip escape pods, why bother with the escape pods themselves? You could just use the extra life support as backups on your ship.
I remember an episode of Clone Wars where the separatists were sending out ships made to breach and board larger ships to hunt escape pods. Bloody terrifying. Can’t do anything except watch as something slowly bores a hole in your craft through the viewport shortly before you get sucked into the vacuum of space.
6:15 : I entertained a 'conspiracy theory' that Maverick didn't really survive that crash, and the whole movie after this point was simply a "Jacob's Ladder Death Dream", thus the reason why the 'enemy' is never identified, and all the other strange conveniences in the movie 😅 Also: The EGRESS? Wow, and people laugh at S.H.I.E.L.D. 😏
There was this Andromeda Episode in which the Crimson sunrise exploded and all those tiny octagonal escape pods clustered together to share resources and space. Kind of StarTreks Suliban Helix. I found that was a nice idea. Especially since i believe it was implied that even unmanned or partially damaged pods could be docked to utilize their resources to maximize the survival chance of the manned ones.
In my sci-fi story, I combine the ships' Long-term Hibernation pods with the escape vehicles, so that they can be used by ship crews regularly throughout deployments, but can eject from their ships in critical situations, similar to the cryo-pod bay on the USS Sulaco in Aliens ---> Alien 3.
I'm reminded of 3 different types of escape craft in Star Wars now. The first one is those zorb ball things Anakin, Ahsoka, and Obi-Wan use on Felucia in The Clone Wars. Ejecting just before their shuttle hits a mountain and they just bounce and roll down the hills until reaching level ground. I think they even came with oxygen masks The 2nd is the Salon pods on the Consular-class cruiser and the Charger C70. Meant for diplomats, but could eject from the ships with up to 16 people inside them if needed And the third is the gun pods on the Tantive IV (can't remember the name of the pods, or if other CR90 corvettes were equipped with them). They were in spots that the turbolasers on the Tantive IV were, and were equipped with short-ranged hyperdrives to escape the battle. Handy little things since they could, in theory, protect themselves against enemy attacks, or until the plot deems it necessary for the occupants to be rescued
I was thinking, having the escape pods for military ships behind. blow off panels. so that the sequenst would be something like. blow of the pannel. a fraction of a second laters. four decoys fires of. after that the pods rockets starts. the decoys have the benifit that. if the explosive bolts don´t function. the decoys makes shure that the panel is gone.
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Have you heard of the sci-fi movie Lifepod? I think it was a sci fi original remake but it is exactly what you talked about with a group surviving in a space life pod
Imagine a sci-fi version of The Life of Pi... Now _that_ would be an interesting thing to watch.
Not sure if its correct. But in star trek there are escape pods that can link UP into a bigger group
I have my own opinions on escape pods in Science Fiction.
Learn how to say WarHammer "40K" correctly
I liked the line in Mass Effect: Andromeda where you can ask if it's easy to accidentally launch an escape pod, and the response you get is, "Ryder, it's an escape pod. If it's difficult to use, you're designing it wrong."
Though... there is something to be said for a check to make sure you really want to launch it.
@@forestwells5820An escape pod should be easy to intentionally launch, but hard to activate by accident.
Now they only got to make it Peebee proof
"To the Escape pods!"
*Unto arrival, start reading the 80 page quick-start guide of the 10 minute heat-up process for the rescue power core*
"WTF? Who designed this?"
"Commander Ryder, cause he accidently launched a bunch of them last time"
Indeed, that would be a design-flaw the designer DEFINITIVELY will regret.
@@InventorZahran
I would guess a flip-cover button or switch would be enough like it is in reality. 2 steps, easy to do even with one arm and one finger only.
Let's not forget one of my personal favorites:
"We've equipped your escape pod with a science-fiction super fabricator so that you can build a high-tech planetary facility within which you can assemble your own escape vessel using only local minerals, flora and fauna. Welcome to survival game planet."
I've only seen that premise in Subnautica, can you recommend other stuff with the same setup?
@@Ghost8492 Factorio in a sense
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
@@Ghost8492 Technically Factorio but the Science-Fiction Super Fabricator is just the engineer.
@@Ghost8492 I know you arrive in a little escape-pod like thing in Satisfactory, but that's more intentional deployment than emergency escape. I *think* Breathedge does the escape pod thing, but I can't remember that one so well... and Space Engineers has a start that is essentially "you're in an escape pod in deep space" thing too.
@@Ghost8492 Star Trek.
As someone who has been on a lot of cruise ships, every so often, you will see the crew take one of the lifeboats for a spin to make sure its engine is functioning properly.
I always thought that could be an interesting slice-of-life scene for a sci-fi series.
It would! A slightly different take on the "fly a shuttle to the ship" scene.
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
Honestly something I would love to see in a Sci-fi series in general is just random upkeep of the ship. Ships in Scifi usually seem to just run perfectly unless there is battle damage or plot important issue.
I would love to see a random engineer having to take random scans of the ships hull to check for random microfractures, needing to replace anti-grav plates that are burnt out like an old lightbulb, having to spend a minute realigning the ships guidance computer to count for inevitable discrepancies.
Similar thing I want to see more of is just ships having bad designs or even a mention of a ship canceled in development due to it having too many issues to make it worth producing.
@@Nostripe361 Even though it will never be a movie or series and I may never get the book published, a sci-novel I poke along at writing has exactly that; a couple scenes with habitation engineers periodically checking the crew and passenger quarters utilities and ventilation.
@@Nostripe361Deep Space 9 did this really well. You’re constantly seeing the engineering crew and Quark doing repairs and maintenance
@@Nostripe361 The Expanse did this, but it was mostly expressed by people replacing clogged filters and burnt-out electrical gear most of the time. Not always though
Ship size is a real issue. I spent the better part of a decade on U.S. Navy carriers. Even in a drill where nothing is actually on fire, your looking at 5 to 10 minutes to make it from the center of the ship to the skin where the lifeboats are. And you can’t really make it easier, the closures that make it hard to traverse are part of the armor and compartmentalization.
It's hard enough on submarines. It must be a nightmare on one of those big carriers you yanks have.
Are the aircraft a feasible form of escape route if the flight deck isn't damaged or in danger?
@@ArchOfWinterIt might take too much time to launch them all, and I'm not sure if there would even be enough planes to fit a carrier's entire crew...
@@InventorZahran Well, I don't mean the entire crew, just a few planes for some some number of people such as higher ranking officers or VIPs.
@@ArchOfWinter VIPs would be evac'ed by helo to a nearby ship. Carriers don't go anywhere alone.
