In Old Man's War by Scalzi, the troops are sealed in a ball of nanites that absorb the heat from re-entry and change shape to that of a glider and then finally fall apart into a cloud of dust just above ground. In fantasy, a wizard did it. In science fiction, it's nanites.
What is science faction? WD Hallmark % 26 so evil is on Saturday 🪐? It's how nice the poisons of ag and compression is on the Rollbot that is working in are Galaxy? Your the Seagreat. Keep your acounts end tell 2024& WD route 66 was old maps. Your ok with Jupiter files! AES is covering slots! And earth % is love you &CSC covers the slacking ends. Make a CD for 2024 with all your files for a device that plays it in a store investment for fewture children. Your saveing the children of pork wolds of WD cant stand that evil Creator! Y? We setting a reservation of date on earth also.
Isaac's premise that dropships / pods will be fired upon is correct, imo. But generally, paratroopers (even today) are delivered to areas that are minimally armed. They learned in WW2 that dropping them directly on armored formations wasn't conducive to operational success. I'd suspect the same principles would be used for dropships and droppods as for paratroopers. Orbital bombardment may be required to create that drop zone, but the principle remains, clear the area of enemy forces first. 🤣👍
Most probably....or extremly stealthy insertions of small teams but no, hard to imagine mass drops of troops on contested áreas, more so with the proliferation of anti-drone equipment and man portable AA, the dissaster suffered by the Russian special forces who tried the helicopter assault on Kiev airport seems like a warning about things to come.
Not to argue, just offering a counterpoint. Orbital bombardment would very effectively announce your presence. If the mission you're undertaking needs to be covert, that wouldn't work.
@@amateurcrastinator9523 Orbital bombardment is barely under full nuclear warfare on the scalation aspect of the equation so I believe that not always would be a political or practical option even if temporal control of the requiered space battlefield is achieved, as you said, not to argue but I believe that covert insertions always would be part of warfare, you dont always need or want to hit the enemy with a hammer, sometimes Is way better an scalpel.
@@dansmith1661 That is propaganda, the mauling that the top russian commands transported by their most elite helicopter combat transports received on that battle is an historic fact, Putin bitches and trolls of course say something different, nobody sane cares.
The interesting thing about 40K's drop pods is that they're actually weapons in and of themselves, not in the sense that they're armed (although there are versions for that) but the kinetic force of landing, and doors opening means anyone unfortunate to be close enough gets squished.
@@SirHeinzbond Not the genetically advanced super humans with crazy armor that are 40k Space Marines. Thats the first rule of warfare, have more super soldiers than the enemy
Motherships are used in real world applications. They are used for the deployment of submersibles such as those that visit shipwrecks. German U-boats of ww2 used bigger U-boats they called “milk cows”. Somali pirates used larger fishing boats as motherships. The lunar landers of the space race used the command modules as motherships. Aircraft carriers, exist. The list could go on but I need to make breakfast. To quote the Wikipedia page on motherships “A mother ship, mothership or mother-ship is a large vehicle that leads, serves, or carries other smaller vehicles. A mother ship may be a maritime ship, aircraft, or spacecraft.”
The drop ship equivalents would be Hueys, Chinooks, Black Hawks, and Ospreys. WWII had the drop pods in the form of Higgins boats and Waco and Horsa gliders.
Glad somebody corrected this, so close to the start of the video hearing it is not a commonly used term bugged me. Working in a maritime industry it is frequently used along with the term daughter craft.
The anime Aldnoah Zero had the most awesome drop sequence using Landing Castles. Its a dropship the size of a skyscraper that impacts like a nuke and levels the entire area it lands on.
Okay so now I'm imagining the drop pods themselves dropping bombs -- clear the landing zone, create obstacles to block the defender's from gaining LOS on the pods, and you raise a huge cloud of dust that will give the pods concealment as they deploy parachutes, a vulnerable phase. For now, I think parachutes are still the likely choice over rockets. Less mass, smaller size, less complicated. Cutting down on landing time sounds nice, but so does bringing more troops, being a smaller target, having more armor on the pod, or having spare room for decoys and ECM. If you want to put actual fleshy people on the ground, they need to believe in a reasonable chance of survival, at least 80%. The same railgun you use for clearing the landing zone on the way down could be used as static (or even towed) artillery. Orbital to surface combat sounds like it could take trench warfare to a whole new subterranean dimension. You dig and then you dig some more! We'd be eating cockroaches in no time. Or manufacture some fancy invertible cities like in Neon Genesis Evangelion.
I like the idea of the drop pods having no form of reentry control. They just sink through the atmosphere like rocks, having internal shock absorption so the humans inside don't become a paste on the floor or ceiling of the craft.
@@squashiejoshie200000 Yeah you weren't wrong, that was so damn cool. I'm pretty picky with my anime but that does peek my interest. Apparently that "smart" cluster bomb is a real weapon, although discontinued.
Halos ODST(Orbital Drop Shock Troops) used Single occupant Exoatmospheric Insertion Vehicles to quickly insert at or near the target. They were as implied single occupant reinforced pods. They "used the atmosphere to do most of the work slowing the pod down, as the ceramic armor would burn off revealing a crash cage, and closer to the ground with air brakes that had rockets on the ends of the 4 brakes, slowing the pods down before landing, but it was still more of a crash lol.
Yeah odst reminded me of Tiberian sun opening mission but I would think that delivery option with multiple weapons platforms would be better more like sst or multiple individuals to use a multitude of combined arms but a solo recon trooper pod sounds expensive insertion .war is expensive cheap and simple is the best
@itorca835 Would definitely be expensive. They were usually single use. They did have different types. Some that had larger pack outs, a type that could be launched from slipstream even? Always thought it would be realistic for a low type two civilization as they wouldn't be all too difficult to manufacture vs. some of the other more technologically advanced methods explained in video. Quickly inserting soldiers behind enemy lines has always been and likely always will be a viable strategy in order to get behind and sabotage battle lines from the rear, or sabotage supply lines, power stations, rear support, communications, and other infrastructure. If they have to drop from orbit, of course using just a parchute isn't gonna cut it, so this would likely be amongst the first step in a long line of advancements in tactical Insertion from space. I do like the idea mentioned in another comment on nanobots thar configure from a protective shielding(wonder if a layer would be ablative or if the nanites would be strong enough to survive the friction) and turn into a glider shape as they get into the lower atmosphere. I imagine it wouldn't be a "one-time" use, and could even turn into shielding or weaponry, or surveillance equipment or something else on the ground?
@@bshinn4884 I would think from a combat engineer a instant forward outpost or base would be a marvel sure less of a shootem up. but the power play is immense if you could just drop a fob that would be a well shot what do we do about that situation. on a chaotic everchanging battlefield it's who's making moves and who's reacting to chaos. But to just drop one guy isnt the same effect
@@bshinn4884 I was talking to a buddy he was saying a pod could deploy team under the planetary surface and use the pod to make a underground fob to send strikes from.
@@bshinn4884 single use is the best way to go about it. Save a lot of time and energy by having smaller, lighter, far cheaper to produce, disposable units. The fact that they can be mass produced so easily and be discarded also allows for stuff like magazine fed insertion devices meaning you put a whole platoon in atmosphere in seconds while maintaining the capability to do it again and again.
1:18 Actually, mothership IS a term used in hungarian military jargon to refer to carriers. It stems from the old hydroplane tender's name, that was called "repülőgép-anyahajó", or airplane-mothership.
On the bigger side, Battletech dropships come in a range of sizes. From the Leopard which drops a mech platoon, or a Fury that carries an infantry company and a couple vehicle platoons, basically their APCs and maybe a supporting light tank platoon. On the large end you have huge dropships that can transport a regiment (Excalibur and Colossus for example). One of the more interesting is the Fortress Class. It transports a mixed battalion, a company each of mechs, tanks, and infantry. But it is heavily armored and armed for its size compared to other transports, with the weapons mounted where they are more effective if being chased, or firing on targets attacking it on the ground. The Fortress pretty much does what it says on the tin. In addition to providing medical and repair support nearly all dropships in the setting provide, it also is a small fortress to anchor your dropzone. The dropship uniquely has a heavy artillery piece mounted in the nose that can only be used when the dropship is grounded. Basically Battletech has a range of sizes, allowing to a military to dial in the risk of many eggs in one basket vs the inefficiency of having to gather enough jumpships to transport a force sent by exclusively smaller dropships. In practice while choice is often limited, a general in theory could have a mix of large transports that would best only be landed in secured dropzones, and smaller dropships that can be exposed to more risk for raids and/or to secure a dropzone for later groundings.
Though it should be noted that in Battletech, the reason why Dropships are called such is because of the Jumpship. Dropships are named such because they drop away from the Jumpship, not because it drops from space into the atmosphere. Even dropships which can't enter atmosphere are still called dropships because they exist in the dropship/jumpship binary paradigm of function.
Regarding planets not being defenseless, I just remembered Robotech/Macross, when the Zentradi had four million ships, and earth was able to take out about a quarter of them just using one really really big cannon in Alaska
The grand cannon and in the lore there were 7 of them planned (one on each continent), the rogue zentradei during the malcontent uprisings lived in the barrel of the unfinished Brazil grand cannon.