Personally I think that since spaceships share a lot more things with submarines than with surface vessels, the emphasis must be placed into modularity and survivability rather than immediate evacuation.
When the outside environment is so hostile, the obvious answer is to stay inside as long as possible until a proper rescue can be executed.
I‘m pretty sure there are multiple submarine classes with crew escape pods.
Yes. The idea that the spaceship's power plant is about to blow up is often raised, but the Atomic Rockets site pointed out -- eject the reactor, not the crew....
@@davidbirr2718 unless for plot reasons or dramatics, you decide the ejections system was one of those systems that was damaged along with said reactor.
@@AnonD38 The Russians did, but I'm not aware of any other nation that designs and builds subs doing so. I think that there was only 1 occasion ever involving an old Soviet sub that had an accident where the escape pod could have been used, but IIRC it was damaged in the accident and couldn't be jettisoned. Sadly, the Soviet/Russian Navy and government brass wasted a lot of time and being fairly paranoid and overly proud at the time, refused help from the UK and the US and by the time they finally agreed to help, it was too late and the surviving crew had died.
@@Riceball01 Yeah.
But it proves that escape pods on a submarine aren’t some Sci-fi mumbo jumbo, but actual field tested equipment.
One of the best escape pod stories in sci-fi is actually from the second episode of Star Wars The Clone Wars, "Rising Malevolence." Most of the episode is about some fairly minor (and expendable) characters stuck in an unpowered escape pod in a debris field, waiting for rescue while something is actively hunting them. It has a real claustrophobic vibe to it.
The red light leaking in the windows, finding the already destroyed escape pod from the hunting craft... that was one memorable episode
'fairly minor (and expendable) characters'
"Not to me"
@@ig_4220"Deceive you, eyes can. In the Force, very different, each one of you are."
indeed, it actually uses the moment to tell us more about the clones and plo koon relation with his men
But they're just clones. They're meant to be expendable...
The B-58 Hustler’s escape pods are the most Kerbal escape system ever actually put into production. I just enjoy the fact that the A-12/SR-71 didn’t bother. They just put the pilot in what was essentially a beefed-up space suit. “Screw it, that’s too much weight/complexity in the aircraft, just wrap them in a better flight suit that can survive Mach-3/80,000 ft. ejection.”
Which is exactly what they did. And there were multiple Mach-3/80,000ft. ejections successfully performed over the operational life of the Blackbird. (Sadly, both resulted in the pilot surviving but the back seater dying - one when he opened his helmet after landing in the ocean and water filled his suit and he drowned, the other apparently something happened during aircraft breakup/descent that caused fatal injury.)
6:32
Whoever drew the faces on that is a legend
I had to pause the video for all the laughing. Is he scared of the fact he's just ejected from a rocket, or is he scared of the _completely unbothered stone cold maniac_ to his left?!
@@Double_Vision that's just an experienced test pilot tbh. "This is my 20th re-entry testing these pods" look
@@kaitlyn__L "...I wonder what they're serving for lunch in the mess hall."
I think the guy on the left is just experiencing high G-forces, while the guy on the right is thankful he didn’t open his lips before the G’s forced his face to lock up.
For fans of AFK, that's just TK-FNG and TK-FKU just being themselves. 😁
One topic I've been exploring in my own writing is that in most situations, staying on the ship and trying to repair it is the safer option. Most ships that are destroyed don't explode in massive fireballs, but instead lose manuvering and/or life support. They are left drifting on the vector they were travelling. If help can reach you (the setting only has sunlight speed), it is going to take days, if not weeks, and you are better off all staying in one spot, trying to make the most of the resources you have or possibly repair the ship.
I've had the idea of a kind of "storm shelter/bunker" that functions like a mini-ship inside the mothership. It's systems are fully independent from the mothership and can "hatch" out of the mothership if the mothership is beyond repair.
Yes and no. An enemy could come along and finish you off, or capture you. So being able to escape to allied forces may be more advantageous. Also, many parts of space are dangerous, and enough damage can mean no enough protection from it. And if your ship is drifting toward a planet or star, you probably don't want to be on it when it hits it. So there is a lot to think about when deciding if it's better to stay on a ship or not.
All that said, the core point is very much valid, and could add more interest in a situation where the characters have to make that choice. In Voyager's "The Year of Hell", she had them abandon ship because Voyager could no longer support them. Had they stayed, they'd have run out of food and/or air for them. It had taken too much damage to support the full crew anymore. So yeah, the ship may be "in tact", but it's like staying on a barren island. You won't survive if you stay, so you leave hoping to find somewhere you CAN survive. But if the ship can keep you alive, and hope of rescue is real, might be better to stay put and wait it out.
That's a good point. Spaceships don't exactly sink in the way naval ships do.
Ive been thinking about that with interstellar torch ships. Smaller escape pods wouldnt be able to hold enough provisions for the journey which is much longer since you cant keep the 1g acceleration. Even if they could you wouldnt be able to capture around the host star 200 years later.
I have a few similar ideas in the scifi novel I'm writing. Even in battle, ships dont tend to go up in a fireball, they break apart instead, unless the reactor itself blows, which doesn't always happen.
Love how space pods are frequently used in Star Wars as a badass way to open a great story. Apart from the iconic opening of A New Hope, the legendary KOTOR game begins with the protagonists Revan and Carth going to Taris in order to find the escape pod of the Jedi Bastila Shan
Revan is not part of the party at that moment (wink)
I like how the Starfury in Babylonb 5 has an ejection system similar to the Hustler: the whole cockpit just flies off leaving the rest of the fighter behind.
That would be the F-111's cockpit rather than the B-58 Hustler which had 3 individual seats which would activate encapsulation for the individual seat as it ejected.
I think X-Wings have the same system, when they manage to be used.
I can't remember which universe it was in but at least one setting had capsules like that which were unfortunately just large enough to trigger the seeker head on anti-fighter missiles. The fighter would take the first hit and the pod would take the second, or if active fighters were still in the area a missile might go for the escape pod rather than the intended target.
Another fun fact about Star Trek escape pods, they are designed to connect to each other thus sharing resources and people can even travel between pods. The bridge of the Galaxy Class is also an escape pod (never used because of real life budget reasons). It would act as the core of the lattice, it had its own fusion generators, life support, and shields.
With the Bridge in the escape pod lattice survival time went from a few weeks to several months, long enough for a emergency signal to reach someone even at low power.
"We're coming in too fast." - Cortana
"Damn! Airbrake failure! They blew too early! I'm losing her! Brace for Impact!" - Pilot, UNSC Lifeboat LFA-43
4:55-5:00
Pretty curious to think that the lack of will to destroy a space pod literaly made possible the plot of the entire Star Wars OT. I wonder what the imperial who refused to destroy it said when he realized that the capsule with no sign of lifeforms had inside the droids that possessed the Death Star Plans 😅
In canon at least, that officer's POV is explored in "From a Certain Point of View" anthology. Basically, he didn't want to shoot as he though wasting a good shot for seemingly no reason would look poorly on his review, and once he figured out he probably should have shot at it, he had a mountain of bureaucratic papertrails made to made sure nobody could find out he was responsible.
Once again, the Empire's own doctrines hurt itself more than it helped.
I would think that shooting down escape pods would be considered a war crime, which would explain the reluctance of the gunnery crew to target even an apparently empty one. I feel like you could also have a few senior officers who fought in the Clone Wars remembering the CIS destroying escape pods at several points, and this making them very uncomfortable with shooting at one.
Given that Darth Vader wanted to find the plans, destroying the escape pod they were on would be considered a bad move.
@@saberwing7930 Well, the term "war crime" is not in the imperial dictionary, you know.
@@Timjer92I'm pretty sure it is. Probably has a definition involving "promotion opportunity" though.
TNG Enterprise technical manual had my favorite system. Most pods were capacity focused [8?] while others were specialist. Some were interlinking, medical suites, communication focused etc.
That's a great manual and the life pod section is good. The whole shuttle/auxiliary/small craft section.
Tbh, I think star trek does emergency escape best, even for large ships. Need a fast way to the pods, site to site transporters always work (joke)
The pods also had the ability to link up with each other forming a larger escape vessel, and allowing crew movement between joined pods.
If memory serves, wasn't the system rigged to launch even empty pods at the last apparent moment, just to link up with other pods and increase the supplies available to those who escaped?
Gaggle mode!
Trip and Malcom getting trapped on a shuttle in Enterprise was one of my favorite character moments in the whole show.
I thought of that episode also after watching this. Great episode.
They weren't lying with 'easiest' a bin bag filled with expanding filler foam. I need to put this in my next scifi short story.
Reminds me of the Speed Racer live action movie.
Bubble escape pods!
The copilot's face at 6:32 is priceless
I've wondered about settings that subvert our lifeboat expectations. The Titanic's lifeboats had a total capacity of only a fraction of the total passengers, and this was far more than what was legally required at the time. The expectation was that these lifeboats would be used to ferry passengers to a rescue ship, as previous sinkings had shown that modern ships sank very slowly and the use of radio along trade routes ensured that rescue could arrive quickly. We could extrapolate this to sci-fi: Most of the dangers of space aren't mitigated by going from a large ship to a small lifeboat. In fact, some of those dangers get worse, as you don't have the bulk of the ship and it's hull to protect you. Most things that would be fatal to a large ship would also be fatal to small lifeboats. So what if the expectation became that lifeboats would be used to ferry folks to rescue, not to have them live in them for days after abandoning ship.
And then you can double subvert it by having a Titanic situation where you do need to evacuate the large ship immediately, like due to a massive radiation leak, where getting away is safer than staying.
In the Honorverse, it is established that some of the bigger warships dont carry enough lifeboats for the whole crew. The setting is often very... pragmatic, and it is acknowledged that if you are in the depths of a superdreadnaught, then either A) the situation develops slow enough for you to escape via small craft, or B) you wouldn't have time to make it to the skin. Note, the senior officers on such ships are some of those buried away in the most heavily armoured sections, where they are most likely to survive, but unable to escape if it goes fully belly up.
@@ParanoidMarvinMk2 Also everybody in the Honorverse goes into action wearing an EV skinsuit and helmet because they aren't bloody stupid. So the smallcraft and lifepods/boats have a secondary role of hoovering up everybody who survives a wreck but is basically floating free.
I am impressed that someone here remembered how lifeboats were viewed prior to 1912. Indeed, only a few decades earlier, if a ship was in distress, you'd be lucky if *anyone* survived. Disasters like the _Clallam_ and the _Lusitania_ also show how lifeboats do not guarantee survival, and that not entering one does not necessarily doom a potential survivor.
This can be translated with spacesuits essentially being lifebelts, and just as with a real ship, you need to be certain that your spacecraft is doomed before launching escape pods into the vast reaches of space.
@@stamfordly6463 They even deliberately pump unoccupied spaces down to vacuum when they clear for battle as an additional measure to prevent damage (fire, etc.). So if you were cleared to move from one compartment to another when at battle stations, that suit becomes a necessity. This doesn't exactly have an analogue in modern vessels, since its not like submarines flood unoccupied compartments. The lifebelt analogy is a decent one though, in that even if you get blown off the ship, you have a (probably small) chance of survival.
That's how I imagine escape pods in Star Trek, in reality most maritime disasters occur close to shore, lifeboats are just a way to get to shore safely. I'd imagine most starship disasters would happen in orbit or in a solar system, where you could get to a planet in a short amount of time.
You missed the opportunity to talk about escape pods that are able to connect to multiple other pods and form some kind of 'mini-station' until rescue.
@@astebbin yes, i believe it's in star trek
The TNG Enterprise technical manual had a great breakdown of how the Lifepods worked.
@@astebbin We never see it on screen (that I know of), but Star Trek tech manuals say the escape pods of TNG and after can do just this. And some are even designated as medical or supply pods. Not meant to be loaded with people.
@@forestwells5820 that's why they're always square, triangular, or hexagonal - never spherical
Not sure about escape pods. But I ran a Sci fi game in my own setting, where may of the asteroid miners would live in effectively a space motor home.
These ships will often be rigged up together to create a trailer park IN SPACE.
Really love the episode of the clone wars where they're stuck in escape pods and there are drones hunting them down in a debris field. Attempting to contact other pods. The slow realisation that they're in danger. The desperate battle in space with suits that only have a few minutes of air in them. Amazing episode and concept, real nasty close-in stuff.
Something i really like from the TNG technical manual is pods on larger ships are made to dock and cluster up. Lets engineers and medics get to the whole crew and share power, a few of the pods are even made with more then two docking ports to help the packing density and structural integrity of the cluster.
the biggest issue I keep coming to with escape pods / lifeboats is the supplies they can hold. They basically are their own ships that you have to squeeze in somewhere. If you are abandoning ship because you're under attack, what is stopping the enemy from just popping the escape pods? You already have limited space on a ship on account of it needing to be self contained, now we need to tack on hundreds of tiny things, that are only supposed to be used in an emergency that need their own life support, supply hold, propulsion etc. To have what they need to act as a lifeboat, even solo-occupant, they would be roughly the same size as space fighter craft.
Usually they are very small and have strong engines to escape quickly.