@@mahatmarandy5977 There was a huge series of novels written by Jack McKinney back in the day (they are trying to get them republished) but the novels covered all of the history that did not appear in the cartoons, it covered the comics (published and unpublished), the cartoons and all the story filler that appeared in the Palladium Books RPGs as well. If you can find a copy of the novels they are worth the read if you are a Robotech fan and it is the original story before the Shadow Chronicles re-write.
i did always think an orbital ring with drop ships of some kind was a perfect rapid reaction solution for earth, not just military but also for emergency response.
Sure it's cool, but isn't it pretty much strictly better just to scatter forces around the planet and give them starship style point to point transit. Either the ring is moving at orbital velocities which means you have to pay a pretty high fuel cost to get your dropships up there only to burn it off again or you've built one of those fancy active structures which seems as likely to be the cause of the disaster -- and in any case it seems cheaper just to have a bunch of forces on the ground.
Some of the fancy drop pods from warhammer 40K's "heresy period" were pretty decent - particularly the fancy "something claw drop pod" that they also used to use as boarding craft for "naval" combat.
I love your content. More for the though exercise than anything. I like the amazing 3d images you provide as background but as an artist myself I had to say something about the beautiful art you displayed in this one.
@@isaacarthurSFIA I can't even remember how I found you, I think I was looking up worldbuilding related stuff and you came up. Your distinctive voice is actually what hooked me. I feel kinda bad about that because it was a little bit meanspirited, but I'm glad I did, because you're very interesting and if I ever do get off my butt and actually make my sci-fi setting, your videos will be primary sources for the stuff I do. In particular your videos on extreme terraforming.
My absolute favorite version of drop ships is the landing castles from Aldnoah zero. They’re practically meteors that spawn a military base. And man they are destructive
Yeah but they are towed systems aren't they? Not that useful as its something of a big expenditure for a single use. It makes sense for something like an odst drop pod but not so much for a whole base
@@casematecardinal i wouldnt say they are the biggest waste since you would drop them onto major cities to clear out a zone. Also i dont think they are single use.
Love that you talk about planets able to strike back at ships in orbit. having fun one day, I was designing ways a planet could fight back and while missiles and giant guns with fighter bombers are good, I had the idea you could also add some sort of tractor beams or similar trek. Imaging having your ship in orbit grabbed by this system and then yanked back to the surface in a crash landing; perhaps even dropped in pit surrounded by heavy weapons that can immediately just start pounding your crashed ship.
"When the Tahsfoi invaded the Sol planetary system the humans didn't notice and Tahsfoi forces never returned. Upon research it was discovered that Sol was essentially a Dyson swarm with a population of hundreds of trillions. The sad invasion force was just considered to be an especially violent new criminal element. It was dealt with expediently, the event barely made the local human news."
See, I always thought that the thing that defines a Mothership is, it doesn't just *carry* strike craft. It has fabrication facilities onboard to *make* them. It's essentially a mobile base and factory with rapid deployment capabilities. Maybe with mining/refining and hydroponics capabilities to make it its own fully independent logistics hub.
In Deathworlders, the HEAT (spec ops) drop in from orbit (which they call a HELLNO jump) using portable force field projectors that form invisible glider wings.
I love 40k and its always an awesome day when i know SFIA is going to be discussing it at least in some way!! I just recently listened to a series of videos on the siege of Arnagedon (both of them) and the siege of Vraks they were pretty cool in terms of how a planetary assault might go. That said the number of troops in the 40k universe sometimes seems a bit low to me. Planets are rathet large and i think the numbers in the siege of Vraks were somwhat more accurate given how much of the planet was uninhabitable and how many hives were actually held by the rebels. The Orks in Armageddon had numbers but the imperium. They seemed a little light even with all those Adeptus Astartes evening the pkaying field.
I'm far from being an expert on the lore of 40k, but isn't it the case if there needs to be troops on the ground only the initial strikes on centers of gravity are conducted by the marines? Actual occupation and pacification (cleansing...) is the realm of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Imperial Guards, not the Legiones Astartes. Like I said, my 40k expertise is very, very limited, but I love learning more if I'm wrong about this.
The Space Marines really aren't marines. They're functionally a lot more like Delta - even more elite that SEALS. (I've got no idea what the equivalent for any other nation would be). One interesting thing about 40K games involving Space Marines is that they've already lost even before the first die is thrown. A game is supposed to be a more-or-less fair fight; the Astartes aren't trained or equipped to fight fair. Possibly the only exception is if they're being used as a blocking force to be expended so something even more valuable can be protected; but the only thing that comes to mind would be a Titan.
@PersonalityMalfunction I'm sort of in the same boat as you, I'm pretty new to 40k lore, so you may be right, I was really just musing about the numbers anyway, it might just be the writers prerogative too 😉
"'Helljumper, Helljumper, where you been? Feet first inta hell and back again! When I die, please bury me deep! Place my MA5 down by my feet Don't cry for me, don't shed no tear! Just pack my box with PT gear! "Cuz one early morning 'bout zero-five! The ground will rumble, there'll be lightning in the sky! Don't you worry, don't come undone! It's just my ghost on a PT run."
Oddly the best reason to build a space elevator in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is drop- marines. Good literary examples in Old Man's War, Red Rising (where it's called "Iron Rain" for good reason), and maybe the original example, War of the Worlds. Just realized that's sort of what H G Wells had in mind.
I know Battletech is the first thing that comes to mind for me when I see Dropships! As for drop pods, I rather like how they were handled in Starship Troopers. The book, not the movie.
Funnily enough, there is an _ANIME_ of SST (based on the book) that is the closest to the book here on youtube, an old Laserdisk OVA... ... but Battletech does it best: Dropships are heavily armed and armored and can take on _multiple assault lances_ and still win. Each one is a mobile strongpoint, and most of the time, you don't fight them, you just stay as far away from them as possible.
@@UrdnotChuckles nope, there was a legit OVA of Book SST back in the '80s on Laserdisk. If you watched Halo Legends' _Prototype_ segment, then you've seen the (modernized and Halo-ized) version of the Anime Marauder suit from that laserdisk anime.
@@TheTrueAdept Unless it's a mule. Or a danais. Or a mammoth. Aquaducts. Behemoths. In battletech is actually somewhat interesting in that it has a very clear definition of what entails a dropship. "The dropship drops from a jumpship" anything that doesn't is a jumpship, a smallcraft, a station, a monitor, or a fighter.
Just a little thing, you mention that mothership is not a term used in maritime but as a merchant marine officer I would partially disagree. In the maritime academy we learn to spot potential pirates or terrorist vessels by looking out for "mothership behaviour" in high risk zones, a single larger craft sending out smaller craft as we enter the area. It's just a way to help identify suspicious activity. Not sure if only my academy taught this or if it is a more widely accepted use. I also would not be surprised if the term originated from sci fi, but we do use it in an albeit niche way in the commercial maritime industry.
I don't know if you read your comments, but just wondered if you read much sci-fi? There's a series by Jack Campbell that covers some orbital warfare with landing craft, etc. It's not entirely relevant but thought I'd mention it. It's called the lost fleet. Thanks for another vid.
My comic series uses drop ships to get the soldiers through atmospheric entry, then they open the doors and the soldiers (many of which have natural wings, the rest use jetpacks) act as paratroopers and make their way to the ground. The dropships launch from what I just realized classifies as a mothership, but I call a Galleon. The ship is built around an O'Neil cylinder, and houses cannons that can fire "rods from God" projectiles the size of a minivan. The Galleon is the only ship in the fleet capable of FTL (I know the idea of such a massive ship being capable of FTL is weird, but I've got to fudge the rules somewhere) so all other ships either store in the hangars or dock solidly to the side. The Galleon can dock 8 frigates and hold thousands of fighters, bombers, and dropships. The drop ships can provide air support but can also be fitted with special modules to land tanks, or be used as a temporary bunk for ground troops.
I just got done reading a series called Drop Trooper by Rick Partlow.. excellent books. First book is called Contact Front. I of course loved the classic book Starship Trooper (and despise the movies) Recruit by Brazee is also a good book & 1st book of a series.
I loved the movies, the director was so wrong that even in his attempt to make a satire all he did was make the movie more enjoyable. Anybody with a brain could see the propaganda wasn't really that false, it was all true. I can't speak for the later movies though.
What is this comment section? A 2000 lotr discussion circle? Noooo the movies sucked ruined the book!!! I'm very familiar with manga/anime too and i can safely book/manga purists are the worst. Literally cannot fathom the idea that X can be good because it isn't the same thing. Might as well screen the book page by page then they'll be happy. The movie isn't a good adaptation but an amazing spin off/stand alone
@@tarektechmarine8209 All he had to do was make a good movie with the usual patriotism and fighting foreigners. It doesn't resonate with today's crowd because the military is rainbow warriors and endless oppression of other countries through establishing Democracy.
It is a bit cheap reference, because it's obvious, but the reference in my mind for arguments in favour of infantry in high-tech settings is always Starship Troopers from Robert A Heinlein. My favourite scene of soldiers dropping from orbit is in that book as well. Circumstances may appear where "destroy everything" is the best strategy, but I suppose there is more general application for the old mote that states "to the victorious go the spoils". Most armies will probably continue wanting to spoils (in land, infrastructure, slaves, and what have you) to pay the cost of fuel to get the explosives and/or soldiers in place. As long as that remains true, armies will not abandon the use of infantry (I suppose). Alternatively they could send some mind-hacking wave and brainwash all enemies into vassals, or soldiers, for your cause. That would make infantry obsolete, possibly. Explosives will not. Fall from orbit is a nice image, and I imagine the ideal tech for that would be change the body of people. Allowing any random citizen that cool experience of falling from space completely naked, walking from the center of a hot crater, and getting arrested for being naked in the middle of a urban area. No Drop Pod will give you that.
I also love Heinlein's work interesting to think that in an age where humans can "Hot Drop" from orbit fully nude they would be arrested for that rather then the crater they created lol
Well,@@WolmanLykos , I assume the ground in urban areas will be self-repairing with nano-technology fast enough for no one take notice of things like that. Long before men start 'raining' from orbit.
@@thiagom8478 Sure, a more modern analogy is while its easy to mend fences people still consider it a crime : 3 Although ODST nudists seem impossible biological augmentation may be more practical going forward then Cybernetics. We don't really know what the limits of either technology are
Sounds reasonable to me,@@WolmanLykos . You are probably right. On the other hand, there is always that argument someone used in I can't remember which book, about what would have happened if Queen Victoria of England had decided to set as priority for her nation the creation of a machine able to transmit sound and image through large distances in real time. The thing (basically Television) was imaginable, even long before that time, but the basic fields responsible for produce the knowledge we Historically used to reach the point where we can build that stuff didn't exactly existed at the time. Possibly there are other ways to reach the same solution, but we do not know them. What we can say, with relative certainty, is that the most powerful and rich nation in that time would have failed the goal. The knowledge they had didn't included tools to make televisions. Perhaps there is ways to make ODST nudists (so we can arrest them, on arrival) and we just didn't developed the fields of science that will provide us the basic knowledge to develop the technology that will give us those nudists. But, probably not.
@@thiagom8478 Oh fun I had never heard of that argument with the British empire I might borrow that. We may be able to make a human to survive the impact but I can't think of any organic material that can resist that kind of heat. From what I recall re-entry heat shielding is mostly ceramics with some metals? Our current limitations are less can we manufacture that and more do those materials exist and if not can we make an alloy/composite/synthetic version to the desired specifications. And in the case ODST nudists can it be not only organic but a part of a human body. It would need to be flexible enough to allow a full range of motion [or more range then we have now!] breathable [humans breath through their skin as well]. Im now imagining what kind of caloric intake our "ODST's" would need and the logistics to go along with it : D
For a sci-fi story I'm writing I'm including drop-mechs which, if the online calculator I used was right, the operators would be under about 7 Gs of acceleration for about 7 minutes straight. I know there are some pilots who can handle 9, maybe even 10, Gs for impressive periods of time, but falling for 7 minutes under that kind of load is impressive. And 7 minutes is usually enough time to activate some AA defenses, especially if the target has fair warning. But it definitely isn't enough time to fully mobile to resist a mech assault.
17:47 And at that weight, you can have a reserve chute that might even be bigger than the first one since it opens up closer to the ground with less time to slow you down.
Since the air gets denser as you get deeper in the atmosphere, your "drag chutes" will be becoming more efficient as you descend. You don't have to make the chute bigger - you just have to make it strong enough to not shred when it opens.
Larger Dropships would also make a lot of sense in later waves of deployment, After the initial waves have absorbed/removed/occupied a local area's defenses.
Space elevator + orbital ring + drop ships= rapid deployment anywhere faster than most jets can scramble. Near instant reinforcement / rapid deployment. The battlefield becomes 2.5D as now you have to worry about the potential of being outflanked from above.
The first use of "mother ship" that I know of was by George Adamski in 1952's FLYING SAUCERS HAVE LANDED in his description of his meeting with the "Venusian". The smaller landing craft were called 'scout ships" Now "drop pod" is differentl. The first use of such that I know of was in Heinlein's STARSHIP TROOPERS (not the movie, which was a horrible abortion of the booi) from 1959. and called a "drop capsule. It was equipped with what would later be called ECM that could lock up a defensive system, chaff, and would peel away from outer to inner with several deployments and jettisonning of parachiets along the way. This was not new to me. I saw it in a 1954 issue of COLLIERS magazine, I think March, there was a picture of the then current idea of a spceship with the small swept front wing and the large swept rear wing and tail. This one was HUGEE and crusing on the edge of space letting out pod-shaped objects on parachutes from opeings in the side facing the viewer In 1964 or early '65,SCIENCE & MECHANICS magazine published a piece about a 'Porject Ithica". It looked like a cross between Dyna-Soar and the Space Shuttle, with the craft being big enoug to carry what looked like tws squads of soldiers in the diagram. It was to be sub-orbital. Thas was at the hight of interest in the X-20 I think I'm giveng away my age
Heinlein's pick-up ships were called 'retrieval boats', which is a bit of a dull name, really. I'm struggling to remember what Joe Haldeman's soldiers used in _The Forever War;_ I think they just had shuttles. 'Drop pod' in the current generation seems to have come chiefly from the game _Halo,_ though there seems to be some influence from manga and anime as well.
@@akizeta Thanks for the Heinlein reference, I had forgotten The ships in FOREVER WAR were mostly things you held onto like posts, I forget what they were called, probabl "shuttles". They were strange with separate internal time and external time referents. such that though decades and centuries passed in externa (real) time, internally, only a short time passed
@@spaceman081447 I would not be surprised. The transport was not really described that well and I thought that the starships may have landed to deliver troops
14:42 A white fuselage with black writing that says “Reusable Rocket” totally made me laugh. For those old enough to remember this reference, this booster is the generic “Beer” of the launch industry.
As per using nukes as anti-aircraft, they did tests for it in the cold war and the radiation wasn't an issue for the people on the ground as the detonations we're at a high altitude. The radiation also wasn't a problem because they weren't salted bombs so the radiation was completely dissipated in minutes to hours. The idea was only dropped because ICBMs became a thing and the idea was for shooting down fleets of bombers.
Something to consider, one topic you didn’t cover or I missed, is the use of electronic countermeasures, drones and decoys, with dropships /drop pods. The assault force commander would assume the enemy has effective anti-air or space defenses. To protect his landing force, he probably with use a combination of orbital strikes and massive ECM to protect his landers. Each lander could deploy it own decoys or the Mothership could Launch thousands.
Speaking of beaming power to the Drop Pods, again depending on how much Power you have at your disposal. You don't really need to tightly beam the power down, esp as the beamed-power will muck with sensors. If you use the right wave length you can make it uncomfortable to very deadly or even heating/melting the metal outside when the drop-pods are falling.
Starship Troopers ~ the original book from about 1965 ~ not the crappy movie. Powered armour ~ Think Iron Man. You drop in a pod, which is like a Russian Doll, like an onion. Layers are semi-ablative, and they're made to become radar chaff. By the time you get down to 5,ooo ft your speed has dropped to terminal, which is about 140 mph. Your jump jets can slow you from that with no problem.
You should read Contact Front by Rick Partlow (Drop Trooper series) and/or the book Recruit by Brazee. The movie Starship Trooper is a poor pale shadow of the excellence of the book.
@@icecold9511I wouldn't go quite so far but it is a damn good movie, enjoyable to watch while still putting across the message. Even now the effects still hold up well.
Hello there, Isaac Arthur, I have some questions for you. 1) LET US ASSUME THERE IS FTL WHICH IS FAST. Well then, in interstellar warfare, what would warfare “feel” like? Would war “feel” like a war in the “Age of Sail”? Would there be no “front line” like ancient/mediaeval/early modern warfare and would there be individual battles? Or would there be a front line like WW1/WW2/modern warfare but the “front line” is 3D since you got to realise there is an up and a down? And would there rarely be individual battles because (for example, in WW2, the Battle of Stalingrad was not just about Stalingrad and the immediate area around it, it was also about the massive area surrounding Stalingrad such as Kalach, the Don River, the Volga River, Kotelnikovo, etc.) 2) What would the organisational structure of an interstellar military look like? In our world, a squad would be about 10 to 15 men or something. In an interstellar military, would the smallest organisational unit be tiny drones controlled by a single human? Or would a squad be like 10 to 15 robots which are directly controlled by 1 human, but SOMEHOW, that 1 human IS the squad? For example, you could think of the individual robots as limbs that could be disposable when damaged, (for example, if 1 robot got damaged, the human could easily discard that robot, and control the remaining ones, and when the whole squad gets wiped out, then the human gets killed?) Like, think of the WHOLE SQUAD of a “body” of a human. Would this idea be practical, or would it be a joke of an idea? 3)Let’s say that in the future, a single bullet can cause a nuclear explosion. If a single bullet has the potential to be that powerful, then how would planetary invasions occur? How would generals use infantry, tanks and IFVs, artillery, etc? If a single bullet can do this much damage, then what is the point of an Army for an Invasion? Wouldn’t planetary invasions just be pointless and be ridiculously costly, while you can just blow up the planet with your navy without ever sending ground forces? Not only that, if you have technology to turn civilians into very experienced soldiers in a matter of minutes, then what is the point of being careful, launching a planetary invasion to reduce collateral damage, and not commit to orbital bombardment so to try and avoid committing war crimes, if there are no innocent and unarmed civilians? If I am wrong, PLEASE, let me know, and I will change my thoughts. 4) This links to 3). If planetary invasions are useless, then what is the point of some military branches such as the Army, the Air Force or the Marines? In the future, would the Navy (in space, not the water one, of course) be the only branch which is needed in interstellar warfare? 5) We as human beings fight wars in the 21st Century, for resources, ideological reasons, and religion, etc. What would the motivations be for an interstellar war in the future? Not resources, because an interstellar nation has lots of those. Well, in Halo, the Covenant Prophets had a pretty good reason to wage war and commit genocide against Humanity and that was to keep the secret that their religion was bullshit. Humanity’s very existence contradicted the Covenant’s religion and the Prophets did not want the masses to find out, and potentially make the Prophets lose their power. So what would the motivations be for an interstellar war, if there is one? Or would warfare be obsolete, hopefully? These are all my questions. I hope you, Arthur, or someone else can answer them. Bye for now. Jans Kam.