Maybe even small armor to take a hit or two.
Tin Can is a game about surviving in an escape pod made by the lowest bidder, as you frantically try to repair malfunctioning life support and other systems.
Do Warhammer 40K ships feature escape pods?
- Probably not for the thousands of "thrall"-type crewmembers manning the engines and loading the guns
- Probably not for the servitors hardwired into their stations
- Maybe for higher-ranking crew members if they don't have a permanent plug connection to their vessel
- Maybe for passengers, if they are of the nobility
Nah, if an Imperial ship is abandoned, the survivors will be left to fight over the dwindling resources since they're essentially moving cities that most inhabitants are born, live, and die on.
It's called savior pods and can support two people for three weeks comfortably so yea they do.
The thing with 40k tho, by the time the order to abandon ship comes around most of the crew is dead from decompression
@@Darqshadow In fairness, they were intended to carry more than that (based on the number of weapons in the survival kit, at least 20, with sufficient food, water and air for two weeks), but Jurgen and Cain were the only ones aboard (and the only ones that needed to board it, as everyone else got out of the breached compartment before it vented to vacuum), so it was a little more comfortable for them. At least until they attracted the attention of an ork fighter pilot on their way down from orbit...
@ala5530 yea. But my stance is that unless you're able to get to a pod readily, you're dead when the ship is vented. Lost Fleet by Jack Campbell explores this. The ship itself is made in such a way so a weapon compartment going out doesn't screw up the rest of the ship but unless the bulkheads are able to seal, the gun crew are dead.
There's also teleportation like how its used for adeptus custodes so maybe they can teleport onto a planet or smth?
I've read military sci-fi from David Weber and others and those ships are designed with less life-pod capacity that the full crew count on the assumption that by the time "Abandon ship!" is declared, much of the crew will already be dead or stuck in sections with no access to a pod.
But a lot of the pods are likely to be destroyed by that point too...
What if the ship is struck with slow-working malady that will inevitably doom it, and yet there is no one close enough to bring aid before the ship is lost? You may have hours or days to load everyone on escape pods, but simply have not enough space for everyone? Those left in the ship will know they are sentenced to death, and might even mutiny! If you can afford it, have pods for everyone AND more. Extras can be placed strategically around the ship so that no matter where crew are, they are within 30 seconds distance from the pod or something like that.
Computer virus could infect the ship and slowly shut it down. It will progress slowly so you have time to escape via pods (before this system is also shut down, or even rules of space combat mighy require such electronic warfare 'munitions' to be specifically designed to not disable, or disable last, the escape pods. First it could kill the engines/FTL and radio. You cannot purge it manually, nor contact/reach your command to help you, or anyone else to help offload the crew. You end up 'dead in the water', with the ship slowly sinking, and crew that won't fit on escspe pods. Shit way to go to be honest.
@@Reynevan100 Weber kinda lionizes the military to the point i doubt that would happen in the books. This coming from someone who loves star carrier
Being able to swim wasn't a requirement in pretty much any navy until after WW2 because before then it was assumed that if you went into the water because the ship sank and you hadn't made it to a life boat (if any had survived the battle), it was better to drown quickly than tread water hopelessly for possibly hours before finally succumbing.
Same kind of thinking and it has a grim logic to it.
Of course, by WW2 the chances of you being picked up in the water had drastically increased since the Age of Sail and they realised good sailors were dying needlessly when all they needed were a few swimming lessons.
The Titanic already showed us why that is a bad idea.
In the Expanse, you never see scapepods. There's surely small ships or sciffs attached for scape, like the Tachi was in the Donnager, but no the actual scape pod.
They go for the "either die or survive in a presurized room" as they find survivors in the damaged corvette further in the series.
Having the escape pod include a stasis chamber also allows for interesting "fish out of temporal water" stories, such as the Lost Fleet book series.
happens a few times in Larry Niven's "Known Space" universe.
Often times give the entire ship's hull a stasis field, incapacitated indefinitely but not destroyed.
5:07 I feel obligated to point out that this particular thing is in fact an empty torpedo that Scotty modified to be controlled via padd inside of five minutes, so the flying coffin thing is justified in this one case.
One of the Stargazer books had a backstory about the crew of the SS Valiant (the first ship to try to cross the Galactic Barrier and got a crewmember turned into a proto Gary Mitchell). They ended up in escape pods before the captain detonated the onboard nukes. Some were damaged by the blast. The survivors kept their pods together and did their best to try to find a habitable planet nearby. Weeks later, they began developing psychic abilities. Apparently, all of them were affected by the barrier to varying degrees. They ended up finding a planet and formed a colony there. They made contact with the Federation in order to inform them of a new threat
Unless your spaceship is made of explodium, the best lifeboat is to just not abandon ship. Even if it's got holes in it, it still gives you radiation protection, you might have some kind of emergency balloon to inflate inside a compartment to hold air, and above all -- in Newtonian physics you and the ship you're abandoning are going to the same destination whether you like it or not.
Darn black holes, always getting in the way.
Space ships do tend to be full of (depending on setting) rocket fuel, munitions, fusion reactors, antimatter, energy converters, or various other things that tend to make being on board lethally inadvisable. Frequently the speed of life pod launches in such settings is indicated more by the need to get away from such hazards as anything else.
@@willythemailboy2 Yet there is a very high probability that by getting in an escape pod, all you've achieved is exchanging a quick death inside the ship for a slow one outside it.
@@JC130676 But a slow death means more chances of getting help. And if there is a habitable planet nearby, it wouldn't be an automatic death sentence.
Thought for larger ships - escape pods are located ajacent to whatever peoplemover system (turbo lifts, elevators, trams, whatever). The lift tubes extend to the inner hull and a section blows out of the outer hull during abandon ship. Then the escape pods use the lift shafts to exit the ship. Advantages are that you can escape people from deeper in the shop this way. And even if one point of egress is destroyed you can ideally travel through the shafts to an undamaged ejection point. Multiperson larger escape pods can be located closer to the outer hull.
The novel of Starship Troopers has the Mobile Infantry deploy from orbit in what are essentially single-use pods. They coat the trooper in an egg-shaped goo, harden it, then drop them. The shell then burns off as ablative protection on the way down, and by the time it's completely worn away, they're at the kind of altitude/speed for parachutes
Starship Troopers is RIGHT about voting!
@@Mark-in8jubut what about those of us who can't join due to medical limitations such as poor eyesight?
@@Darqshadow In the novel, the military found roles for those with different abilities and limitations
One of the examples they gave is a situation where someone with severe learning difficulties wants to serve, so they gave them a job counting the matchsticks in a pile for their term of service. The key element for them is the desire to serve the nation, and the willingness to see it through
@@Darqshadow The other guy answered your question, but i just want to elaborate that military service was only one of the many ways someone could perform a term of service and earn their franchise.