A drop pod, we can do now. See powered landings with Crew Dragons from SpaceX. We can augment them for military. Also Spring Drop Crater Based drop pods are also good to use. Shocks and springs that remove the need for parachutes or rockets.
Janking up cargo/people from the ground has already been done. I saw a WW2 movie produced during or immediately after the war where the protagonists left a jungle area in a glider plane. A powered aircraft essentially just swooped down to catch the glider without actually landing.
There's a really good movie called "Genocidal Organ" that starts with a really cool scene of this... The main military agency wanted to extract a VIP so they 1st launched a fragmentation bomb from a plane in low orbit to destroy all armored vehicles and enemy clusters in the landing zone. They then launched pods made of a material that dissolved after drop. In the movie the pods are made of bioengineered dolphin meat for grimdark reasons but it can really be almost any material foam you can imagine and i would rather consider a form of aerogel since it would be cheap, resilient to both heat and kinetic energy and made of very little actual material so dissolving it would be easy and leave pretty much zero trace of what it was before or who made it. Those same pods carried high caliber machine guns to ensure the dropped troops safety by further saturating the landing zone with lead before proping parachutes and then eliminated any remaining combatants after landing before melting and letting soldiers and machine gun drones out. While the drones patrolled the area, anihilating everything that moved and wasnt marked as ally to clear a path and sow chaos the soldiers went and secured the VIP. If you have several million dollars around waiting to be burned away or those troops have some very specific and valuable missions like long term guerrilla warfare, espionage or extraction of high profile people/mcguffins then this method would be more or less how i envision a soldier drop onto a planet. 1st- Bomb the sh*t out of some specific areas chosen for strategic or military importance; 2nd - Drop operatives there into pods made to guarantee their survival and leave minimum traces of them ever being there in the 1st place after landing; 3rd - Allow the soldiers to move into an adjacent area; 4th - Disguise their drop with more bombing or pods with expendable drones and a secondary legitimate objective; 5th - Wait for contact and profit;
As you already touched upon I think there's definitely going to be cases where you want to land troops on the ground and can't just bombard it from orbit. Maybe the place is a factory both sides want intact, or you want to recover data, or you want to extract an important hostage, or it's a counteroffensive on an occupied part of your own city/space station. Sometimes you need a scalpel, not a hammer. I do think the scifi trope of landing troops to destroy the enemy is silly though. At the very least they should be supported with heavy orbital bombardments, and more often than not they should outright be replaced by them.
@23:07 This is how the Necromongers did it in "The Chronicles of Riddick" (2004). Giant, building-sized spears, whose sides were lined with smaller drop ships and troop carriers.
"Yes anti dropship batteries may be firing low yield nukes at you" Look up the USAF NIKE program. We already tested this. The first anti air missiles were nukes. You only had to be close.
I work for a company that has actually done work on developing these, as a troop insertion vehicle, an emergency evacuation system, and as a emergency bailout system for ISS or "Other vehicles".
I am surprised (shocked, really!) that Isaac Arthur didn't mention the Mobile Infantry (MI) of Robert A. Heinlein's classic novel Starship Troopers. In the novel (forget about the train wreck of a movie), each trooper is enclosed in a "drop capsule" that is ejected from an orbiting troopship. The capsule enters the planet's atmosphere on a ballistic trajectory and slows down using aero-braking. For landing, the capsule breaks apart and the trooper's armored suit deploys a series of parachutes. The trooper's armor is totally sealed and self-contained, so that he can fight in a poisonous atmosphere or in vacuum. He's equipped with a full sensor suite including radar, sonar, lidar, sound, light, infrared, and ultraviolet. He has radio communication with his squad mates and his chain of command. His weapons include an assault rifle, light and heavy flamers for incendiary work, a grenade launcher, and a missile launcher with tactical nuclear weapons.
IA covered the relevant details without mentioning Heinlein, probably for copyright reasons. Another important role of the drop pod was the ablative armour peeling off in sheets, cluttering up the radar of ground based defenses. I thought that was a nice touch. Hammer's Slammers is another series of novels you can have a look at if you enjoyed Starship Troopers!
@@PersonalityMalfunction Yeah, the heat shield becoming chaff was a nice touch. I'm also familiar with the Hammer's Slammers books. That brings up a question. Who would win in a battle between the Mobile Infantry and Hammer's Slammers?
@@spaceman081447 Good question... leaning towards Hammer's Slammers due to tanks and artillery. The MI insertion method and lack of logistics train would give them a huge advantage in any army vs army scenario though.. damn, that's a really good question. Your thoughts?
@@PersonalityMalfunction The novel Starship Troopers doesn't say much about the MI's supporting forces. However, it does explicitly say that, "A single MI private could take out a squadron of those things [tanks] if anyone was silly enough to put tanks against MI." Also there is the implication that the Navy could bombard artillery positions and other targets from orbit. Concerning the MI's logistics train, the Navy's retrieval boats could be used to ferry down heavy weapons and other equipment from orbit. The extreme mobility of the MI plus their armored suits could be a problem for Hammer's Slammers. That's all I have for now.
I’v always seen drop troopers as a evolution of paratroopers a way to deploy troops behind enemy lines either as shock troopers attacking the enemy’s flank or as commandos striking key targets within enemy territory. The augment against just orbital bombardment depending on the setting starship weaponry could have a similar energy output of atomic weaponry the destruction caused would be too costly potentially glassing the surface still causing long term damage similar to nuclear weapons.
We've had a solid decade of demonstration for all the tech required to drop a squad of troops anywhere on the planet within two hours. Virgin Galactic has the piggyback launch; NASA showed us autonomous shuttlecraft; Red Bull televised sub-orbital jumps... Then we got an official 'Space Force'
So one thing I liked about 40k is they also have pods that are just for resupply allowing front line units to get emergency resupply when needed which I don't see much other then say halo with weapon supply drops
Interesting ideas that you mention "beaming down energy from the mothership to the dropship to give the dropship energy/fuel to slow it down" cause I don't know if that would be possible. On a fundamental level, if you are blasting a dropship with X amount of energy, if it is absorbing that energy, then re-blasting it downwards to slow it down, or using it to power grab generators or something. Even accounting for 100% efficient engines and machines, it would still only be able to emit X energy downwards to slow it down, meaning that the net change in momentum would be Zero so the dropship couldn't slow down. Fascinating little loophole I think
I imagine the ideal size and type of insertion vehicle will also depend on the stage of the invasion. For the first waves you probably want lots of small drop pods, thoroughly mixed with decoys and munitions that share the real thing's radar signature, to oversaturate and/or deplete ground defenses. I also imagine that many apparent landing sites will be targeted by nothing but decoys and bombs, in attempts to draw enemy QRFs away from your actual soldiers, and that even if you do use organic infantry there will be quite a lot of autonomous weapons, be they drones, turrets, nanites, or more general robots, and mine dispensers scattered around outside the LZs proper to hinder enemy movement while your troops get to work. Once they have gotten up to their business of securing LZs, descent corridors, and generally causing chaos you start reinforcing them with your larger landers. Send platoon dropships screeching through holes in the AA net, or your brigade landers drop straight down above suppressed zones, or, further down the road, send transatmospheric shuttles far closer to civilian grade to captured starports. Whatever floats your star dreadnought.
You'd also probably want the first wave hitting the atmosphere to be smaller ships less because of survivability but also because those big regiment landers and logistical ships are also very very big baskets with lots and lots of eggs in them. So for the first wave you put a few eggs in a many baskets as you can and throw them in all at once so that they enemy can't kill them all and you don't lose as much combat power per kill.
It depends on which 40K drop pod you’re using such as the dreadclaw assault pod can carry up to about twenty marines vs the ten man pods usually used, also there’s dedicated vehicle pods such as the dreadnought drop pod which replaces the ten man squad with a single walker, armed with a heavy laser cannon, plasma cannon or an assault cannon and a powerful claw on the other arm with a heavy machine gun or flamethrower strapped underneath it, or the raven guards tarantula assault pod which replaces its internal cargo for a single automated heavy weapons platform, be it a multi missile launcher or a twin heavy bolter variant
I always felt the Heinlein drop pods from Starship Troopers were fairly realistic. It's a disposable onion that, as it breaks through the atmosphere, it sheds layers that slow the pod down and act like chaff. Eventually opening up and dropping the trooper mid air. But their power armor has gyro-jets for slowing down further. Even with AI and modern targeting systems, the chaff off of 45 pods would probably blanket a good portion of the sky. Especially if it releases a lot of radio noise, junk, flares, what have you.
This is one of those things where I know it's stupid, impractical, and probably won't work. But I know damn well humanity is gonna figure out how to make it work. Mostly out of spite and also because it's cool. Just how I am certain, big stompy robots will be made.
I must correct your definitions. Term Mothership was used in Military. Prior to WW1, with emergence of Torpedo Bats. There was attempt of caring them in dedicated transport ship, called Torpedo Boat Tender or Motherships. Like French Foudre. But concept died fast when they realised that it make more sense to use large Torpedo Gunboat capable of sea fearing, what become first Destroyer. In SF sense term is used for mobile bases, commonly doubling as shipyard and civilian population centers. With examples being Mothership from Homeworld or Supremacy from Star Wars. Term Dropship is typically used in context of military space shuttle. Basically more futuristic version Assault Helicopter. With examples being Pelican from Halo. Though larger versions also exist like Dropship from Command and Counter.
I would also like to reference the kinetic rods/hangars/WMDs used by the Necromongers in chronicles of Riddick. It may not apply but it did serve multiple purposes and was essentially an enormous version of the "Rods from god".
regarding lithobraking, this has come up in pop sci videos about things like power armour and jumping off buildings. Would it not be possible to have a massive crumple zone on a drop pod to enable you to slam into the ground and have the deceleration eased by the extra material? Either in the form of a kilometre long crumple shins on a mech suit, or perhaps something more complex like explosives and expanding foam?
Why people say flak cannon when the acronym flak already has the word cannon in it? Flak is a german term that stands for flugabwehrkanone, you can guess what kanone means.
Drop pods don't make much sense to land troops, unless it strictly to land assault troops as soon as possible. I would go with a dropship having troops freefall from around 140,000 ft in specialized spacesuits (more advanced than what we have today) with steerable parachute packs. I believe that drop pods would be easily tracked for targeting by air defense systems or to determine their landing zone to alert forces to that area. Dropping troops from near space makes more sense and you don't have to land ships if the goal is to land on the planet undetected. Also, there is a lot of planning that goes into insertions from the air, so they don't happen randomly. It is very much an opportunistic tactic if the conditions support it.
Many years ago I read an article about an idea where you have a meteoroid in the size of a buss or a car as a heat shield, and then strap your self to the rock and dropp everything from space. So when you are close to the ground you release your self from the rock and open a parachute. If we think that we have a couple of these then we could fool the ground forces that it's just a natural meteoroid rain.
We track nearly every asteroid in our vicinity and their orbits on a plane. It would be odd if some suddenly went on a collision course with our home planet. Anything extrasolar would surely be detected much like with oumuamua.
@@rea280 very recently we missed a astroid e which passed between Earth and the moon. We have the incident over russia a couple of years ago which we missed. But the thing is that we only see a rock or couple of rocks hitting earth, not artificial made objects. So if you don't expect this type of inception you will miss it. It is good for SOF missions which can be denied that they have ever happened.
i had an idea once where ground troops themselves could be large mass-driver launched probes that float on a set trajectory towards their target with little to no guidance, using some sort of (if its even possible) particle shield for atmospheric entry and of course defense from projectiles. once it lands it just unfolds, gets up on whatever it has to move (my idea involved tall, lanky legs to pull itself out of whatever crater it made while lithobraking, like the tripods from war of the worlds) and starts the invasion wherever it happened to land. Effectively giant robots launched by the dozen like how the aliens from Starship Troopers got to earth, minus the asteroid and unexplained speedy arrival.
In Old Man's War by Scalzi, the troops are sealed in a ball of nanites that absorb the heat from re-entry and change shape to that of a glider and then finally fall apart into a cloud of dust just above ground. In fantasy, a wizard did it. In science fiction, it's nanites.
What is science faction? WD Hallmark % 26 so evil is on Saturday 🪐? It's how nice the poisons of ag and compression is on the Rollbot that is working in are Galaxy? Your the Seagreat. Keep your acounts end tell 2024& WD route 66 was old maps. Your ok with Jupiter files! AES is covering slots! And earth % is love you &CSC covers the slacking ends. Make a CD for 2024 with all your files for a device that plays it in a store investment for fewture children. Your saveing the children of pork wolds of WD cant stand that evil Creator! Y? We setting a reservation of date on earth also.
Still love that series though.
Scalzi does some interesting things, and hits lots of great tropes well. I forgot about this part though!
Gah! You have excellent taste!
At that point, why not just have the Nanites do the fighting, ala terminator 2?
Isaac's premise that dropships / pods will be fired upon is correct, imo. But generally, paratroopers (even today) are delivered to areas that are minimally armed. They learned in WW2 that dropping them directly on armored formations wasn't conducive to operational success. I'd suspect the same principles would be used for dropships and droppods as for paratroopers.
Orbital bombardment may be required to create that drop zone, but the principle remains, clear the area of enemy forces first.
🤣👍
Most probably....or extremly stealthy insertions of small teams but no, hard to imagine mass drops of troops on contested áreas, more so with the proliferation of anti-drone equipment and man portable AA, the dissaster suffered by the Russian special forces who tried the helicopter assault on Kiev airport seems like a warning about things to come.
@@cesaravegah3787 Can't forget the contributions of the Ghost of Kiev.
Not to argue, just offering a counterpoint. Orbital bombardment would very effectively announce your presence. If the mission you're undertaking needs to be covert, that wouldn't work.
@@amateurcrastinator9523 Orbital bombardment is barely under full nuclear warfare on the scalation aspect of the equation so I believe that not always would be a political or practical option even if temporal control of the requiered space battlefield is achieved, as you said, not to argue but I believe that covert insertions always would be part of warfare, you dont always need or want to hit the enemy with a hammer, sometimes Is way better an scalpel.
@@dansmith1661 That is propaganda, the mauling that the top russian commands transported by their most elite helicopter combat transports received on that battle is an historic fact, Putin bitches and trolls of course say something different, nobody sane cares.
The interesting thing about 40K's drop pods is that they're actually weapons in and of themselves, not in the sense that they're armed (although there are versions for that) but the kinetic force of landing, and doors opening means anyone unfortunate to be close enough gets squished.
There is assault droppods like deathstorm filled with missiles and assault cannons 360. It can also be used as ammo drops and small supplies.
i think the troops insight would be also squashed by the impact on ground and the rapid deceleration...
@@SirHeinzbond Not the genetically advanced super humans with crazy armor that are 40k Space Marines. Thats the first rule of warfare, have more super soldiers than the enemy
@@lastword8783 They also handwave that shit away in the codex, too, as some Dark Age anti-inertia tech back in second or third edition I believe.
@@SirHeinzbondgood luck with that
Motherships are used in real world applications.
They are used for the deployment of submersibles such as those that visit shipwrecks.
German U-boats of ww2 used bigger U-boats they called “milk cows”. Somali pirates used larger fishing boats as motherships. The lunar landers of the space race used the command modules as motherships.
Aircraft carriers, exist.
The list could go on but I need to make breakfast.
To quote the Wikipedia page on motherships
“A mother ship, mothership or mother-ship is a large vehicle that leads, serves, or carries other smaller vehicles. A mother ship may be a maritime ship, aircraft, or spacecraft.”
I am a mothership. I deploy my fleet each morning.
But this video is discussing drop ships….
The drop ship equivalents would be Hueys, Chinooks, Black Hawks, and Ospreys. WWII had the drop pods in the form of Higgins boats and Waco and Horsa gliders.
Glad somebody corrected this, so close to the start of the video hearing it is not a commonly used term bugged me. Working in a maritime industry it is frequently used along with the term daughter craft.
@@wils315 I have never heard it used in a military context, but it's a valid term, I suppose.
The anime Aldnoah Zero had the most awesome drop sequence using Landing Castles. Its a dropship the size of a skyscraper that impacts like a nuke and levels the entire area it lands on.
Exactly what I was thinking of, the best way to do an orbital insertion is if the lander is an actual weapon itself
Okay so now I'm imagining the drop pods themselves dropping bombs -- clear the landing zone, create obstacles to block the defender's from gaining LOS on the pods, and you raise a huge cloud of dust that will give the pods concealment as they deploy parachutes, a vulnerable phase. For now, I think parachutes are still the likely choice over rockets. Less mass, smaller size, less complicated. Cutting down on landing time sounds nice, but so does bringing more troops, being a smaller target, having more armor on the pod, or having spare room for decoys and ECM. If you want to put actual fleshy people on the ground, they need to believe in a reasonable chance of survival, at least 80%.
The same railgun you use for clearing the landing zone on the way down could be used as static (or even towed) artillery.
Orbital to surface combat sounds like it could take trench warfare to a whole new subterranean dimension. You dig and then you dig some more! We'd be eating cockroaches in no time. Or manufacture some fancy invertible cities like in Neon Genesis Evangelion.
I like the idea of the drop pods having no form of reentry control. They just sink through the atmosphere like rocks, having internal shock absorption so the humans inside don't become a paste on the floor or ceiling of the craft.
Go watch the drop pod scene from Genocidal Organ
@@squashiejoshie200000 Yeah you weren't wrong, that was so damn cool. I'm pretty picky with my anime but that does peek my interest. Apparently that "smart" cluster bomb is a real weapon, although discontinued.