The only way you could be disqualified from serving is if it could be proven that you were genuinely unable to understand what swearing an oath of service meant.
@Justowner never read the books so I wouldn't know. The movies and cartoons make it feel more like a military junta/oligarchy
Star Trek actually has some lore regarding the viability of life rafts, if one follows your lead and considers escape pods something different. The Galaxy class escape pod life raft could apparently support three people up to 96 days, and they were able to dock with each other, to share vital resources and enhance survivability in deep space. They also carried subspace radios to summon help, which, given the ludicrous speeds of Star Trek vessels, should arrive within days if not hours, unless you had the bad luck of drifting through the delta quadrant. The also did a pretty good job designing them with a shape that looks at least plausible for reentry, that is, sporting a big flat featureless surface instead of the classic tin can shape known and loved from Star Wars IV.
I imagine those pods were designed with deep space in mind.
If you were in range of a habitable planet or another ship. Your transporter would be your first means of escape.
Spacedock says: Little ship.
*_shows image of the Defiant_*
*_Worf's blood pressure increases_*
Thinking about this: the best solution definitely does depend on what the craft is doing.
A mostly automated mining craft or station would be expected to stay relatively close to infrastructure and thus could do with simply using the shuttles it would need to transport the mined goods.
A passenger transport would probably not have escape vehicles, instead focusing on minimizing and mitigating the risks involved and fixing any problems before they reach that point. That being said, they would likely design so that the "habitation module"(bit where the people sleep) is in a separate hardened bulkhead
A cargo ship might use a cargo shuttle if needed, or follow those principles.
For military ships it depends a lot but I could see them simply going with the small craft they already carry and instead focus on defending the bigger targets so they can do their thing. I definitely see the hardened habitation module being used here.
For long term exploration I would do the approach of sending every ship at at most half capacity. Therefore, there is plenty of slack before things start going bad. I would think such ships would have plenty of shuttles to ferry people and supplies(especially after accounting for redundancy) to act as temporary escape craft.
I may be mistaken, but I was under the impression that the life pods in Babylon five were basically just little boxes with life-support that could hold a few people in it and had a radio or something as a distressed beacon. The idea was just to cram into one of these things, and then just basically drift through space until somebody rescued you.
There should be an extra factor in escape pods and lifeboats: the rules and laws of war depending on the setting. Are the enemy prohibited from shooting lifeboats? Are they legally obligated to take them in as POWs?
The Ruthari Imperium in my setting actually take that sort of thing very seriously. Before an engagement they'll contact the enemy commander to ask which one of their ships is their designated rescue ship and if they don't have one they will order one of their own to break formation and serve as theirs. Firing upon escape pods or ships that are in the process of evacuating or undertaking rescue operations is strictly prohibited and not in the "A diplomatic protest will be issued and reprimands will be given out" sort of way but in a "Shoot my escape pod and we glass your planet" way.
So far in the entire history of the Imperium, it's only happened twice. The first time the enemy high command thought to break their will to fight by using a policy of no mercy, this was shown to be a mistake. The second time it was done by a pirate faction was hired to try and start a war between the Ruthari and a political rival which almost worked but the plot was uncovered and the pirates found themselves on the receiving end of a century long hunt until not only all of the original members but the descendants of that clan were eliminated from existence. You do not want to know what happened to the fool that hired the pirates in the first place
In the game Nebulous Fleet Command you can destroy enemy lifeboats but doing so has no benefit and will (in an upcoming update) hit you with a War Crimes penalty after the battle. I was playing a few days ago and realized my explosive shells were going to hit the lifeboats if I kept shooting them so I had to switch to a different shell type, it was a neat moment, even though the penalty isn't in place yet I thought it was good practice. I believe in the lore both of the main factions are required to pick up enemy lifeboats after battle, and both do so.
@@achillesa5894Realistically, incidental kills on escape pods wouldn't be punished. Its their own bad luck to be stuck between you and a valid target. Expecting a combatant to handicap themselves in the middle of a fight against a legit target in order to avoid hits on escape pods is ridiculous.
Teraport pods from Schlock Mercenary - the ultimate "get me the frack outta here" escape pod.
The moose may have been absolutely insane in its pursuit of minimalist materials for a viable system but it at least paved the way for gundam's balute system which was a far more practical use of the concept lol
Still doesn't beat the special heat resistant plastic wrap the Gundam could wrap itself in during the OG tv show (cowardly replaced by a shield and some kind of cooling medium in the compilation movies)
The Ballute system isn't actually an emergency system, just a method to quickly invade contested territories from orbit. Preferred methods would still be transportation pods or actually landing entire ms carrying ships that are atmospheric re-entry capable themselves or with a ballude. I still wonder how they got Bright's Ra Cullum into earths atmosphere to have it flying around in MS Unicorn tbh.
Scavengers Reign is about a bunch of people who survive of escape pods. They aren't the flying coffin kinds but are large enough to house a few people.
Its mostly an early plot point, the show itself seems to be mostly about the very alien nature of the world itself.
I often think about Worf in the DS9 episode where he got lost. The man just sat inside a little pod, out in the vast nothingness and blasted klingon opera for the hole time enjoying his solitude xD
"It's fairly unlike that the Earth will be out of range of the ISS."
I like that Spacedock hasn't ruled out the possibility that Rick Sanchez provokes an AI to heist the entire planet.
The throwaway visual gag with the saucer and the TNG title card was great
See, my solutions in KSP (not that KSP usually requires it, but sometimes, its still good to have, even at the expense of extra part count) have tended towards 2 options: the real life ISS one of keeping the craft docked to the station, or the Galaxy-class option of just separating the habitation area from the rest of the ship and separating with minimal RCS and maximal supplies so they can wait out a rescue.
The ISS option is only viable near Kerbin (or, if the station is in orbit around a body with a colony with extra capacity and the transfer vehicles can safely land near by). Usually, stations are pretty safe, with the exception of rendezvous and docking operations, in case you (or Mechjeb) fatfingers the RCS and knocks out a bunch of essentials (like solar panels). The Galaxy option is more broadly viable, though admittedly suffers from "putting all of your eggs in one basket", but that's less of a concern considering anything that would kill the hab generally kills the crew anyways, either immediately or through loss of consumables.
I once had an early-game ship make it to stable orbit with zero fuel remaining, stranding the pilot up there. Was going to consider some sort of rescue, then just had the pilot get out and push instead - the suit RCS could impart /just/ enough ΔV to de-orbit the capsule.