Halos ODST(Orbital Drop Shock Troops) used Single occupant Exoatmospheric Insertion Vehicles to quickly insert at or near the target. They were as implied single occupant reinforced pods. They "used the atmosphere to do most of the work slowing the pod down, as the ceramic armor would burn off revealing a crash cage, and closer to the ground with air brakes that had rockets on the ends of the 4 brakes, slowing the pods down before landing, but it was still more of a crash lol.
Yeah odst reminded me of Tiberian sun opening mission but I would think that delivery option with multiple weapons platforms would be better more like sst or multiple individuals to use a multitude of combined arms but a solo recon trooper pod sounds expensive insertion .war is expensive cheap and simple is the best
@itorca835 Would definitely be expensive. They were usually single use. They did have different types. Some that had larger pack outs, a type that could be launched from slipstream even? Always thought it would be realistic for a low type two civilization as they wouldn't be all too difficult to manufacture vs. some of the other more technologically advanced methods explained in video.
Quickly inserting soldiers behind enemy lines has always been and likely always will be a viable strategy in order to get behind and sabotage battle lines from the rear, or sabotage supply lines, power stations, rear support, communications, and other infrastructure. If they have to drop from orbit, of course using just a parchute isn't gonna cut it, so this would likely be amongst the first step in a long line of advancements in tactical Insertion from space. I do like the idea mentioned in another comment on nanobots thar configure from a protective shielding(wonder if a layer would be ablative or if the nanites would be strong enough to survive the friction) and turn into a glider shape as they get into the lower atmosphere. I imagine it wouldn't be a "one-time" use, and could even turn into shielding or weaponry, or surveillance equipment or something else on the ground?
@@bshinn4884 I would think from a combat engineer a instant forward outpost or base would be a marvel sure less of a shootem up. but the power play is immense if you could just drop a fob that would be a well shot what do we do about that situation. on a chaotic everchanging battlefield it's who's making moves and who's reacting to chaos. But to just drop one guy isnt the same effect
@@bshinn4884 I was talking to a buddy he was saying a pod could deploy team under the planetary surface and use the pod to make a underground fob to send strikes from.
@@bshinn4884 single use is the best way to go about it. Save a lot of time and energy by having smaller, lighter, far cheaper to produce, disposable units. The fact that they can be mass produced so easily and be discarded also allows for stuff like magazine fed insertion devices meaning you put a whole platoon in atmosphere in seconds while maintaining the capability to do it again and again.
Snacks? Ready! Drinks? Ready! Notification platoon; jump in! Go, go, go!!!
This is my snack
There are many like it, but this one is mine
The first rule of warfare: to be well stocked on snacks and drinks!
On the bounce!
Do you wanna live forever, apes?
Light is green! Don't stand in hatch!
makes me want to play "Civiliation call to power" as drop ships is one of the late game strats. best civ game as far as I am concerned.
20 years later, I still hear "Find the enemy!"
1:18 Actually, mothership IS a term used in hungarian military jargon to refer to carriers. It stems from the old hydroplane tender's name, that was called "repülőgép-anyahajó", or airplane-mothership.
Ah Hungary everyone's favorite landlocked naval power.
@@robomonkey1018 the swiss and bolivian fleet want to have a word with you
@@robomonkey1018 *Horthy Miklós will remember that.
That's pretty much how it's called in Chinese too. It's called "aviation(aircraft) mothership".
@robomonkey1018 the danube is pretty big mate. That's where the Hungarian 'navy' operates
On the bigger side, Battletech dropships come in a range of sizes. From the Leopard which drops a mech platoon, or a Fury that carries an infantry company and a couple vehicle platoons, basically their APCs and maybe a supporting light tank platoon. On the large end you have huge dropships that can transport a regiment (Excalibur and Colossus for example). One of the more interesting is the Fortress Class. It transports a mixed battalion, a company each of mechs, tanks, and infantry. But it is heavily armored and armed for its size compared to other transports, with the weapons mounted where they are more effective if being chased, or firing on targets attacking it on the ground.
The Fortress pretty much does what it says on the tin. In addition to providing medical and repair support nearly all dropships in the setting provide, it also is a small fortress to anchor your dropzone. The dropship uniquely has a heavy artillery piece mounted in the nose that can only be used when the dropship is grounded.
Basically Battletech has a range of sizes, allowing to a military to dial in the risk of many eggs in one basket vs the inefficiency of having to gather enough jumpships to transport a force sent by exclusively smaller dropships. In practice while choice is often limited, a general in theory could have a mix of large transports that would best only be landed in secured dropzones, and smaller dropships that can be exposed to more risk for raids and/or to secure a dropzone for later groundings.
Though it should be noted that in Battletech, the reason why Dropships are called such is because of the Jumpship. Dropships are named such because they drop away from the Jumpship, not because it drops from space into the atmosphere. Even dropships which can't enter atmosphere are still called dropships because they exist in the dropship/jumpship binary paradigm of function.
@@ScriptedviolinceAlso should be noted Jumpships aren't targeted by nearly all fractions given their cost and rarity its not worth it to destroy thm
Regarding planets not being defenseless, I just remembered Robotech/Macross, when the Zentradi had four million ships, and earth was able to take out about a quarter of them just using one really really big cannon in Alaska
The grand cannon and in the lore there were 7 of them planned (one on each continent), the rogue zentradei during the malcontent uprisings lived in the barrel of the unfinished Brazil grand cannon.
@@douglasrood2650 i did not know that! Is that Macross lore as well, or Robotech only?
@@mahatmarandy5977 There was a huge series of novels written by Jack McKinney back in the day (they are trying to get them republished) but the novels covered all of the history that did not appear in the cartoons, it covered the comics (published and unpublished), the cartoons and all the story filler that appeared in the Palladium Books RPGs as well. If you can find a copy of the novels they are worth the read if you are a Robotech fan and it is the original story before the Shadow Chronicles re-write.
We’re in the pipe, five by five.
i did always think an orbital ring with drop ships of some kind was a perfect rapid reaction solution for earth, not just military but also for emergency response.
Good for pizza delivery
Sure it's cool, but isn't it pretty much strictly better just to scatter forces around the planet and give them starship style point to point transit.
Either the ring is moving at orbital velocities which means you have to pay a pretty high fuel cost to get your dropships up there only to burn it off again or you've built one of those fancy active structures which seems as likely to be the cause of the disaster -- and in any case it seems cheaper just to have a bunch of forces on the ground.
@@mastercharlesdiltardino8058Q: How do you know you live in a post-scarcity society? A: Orbital Pizza Delivery
@@mastercharlesdiltardino8058 amazon prime now!!!
Not economical, are you're soldiers just gonna live in space until there is an emergency?
I think the best considered drop pods have always been the ones described in starship troopers
Some of the fancy drop pods from warhammer 40K's "heresy period" were pretty decent - particularly the fancy "something claw drop pod" that they also used to use as boarding craft for "naval" combat.
More of a halo or titanfall fan of the orbital drop
Thank you. Heinlein did a good job describing the pods, and the entire drop!
Very shocked there was no first rule of warfare in this video
Same, especially since there were rules already.
the first rule of warfare is to never divulge all the rules of warfare
He did mention turning the surface to glass...
There was the Rule of Cool.
I love your content. More for the though exercise than anything. I like the amazing 3d images you provide as background but as an artist myself I had to say something about the beautiful art you displayed in this one.
I’m totally lost as to how you don’t have more subscribers. The subjects you pick and your take on it is absolutely mind blowing.
Personally I'm always pleasantly surprised there are so many folks who enjoy the topics we cover :) More are always welcome of course.
@@isaacarthurSFIA I can't even remember how I found you, I think I was looking up worldbuilding related stuff and you came up. Your distinctive voice is actually what hooked me. I feel kinda bad about that because it was a little bit meanspirited, but I'm glad I did, because you're very interesting and if I ever do get off my butt and actually make my sci-fi setting, your videos will be primary sources for the stuff I do. In particular your videos on extreme terraforming.
“Roger. Arthur is in the pipeline, five by five…”
Featured in one of my sci-fi WIPs. Great research. Thank you.
I was not expecting discussions on dropships...
Interesting... 🤔
My absolute favorite version of drop ships is the landing castles from Aldnoah zero.
They’re practically meteors that spawn a military base.
And man they are destructive
Yeah but they are towed systems aren't they? Not that useful as its something of a big expenditure for a single use. It makes sense for something like an odst drop pod but not so much for a whole base
@@casematecardinal i wouldnt say they are the biggest waste since you would drop them onto major cities to clear out a zone. Also i dont think they are single use.
@@jksupergamer you are correct, they are not single use. The main problem is that massive g forces that'd come with such a litho breaking.
Love that you talk about planets able to strike back at ships in orbit. having fun one day, I was designing ways a planet could fight back and while missiles and giant guns with fighter bombers are good, I had the idea you could also add some sort of tractor beams or similar trek. Imaging having your ship in orbit grabbed by this system and then yanked back to the surface in a crash landing; perhaps even dropped in pit surrounded by heavy weapons that can immediately just start pounding your crashed ship.
I like to call this "Orbital Bombardment by personnel".
"When the Tahsfoi invaded the Sol planetary system the humans didn't notice and Tahsfoi forces never returned. Upon research it was discovered that Sol was essentially a Dyson swarm with a population of hundreds of trillions. The sad invasion force was just considered to be an especially violent new criminal element. It was dealt with expediently, the event barely made the local human news."
See, I always thought that the thing that defines a Mothership is, it doesn't just *carry* strike craft. It has fabrication facilities onboard to *make* them. It's essentially a mobile base and factory with rapid deployment capabilities. Maybe with mining/refining and hydroponics capabilities to make it its own fully independent logistics hub.
Will 3D printers be a future addition to aircraft carriers? I can imagine the maintenance guys printing necessary parts for each aircraft.
I just finished my 2nd cup of coffee so I’ll be deploying some drop pods in about 15 minutes.
Hahaha well done sir. Beware the splash back
@@hardmcshaft7931
Divert all power to the REAR deflectors
Drop ships/pods are basically the futuristic version of paratroopers. ^^
@@benjigeez
Well it's more air/spacecraft to land, so paratrooper. XD
Heinlein modeled his Mobile Infantry on both US Marines and US Army Airborne.
@@RCAvhstape They are wearing high heels and dresses like a rainbow brigade?
@@dansmith1661 ???
Surely it's Air Cav???
In Deathworlders, the HEAT (spec ops) drop in from orbit (which they call a HELLNO jump) using portable force field projectors that form invisible glider wings.
I love 40k and its always an awesome day when i know SFIA is going to be discussing it at least in some way!! I just recently listened to a series of videos on the siege of Arnagedon (both of them) and the siege of Vraks they were pretty cool in terms of how a planetary assault might go. That said the number of troops in the 40k universe sometimes seems a bit low to me. Planets are rathet large and i think the numbers in the siege of Vraks were somwhat more accurate given how much of the planet was uninhabitable and how many hives were actually held by the rebels. The Orks in Armageddon had numbers but the imperium. They seemed a little light even with all those Adeptus Astartes evening the pkaying field.
Just add a few 0's to any 40k figures for them to make actual sence.
Also...
WAAAGH!
I'm far from being an expert on the lore of 40k, but isn't it the case if there needs to be troops on the ground only the initial strikes on centers of gravity are conducted by the marines? Actual occupation and pacification (cleansing...) is the realm of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Imperial Guards, not the Legiones Astartes. Like I said, my 40k expertise is very, very limited, but I love learning more if I'm wrong about this.
The Space Marines really aren't marines. They're functionally a lot more like Delta - even more elite that SEALS. (I've got no idea what the equivalent for any other nation would be).
One interesting thing about 40K games involving Space Marines is that they've already lost even before the first die is thrown. A game is supposed to be a more-or-less fair fight; the Astartes aren't trained or equipped to fight fair. Possibly the only exception is if they're being used as a blocking force to be expended so something even more valuable can be protected; but the only thing that comes to mind would be a Titan.
@PersonalityMalfunction I'm sort of in the same boat as you, I'm pretty new to 40k lore, so you may be right, I was really just musing about the numbers anyway, it might just be the writers prerogative too 😉
Man I love this man! Isaac got me through a really rough time. Thank you, Isaac. ❤😂🎉😢😮😅😊
"'Helljumper, Helljumper, where you been?
Feet first inta hell and back again!
When I die, please bury me deep!
Place my MA5 down by my feet
Don't cry for me, don't shed no tear!
Just pack my box with PT gear!
"Cuz one early morning 'bout zero-five!
The ground will rumble,
there'll be lightning in the sky!
Don't you worry, don't come undone!
It's just my ghost on a PT run."
Oddly the best reason to build a space elevator in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is drop- marines. Good literary examples in Old Man's War, Red Rising (where it's called "Iron Rain" for good reason), and maybe the original example, War of the Worlds. Just realized that's sort of what H G Wells had in mind.
I know Battletech is the first thing that comes to mind for me when I see Dropships! As for drop pods, I rather like how they were handled in Starship Troopers. The book, not the movie.
Funnily enough, there is an _ANIME_ of SST (based on the book) that is the closest to the book here on youtube, an old Laserdisk OVA...
... but Battletech does it best: Dropships are heavily armed and armored and can take on _multiple assault lances_ and still win. Each one is a mobile strongpoint, and most of the time, you don't fight them, you just stay as far away from them as possible.
@@TheTrueAdept Yup, a dropship is dangerous as heck! As for Starship Troopers, wasn't that the Roughnecks cartoon / anime?
@@UrdnotChuckles nope, there was a legit OVA of Book SST back in the '80s on Laserdisk. If you watched Halo Legends' _Prototype_ segment, then you've seen the (modernized and Halo-ized) version of the Anime Marauder suit from that laserdisk anime.
@@TheTrueAdept Sweet, I'll need to do a bit of a media dive then. :) Cheers.
@@TheTrueAdept Unless it's a mule. Or a danais. Or a mammoth. Aquaducts. Behemoths. In battletech is actually somewhat interesting in that it has a very clear definition of what entails a dropship. "The dropship drops from a jumpship" anything that doesn't is a jumpship, a smallcraft, a station, a monitor, or a fighter.
Just a little thing, you mention that mothership is not a term used in maritime but as a merchant marine officer I would partially disagree. In the maritime academy we learn to spot potential pirates or terrorist vessels by looking out for "mothership behaviour" in high risk zones, a single larger craft sending out smaller craft as we enter the area. It's just a way to help identify suspicious activity. Not sure if only my academy taught this or if it is a more widely accepted use. I also would not be surprised if the term originated from sci fi, but we do use it in an albeit niche way in the commercial maritime industry.
I don't know if you read your comments, but just wondered if you read much sci-fi? There's a series by Jack Campbell that covers some orbital warfare with landing craft, etc. It's not entirely relevant but thought I'd mention it. It's called the lost fleet. Thanks for another vid.
Im surprised you didnt use this episode to use the "Number 1 rule of warfare" joke. I love that one.
As an aspiring sci-fi author, i love these videos. They give me so much to think about.
My comic series uses drop ships to get the soldiers through atmospheric entry, then they open the doors and the soldiers (many of which have natural wings, the rest use jetpacks) act as paratroopers and make their way to the ground. The dropships launch from what I just realized classifies as a mothership, but I call a Galleon. The ship is built around an O'Neil cylinder, and houses cannons that can fire "rods from God" projectiles the size of a minivan. The Galleon is the only ship in the fleet capable of FTL (I know the idea of such a massive ship being capable of FTL is weird, but I've got to fudge the rules somewhere) so all other ships either store in the hangars or dock solidly to the side. The Galleon can dock 8 frigates and hold thousands of fighters, bombers, and dropships. The drop ships can provide air support but can also be fitted with special modules to land tanks, or be used as a temporary bunk for ground troops.
I just got done reading a series called Drop Trooper by Rick Partlow.. excellent books. First book is called Contact Front. I of course loved the classic book Starship Trooper (and despise the movies) Recruit by Brazee is also a good book & 1st book of a series.
I loved the movies, the director was so wrong that even in his attempt to make a satire all he did was make the movie more enjoyable. Anybody with a brain could see the propaganda wasn't really that false, it was all true. I can't speak for the later movies though.
What is this comment section? A 2000 lotr discussion circle? Noooo the movies sucked ruined the book!!!
I'm very familiar with manga/anime too and i can safely book/manga purists are the worst. Literally cannot fathom the idea that X can be good because it isn't the same thing. Might as well screen the book page by page then they'll be happy.
The movie isn't a good adaptation but an amazing spin off/stand alone
I am surprised that Isaac Arthur didn't mention the Mobile Infantry of THE BOOK Starship Troopers.
@@tarektechmarine8209 All he had to do was make a good movie with the usual patriotism and fighting foreigners. It doesn't resonate with today's crowd because the military is rainbow warriors and endless oppression of other countries through establishing Democracy.
It is a bit cheap reference, because it's obvious, but the reference in my mind for arguments in favour of infantry in high-tech settings is always Starship Troopers from Robert A Heinlein. My favourite scene of soldiers dropping from orbit is in that book as well. Circumstances may appear where "destroy everything" is the best strategy, but I suppose there is more general application for the old mote that states "to the victorious go the spoils". Most armies will probably continue wanting to spoils (in land, infrastructure, slaves, and what have you) to pay the cost of fuel to get the explosives and/or soldiers in place.
As long as that remains true, armies will not abandon the use of infantry (I suppose). Alternatively they could send some mind-hacking wave and brainwash all enemies into vassals, or soldiers, for your cause. That would make infantry obsolete, possibly. Explosives will not.
Fall from orbit is a nice image, and I imagine the ideal tech for that would be change the body of people. Allowing any random citizen that cool experience of falling from space completely naked, walking from the center of a hot crater, and getting arrested for being naked in the middle of a urban area. No Drop Pod will give you that.
I also love Heinlein's work interesting to think that in an age where humans can "Hot Drop" from orbit fully nude they would be arrested for that rather then the crater they created lol
Well,@@WolmanLykos , I assume the ground in urban areas will be self-repairing with nano-technology fast enough for no one take notice of things like that. Long before men start 'raining' from orbit.