It occurs to me, a former AB Lifeboatman, that massed small escape pods, like the ones in Star Trek properties, would best be designed to be docked with each other after escape, to make search and rescue easier. It's a crucial tactic in maritime abandon-ship procedure, whether swimming in immersion suits, floating in liferafts, or dubiously navigating in motorized lifeboats, to join up with your fellow survivors and become "larger, oranger, and brighter" and therefore more visible to rescuers, who will initially likely themselves be working in hazardous conditions and poor visibility. It also allows for sharing of resources, and most internationally-mandated survival equipment on the market tends to be cheaply made and overpriced, so in a survival situation, you *will* be missing important resources due to defects and failure.
Some of the Star Trek tech manuals, as others in the comments have noted, explain that escape pods are designed to do exactly that. I believe the never-seen escape pods on the Galaxy-class ships were cuboid pods with multiple docking points that could form into a sort of lattice space station.
On your last comment regarding a setting involving survivors in pods: I remember an episode from Andromeda (I believe) where the pods of a destroyed ship had been connected together to combine energy and resources. Found it pretty interesting at the time.
That reminds me of something that happened shortly after the RMS _Titanic's_ sinking: Fifth Officer Lowe brought together a flotilla of five lifeboats, namely numbers 4, 10, 12, 14, (Which he commanded) and Collapsible D, with the idea that a rescue ship would more quickly spot a larger mass in the water.
How much escape pods make sense likely depends on how the main vessel is used.
I.e. an orbital factory / raffinery will have a higher risk of an accident warranting a plant evacuation, while also not being too far away from other infrastructure where to escape to.
Similarly Cargo Ships might already carry a crew shuttle which can double as an escape pod. and it makes sense for a small crew shuttle to be significantly faster than a huge cargo vessel, and having about the same range.
Speaking of Shuttles: for vessels exclusively carrying crew / passengers* escape pods don't make any sense since in total they wold have to be the same size as the whole ship. In this case it is far more sensible to focus on insuring that accidents don't happen in the first place and any consequences are mitigated as far as possible.
(wich is the strategy used in the air travel industry)
An alternative to escape pods would be reinforced emergency shelters
EDIT: *: l'm specially thinking about vessels which are similar to an airliner, which takes relatively short trips for space travel (maximum maybe 20 h) and the hole cabin being filled with seats.
Ever see the size difference between a cruise ship and its life boats? Ever seen a tour of the inside of one? They're designed to hold 150 people packed like sardines. They are designed for survival, not comfort or elbow room. No one would willingly take a six day cruise on a loaded life boat the way they would the full size ship.
@@willythemailboy2True, for a more cruise ship style vessel escape pods make also sense. I was thinking something more like an airliner with passengers relatively closer packed. Should have been clearer about that.
Not sure I agree on escape pods not making sense for passenger ships because they’d take up as much space as the ship itself.
Look at cruise ships, for example the icon of the seas can hold 5,000 passengers and 2,000 crew.
and can fit all 7,000 of them in 17 450 person lifeboats.
Those lifeboats take up hardly any space in the side of the ship.
Even if you proportionally doubled the size of the lifeboats to accommodate all the additional stuff you’d need for a escape pod to survive in space they’d still be tiny compared to the ship itself.
The only way they’d ever be as big as the ship is if they had all the amenities of a ship, cabins with double beds and en suite bathrooms, cafeterias etc.
On a lifeboat/escape pod you’d have a place to sit, and under your seat you’d have enough protein blocks and bags of water to last you a month or two.
I’d say it’s completely feasible that Space cruises or passenger ferry’s could have vessels for the purpose of abandoning ship.
A good showing of EscapePods is in the Star Wars Republic Diplomatic Shuttle. (the Red ship in Episode 1)
The strange cup at the front is both a meeting room/life pod. It can be full detached. It also comes with shields and a small propulsion drive.
I dont think most spaceships would need a escape pod in the first place. In the ocean ships sink, so people need to get out of the sinking craft and get on a smaller, floating craft.
But in space a dead ship is just a drifting hulk. The only thing that needs to escape are the explosive parts(reactor, ammo racks etc.) eject those parts and you could still inhabit the hulk and scavenge whats left.
Unless calamity strikes while close to a planet, and your drifting hulk is headed straight towards it ^^
@@TwinPeaksIndustries Yes, that is a good point! in that case you will need a small craft to escape from a falling orbit.
But remember, most spaceships still fly in a stable orbit! a ship wont simply plunge in a falling orbit when its destroyed, they will still orbit whatever body they are orbiting, but just as a drifting hulk that is.
There was a good not-quite-escape-pod story in the Star Trek novel "The Kobayashi Maru" about 30 years ago. Several Enterprise crew are stuck in a damaged shuttle drifting between planets. They all tell stories about Academy experiences while waiting to die.
Although since one of them is Scotty, you know a half-destroyed shuttle is only an opportunity for wild MacGyver solutions.
(There's a reason MacGyver had a Scottish name, I think...)
I would say EVE online has one of the best escape pods in my option. First off, you are in your escape pod at all time. You control your ship inside your pod. If your ship is destroyed your pod automatically ejects and if your pod is destroyed your consciousness is automatically uploaded into a fresh clone inside a station.
One recommendation I'd follow is making boarding escape craft and their deployment as mechanically simple as possible. If your electronic instruments on-board are disabled for any reason, you wouldn't want your escape to be halted in any way. I think rescue and tug boat style craft make great assets for escape, especially from large craft with multiple decks and sections.
my head canon for escape pod function is that they are launched using SRMs, Even if they have their own higher tech propulsion system. You cannot beat a solid rocket for long term storage stability and immediacy in its reaction time. A few equals to real world JATO bottles could easily kick a pod out of a tube.
"Good news sailors! Our escape pods have been upgraded to seek out the nearest planet and land there!"
"What happens if the nearest planet is a gas giant?"
"Ah. Um... Science I guess?"
First thing that comes on is music from Space Engineers literally as I'm playing the game too. Nice usage
Something similar to the M.O.O.S.E. is seen in Halo Reach, with the Emergency Re-entry Kit that Noble Six wears like a parachute bag while piloting a Sabre fighter. It's only shown fully inflated in some concept art rather than in the game itself, but it's what allows Noble Six to survive the space jump from the Covenant corvette at the end of the level The Long Night of Solace.
always wondered how he survived smashing into reach's surface
Loving the space engineers music in the background
i noticed it aswell XD
I'm really glad you mentioned long-term survival pods in this video, because I'm of the opinion that in anything short of Star Wars, with cross-galactic travel times measured in hours, you're just not gonna be able to stuff all the supplies you need for multiple weeks of waiting for rescue into one little craft. Another really good example of this is in The Lost Fleet, where in the first book, our hero Admiral Geary is rescued from such a survival pod after having drifted for about a century. I'd be really surprised if you folks weren't familiar with The Lost Fleet, but if you aren't, please for the love of Christ go read them. You could get at least a dozen videos out of the series. Maybe two, if you tried hard!
In *Red Dwarf* a salvaged escape pod had emergency terraforming equipment that could make a planet habitable in only a few days, and a Cloning suite that could create functional fully adult Clones, either male or female - irrespective of the donor's gender.
Great unless only one person is using it and they're a complete and total *smeghead.*
And the last thing you want is a society solely of _them._
It drives me absolutely nuts in sci fi how there's always magically some planet with a breathable atmosphere within range of your escape pod.
That does make a degree of sense, because habitable planets have the most reasons for your ship to be there in the first place.
Well in Alien the Narcissus drifted through space for 75 years before Ripley was woken out of hypersleep and questioned on what happened to the Nostromo.
I think escape systems without FTL have to be the scariest thing in Sci-Fi. Life boats work as well as they do because they go adrift in places like shipping lanes where help will be by soon. Who the heck is coming to help an explorer crew trapped on an unknown planet or worse: in-between stars.
also in 2023 a life boat is not ever out of contact assuming its equipment is working, They send out a distress call over radio and possibly even satellite with their precise GPS location. And since things like Iridium provide complete global coverage with a mid orbit satellite mesh you are never out of range of some means to send a signal.
I think this is why so much scifi leans on the feeling of pre satellite age ocean exploration.
The supersonic ejection problem really depends on altitude. For example, at the altitude Maverick was flying many have calculated that regular ejection would've been totally safe due to air density. This is also why high speed planes fly so high usually, it's just easier to go fast in thinner air. Many planes also tell the pilot outright, with a separate speed dial that tells you how much air resistance there is in terms of how fast you'd need to be going at sea level for the same resistance.
Wasnt the thing Scotty was in at 5:07 a torpedo, not an escape pod?
4:20 from what I remember, and it's common enough to just use Starfleet terminology but, nearly every solar system from what we can tell has "m" class or near enough to sustain human life for a period of time for a proper rescue, though if one isnt in range, there is the clump method where they just ball up and transmit emergency beacons
Thanks!
Wasn't there an Enterprise episode about this? Where Tucker and some other crew members were off the NX-01 in a shuttle, and they somehow assumed the Enterprise was destroyed, while they were all in interstellar space, yet at that time Starfleet shuttles were not capable of warp, so they were looking for a decades long flight to the nearest star system.
Yep, "Shuttlepod One" was the name of the episode. It was Tucker and Reed stuck in a shuttle. Tucker wanted to hold out hope of rescue and Reed was set on their fate considering they only had hours of air and nowhere to go, since it would take decades to get anywhere at sublight speeds.
It would be interesting to have a setting where the crew survivability offered by escape pods is debated and not everyone agrees on whether or not they're worth their mass. Like how Russian nuclear submarines each have a single escape capsule for their entire crew (another concept that might be interesting in sci-fi) while nobody else considers such systems to be worthwhile.
In my setting lifepods are required by the regulations but the actual ship's crew opinion on them is lukewarm at best.
Honorverse has that - in that universe abandoning your warship in a lifepod mid-battle does not really improve your odds of survival in comparison to staying onboard a wreck, so it is rarely done.
4:09 "It's fairly unlikely that the Earth will suddenly be out of range"
- insert _Observation_ clip here -
That gundam in the intro grabbing the escape pod ... is that a war crime?
One thing about the Star Wars: incredible cross-section books that struck me as baffling is that the rebellion ship had armed lifeboats! No wonder they got shot down they were legitimate targets.
However, my favorite space life boat story has to have been an episode of Red Dwarf where if the planet you landed on is uninhabitable, they have the technology to terraform the planet and even populate it! It goes wrong (in the most bonkers way possible) but still impressive!
Great video 👍🏻👍🏻
I heard Space Engineers music at the start and wondered if I’d clicked the wrong video 😅 (I love SE)
Two of my favourite nonfiction books are The Wager and Endurance, both of which involve making long trips across stormy seas in small boats. Really is a lot of untapped potential for story telling here. Space could even have its own version of the custom of the sea, where you realise you only have enough oxygen if someone is killed.
There's a classic sci-fi story like that, not with lifeboats, but with a stowaway on a ship on a long journey. They had calculated just enough supplies and oxygen for the passengers on the trip, and now were stuck with the prospect of ejecting the stowaway into space or potentially all dying themselves.
Book like that with a man, his wife and child in suspended animation. His being damaged.
I love the Space Engineers OST in the background.
In the early 90's there was a TV movie called Lifepod, a group of people stuck on a, wait for it.....lifepod, after their transport is destroyed. There were supplies and bunks for sleeping and a separate area, a cockpit, for a pilot.
That Space Engineer-music is so relaxing;)
The starship troopers animated series did do an episode on this but not with an escape pod but with a faulty decent with a drop pod leaving Johnny Rico drifting off in to space.
The main issue with these kind of story scenario's is that they either are solitary ones where they selfreflect like in starship troopers (to an extend Rico had to figure out how to propel and ration his oxigen as well) or it becomes lord of the flies situation where people fight for command over the few resources left in the escape pad.
Sadly there is never one where the pod just does its job and ferries them to a safe harbor like a planet or space station.
Why waste weight on escape pods? If the crew can’t bail out they’ll use their bodies to plug the holes. Now let me just refuel my methane tanks before the my IRST detects another cruise missile
Oh hey Space Engineers OST at that start, instantly picked it up
There was one aspect not considered, from the often forgotten Andromeda series. There, the escape pods could daisy-chain together to support each other, and even attach to a rescuing craft. You would then be able to common share their volume, plus atmosphere reprocessing capabilities, as well as just the shear space for the evacuees.
There's a reason The Clone Wars episode with Plo and the clones was so good. They were in life rafts, alone, with odds closing in.
Best Sticker I saw on a Smart-for-2
"S-class escape pod"
Great Video, greetings from Germany 😏😎🖖👍
The MOOSE system was a standard for the Traveller sci-fi RPG game series, by GDW.
There in fact is a movie about a spaceship getting lost off course on what was supposed to be a three months trip and the movie follows the protagonist struggeling with the implications of their situation, personal tragedy and the increasing scarcity of resources over the years - a story of decline and loss of hope.
Unfortunatly I can't remember its title..
I can't remember the title, but I did read a novel in which an generation-type starship wreck was explored - FTL having been discovered since it was launched and archaeologists caught up with it. One character did ask about escape pods, but another points out that the ship doesn't have any. Because as a starship traveling into the uninhabited void, there's no point.
MOOSE! I thought I was the only guy in the world who had ever heard of MOOSE!
So glad the B-58 was mentioned here, it was such a neat solution for ejection at high altitudes and supersonic speed. That plane is mostly forgotten these days, but it was a technical marvel.
"I know I know...destroyed in the explosion." :D
One of my fav DS9 episodes.
Random idea hit me with the last shot of the video: Depending on the setting, it could be mandated that escape pods are like parachuting pilots from a legal perspective- no longer combatants, and allowed to be taken as POWs (Which is probably preferable to staying on an exploding ship, but that depends on who you're up against).
8:36 that was actually the plot of a Star Wars: The Clone Wars episode, where a republic ship was destroyed and the survivors hunted down by droids
Thank you so much! I found this video while looking for escape pod design inspiration
Don't forget about when the shuttle-craft has it's own escape pods (Voyager's Delta flyer).
Escape pods are interesting, and one thing I've thought about is what about armed escape pods? In Star Wars, the Tantive IV is equipped with larger escape pods that double as gun turrets. Now, this brings up a dilemma. I would think that it would be a war crime to shoot at escape pods, as like an ejecting pilot from an aircraft, they would be considered non combatants. But, what happens if the escape pod is armed? And what about using armed shuttles as escape craft? It could make laws and customs of war in this situation complex and messy. It could be interesting to have this as world building, to show the protocols of that nature, and possibly as moral dilemmas for characters to face.
My take is that armed escape pods are fair game, but only if they actually engage in combat. But, armed escape pods are uncommon, simply for the reason that it opens up the possibility of them being shot at. One exception to this is cases where a navy is facing an enemy that does not respect the laws and customs of war, and will shoot at escape pods regardless. In that case, armed escape pods would be more common, to give the occupants at least a fighting chance.
Another thing that I have considered for my own world building is ships having multiple options for escape pods, including ones that are rigid, and ones that are inflatable. Especially if you have access to materials that are sci fi tech, these inflatable pods could be made to be quite strong and tough. I think pods like this would be most useful and common on smaller ships, which would have less space for escape systems. They would also possibly be common on warships, where space is again at a premium.
As a counter point to the above, I have watched Battleship New Jersey's channel, and curator Ryan has talked about escape craft for wet navy ships, and how historically warships don't really have any means of evacuation. It's only with the advent of inflatable rafts that things get better. For instance, battleships with boats tended to have said boats shredded by enemy fire, or the ship was destroyed in a way that precluded any sort of evacuation. Depending on the setting, this could justify a lack of escape craft. Basically, any kind of destruction of the ship would happen so quickly that evacuation would not be possible.
But, there are several counterpoints even to this. For instance, unlike the ocean, ships don't sink. So, unless the ship exploded, evacuation should still be possible. Also unlike the ocean, humans can not survive in space for any length of time, meaning that unlike with a wet navy, having survivors waiting to be picked up by a friendly ship is not an option. Unless every crew member is wearing a spacesuit, but even then, escape pods or rafts would be preferable, as they could have more robust life support, and would be easier to find in space.
Not directly related to escape pods, but for my own world building, I have come up with other aspects of ship survivability. One aspect of this is that all ships, especially warships, have reinforced parts of the hulls called shove points. If a ship loses propulsion, then a friendly ship can shove them to redirect their course, which in a deep space battle would be back to your own lines. Because there is no friction in space, the disabled ship would keep going until it reached friendly territory, and could then be repaired, towed using an FTL tug back home, or evacuated if there was too much damage.
However, the shove points are even more important in orbit. If a ship is disabled, and is not in a stable orbit, than another ship can shove them, and push them in to a stable orbit. Or, failing that, get the disabled ship stable long enough to evacuate.
Space is hard, which is why you need all kinds of systems available for when things go wrong.
The other side of spaceships not sinking is that, unless there's some imminent peril that can't be removed by throwing the offending object overboard, there's little reason to leave a damaged spaceship. If you can bring extra life support systems to equip escape pods, why bother with the escape pods themselves? You could just use the extra life support as backups on your ship.
I remember an episode of Clone Wars where the separatists were sending out ships made to breach and board larger ships to hunt escape pods. Bloody terrifying. Can’t do anything except watch as something slowly bores a hole in your craft through the viewport shortly before you get sucked into the vacuum of space.
6:15 : I entertained a 'conspiracy theory' that Maverick didn't really survive that crash, and the whole movie after this point was simply a "Jacob's Ladder Death Dream", thus the reason why the 'enemy' is never identified, and all the other strange conveniences in the movie 😅
Also: The EGRESS? Wow, and people laugh at S.H.I.E.L.D. 😏
There was this Andromeda Episode in which the Crimson sunrise exploded and all those tiny octagonal escape pods clustered together to share resources and space. Kind of StarTreks Suliban Helix. I found that was a nice idea. Especially since i believe it was implied that even unmanned or partially damaged pods could be docked to utilize their resources to maximize the survival chance of the manned ones.
In my sci-fi story, I combine the ships' Long-term Hibernation pods with the escape vehicles, so that they can be used by ship crews regularly throughout deployments, but can eject from their ships in critical situations, similar to the cryo-pod bay on the USS Sulaco in Aliens ---> Alien 3.
Trouble is that deep character moments with long lasting repercussions are anathema to modern Hollywood
That idea for the escape pods drifting is amazing
I'm reminded of 3 different types of escape craft in Star Wars now.
The first one is those zorb ball things Anakin, Ahsoka, and Obi-Wan use on Felucia in The Clone Wars. Ejecting just before their shuttle hits a mountain and they just bounce and roll down the hills until reaching level ground. I think they even came with oxygen masks
The 2nd is the Salon pods on the Consular-class cruiser and the Charger C70. Meant for diplomats, but could eject from the ships with up to 16 people inside them if needed
And the third is the gun pods on the Tantive IV (can't remember the name of the pods, or if other CR90 corvettes were equipped with them). They were in spots that the turbolasers on the Tantive IV were, and were equipped with short-ranged hyperdrives to escape the battle. Handy little things since they could, in theory, protect themselves against enemy attacks, or until the plot deems it necessary for the occupants to be rescued
I was thinking, having the escape pods for military ships behind. blow off panels. so that the sequenst would be something like. blow of the pannel. a fraction of a second laters. four decoys fires of. after that the pods rockets starts. the decoys have the benifit that. if the explosive bolts don´t function. the decoys makes shure that the panel is gone.