@@thiagom8478 Sure, a more modern analogy is while its easy to mend fences people still consider it a crime : 3
Although ODST nudists seem impossible biological augmentation may be more practical going forward then Cybernetics. We don't really know what the limits of either technology are
Sounds reasonable to me,@@WolmanLykos . You are probably right. On the other hand, there is always that argument someone used in I can't remember which book, about what would have happened if Queen Victoria of England had decided to set as priority for her nation the creation of a machine able to transmit sound and image through large distances in real time.
The thing (basically Television) was imaginable, even long before that time, but the basic fields responsible for produce the knowledge we Historically used to reach the point where we can build that stuff didn't exactly existed at the time. Possibly there are other ways to reach the same solution, but we do not know them. What we can say, with relative certainty, is that the most powerful and rich nation in that time would have failed the goal. The knowledge they had didn't included tools to make televisions.
Perhaps there is ways to make ODST nudists (so we can arrest them, on arrival) and we just didn't developed the fields of science that will provide us the basic knowledge to develop the technology that will give us those nudists.
But, probably not.
@@thiagom8478 Oh fun I had never heard of that argument with the British empire I might borrow that.
We may be able to make a human to survive the impact but I can't think of any organic material that can resist that kind of heat. From what I recall re-entry heat shielding is mostly ceramics with some metals?
Our current limitations are less can we manufacture that and more do those materials exist and if not can we make an alloy/composite/synthetic version to the desired specifications.
And in the case ODST nudists can it be not only organic but a part of a human body. It would need to be flexible enough to allow a full range of motion [or more range then we have now!] breathable [humans breath through their skin as well]. Im now imagining what kind of caloric intake our "ODST's" would need and the logistics to go along with it : D
Awesome video. This is the first video of yours that I have seen. I will definitely start watching your past and future videos.
For a sci-fi story I'm writing I'm including drop-mechs which, if the online calculator I used was right, the operators would be under about 7 Gs of acceleration for about 7 minutes straight. I know there are some pilots who can handle 9, maybe even 10, Gs for impressive periods of time, but falling for 7 minutes under that kind of load is impressive. And 7 minutes is usually enough time to activate some AA defenses, especially if the target has fair warning. But it definitely isn't enough time to fully mobile to resist a mech assault.
The first part of "Starship Troopers" has a detailed description of how this might work.
Your speech has gotten a lot better, my man! Kudos! :D
This is better?? Than what? Was he just chewbacca before now?
17:47 And at that weight, you can have a reserve chute that might even be bigger than the first one since it opens up closer to the ground with less time to slow you down.
Since the air gets denser as you get deeper in the atmosphere, your "drag chutes" will be becoming more efficient as you descend.
You don't have to make the chute bigger - you just have to make it strong enough to not shred when it opens.
Larger Dropships would also make a lot of sense in later waves of deployment, After the initial waves have absorbed/removed/occupied a local area's defenses.
It’s always a good day when Isaac uploads! I know I’ll have a lot to think about for the rest of the day about no matter what topic he discusses.
Space elevator + orbital ring + drop ships= rapid deployment anywhere faster than most jets can scramble. Near instant reinforcement / rapid deployment. The battlefield becomes 2.5D as now you have to worry about the potential of being outflanked from above.
"Feet First into Hell!"
The first use of "mother ship" that I know of was by George Adamski in 1952's FLYING SAUCERS HAVE LANDED in his description of his meeting with the "Venusian". The smaller landing craft were called 'scout ships"
Now "drop pod" is differentl. The first use of such that I know of was in Heinlein's STARSHIP TROOPERS (not the movie, which was a horrible abortion of the booi) from 1959. and called a "drop capsule. It was equipped with what would later be called ECM that could lock up a defensive system, chaff, and would peel away from outer to inner with several deployments and jettisonning of parachiets along the way. This was not new to me. I saw it in a 1954 issue of COLLIERS magazine, I think March, there was a picture of the then current idea of a spceship with the small swept front wing and the large swept rear wing and tail. This one was HUGEE and crusing on the edge of space letting out pod-shaped objects on parachutes from opeings in the side facing the viewer
In 1964 or early '65,SCIENCE & MECHANICS magazine published a piece about a 'Porject Ithica". It looked like a cross between Dyna-Soar and the Space Shuttle, with the craft being big enoug to carry what looked like tws squads of soldiers in the diagram. It was to be sub-orbital. Thas was at the hight of interest in the X-20
I think I'm giveng away my age
Heinlein's pick-up ships were called 'retrieval boats', which is a bit of a dull name, really. I'm struggling to remember what Joe Haldeman's soldiers used in _The Forever War;_ I think they just had shuttles. 'Drop pod' in the current generation seems to have come chiefly from the game _Halo,_ though there seems to be some influence from manga and anime as well.
@@akizeta Thanks for the Heinlein reference, I had forgotten
The ships in FOREVER WAR were mostly things you held onto like posts, I forget what they were called, probabl "shuttles". They were strange with separate internal time and external time referents. such that though decades and centuries passed in externa (real) time, internally, only a short time passed
@@SpacePatrollerLaser
I think you're conflating The Forever War's interstellar transports with the shuttles.
@@spaceman081447 I would not be surprised. The transport was not really described that well and I thought that the starships may have landed to deliver troops
"not the movie, which was a horrible abortion of the book" guess we know your politics with just a high enough degree of success
Thank you! Been eagerly anticipating this one. Between this and helldivers 2 I am getting lots of inspiration :)
This reminds me of that guy a few years ago that did that high altitude jump
TFW your drinks company has a better space program than your nation.
14:42 A white fuselage with black writing that says “Reusable Rocket” totally made me laugh. For those old enough to remember this reference, this booster is the generic “Beer” of the launch industry.
As per using nukes as anti-aircraft, they did tests for it in the cold war and the radiation wasn't an issue for the people on the ground as the detonations we're at a high altitude.
The radiation also wasn't a problem because they weren't salted bombs so the radiation was completely dissipated in minutes to hours.
The idea was only dropped because ICBMs became a thing and the idea was for shooting down fleets of bombers.
Something to consider, one topic you didn’t cover or I missed, is the use of electronic countermeasures, drones and decoys, with dropships /drop pods. The assault force commander would assume the enemy has effective anti-air or space defenses. To protect his landing force, he probably with use a combination of orbital strikes and massive ECM to protect his landers. Each lander could deploy it own decoys or the Mothership could
Launch thousands.
Watched it on Nebula a few days back.
Great episode again guys.
Bro, I looked for this video like a year ago. Thank you for making a video matching my search for drop ships.
Speaking of beaming power to the Drop Pods, again depending on how much Power you have at your disposal. You don't really need to tightly beam the power down, esp as the beamed-power will muck with sensors. If you use the right wave length you can make it uncomfortable to very deadly or even heating/melting the metal outside when the drop-pods are falling.
Starship Troopers ~ the original book from about 1965 ~ not the crappy movie. Powered armour ~ Think Iron Man.
You drop in a pod, which is like a Russian Doll, like an onion. Layers are semi-ablative, and they're made to become radar chaff. By the time you get down to 5,ooo ft your speed has dropped to terminal, which is about 140 mph. Your jump jets can slow you from that with no problem.
Crappy movie?
Sorry but the movie is a classic at this point, one of the best sci fi movie ever made in fact
the movie was a pretty cool parody.
@@pougetguillaume4632
You might be in the minority on that one, especially given the competition of far better movies.
But the book is way better.
You should read Contact Front by Rick Partlow (Drop Trooper series) and/or the book Recruit by Brazee. The movie Starship Trooper is a poor pale shadow of the excellence of the book.
@@icecold9511I wouldn't go quite so far but it is a damn good movie, enjoyable to watch while still putting across the message. Even now the effects still hold up well.
Hello there, Isaac Arthur, I have some questions for you.
1) LET US ASSUME THERE IS FTL WHICH IS FAST. Well then, in interstellar warfare, what would warfare “feel” like? Would war “feel” like a war in the “Age of Sail”? Would there be no “front line” like ancient/mediaeval/early modern warfare and would there be individual battles? Or would there be a front line like WW1/WW2/modern warfare but the “front line” is 3D since you got to realise there is an up and a down? And would there rarely be individual battles because (for example, in WW2, the Battle of Stalingrad was not just about Stalingrad and the immediate area around it, it was also about the massive area surrounding Stalingrad such as Kalach, the Don River, the Volga River, Kotelnikovo, etc.)
2) What would the organisational structure of an interstellar military look like? In our world, a squad would be about 10 to 15 men or something. In an interstellar military, would the smallest organisational unit be tiny drones controlled by a single human? Or would a squad be like 10 to 15 robots which are directly controlled by 1 human, but SOMEHOW, that 1 human IS the squad? For example, you could think of the individual robots as limbs that could be disposable when damaged, (for example, if 1 robot got damaged, the human could easily discard that robot, and control the remaining ones, and when the whole squad gets wiped out, then the human gets killed?) Like, think of the WHOLE SQUAD of a “body” of a human. Would this idea be practical, or would it be a joke of an idea?
3)Let’s say that in the future, a single bullet can cause a nuclear explosion. If a single bullet has the potential to be that powerful, then how would planetary invasions occur? How would generals use infantry, tanks and IFVs, artillery, etc? If a single bullet can do this much damage, then what is the point of an Army for an Invasion? Wouldn’t planetary invasions just be pointless and be ridiculously costly, while you can just blow up the planet with your navy without ever sending ground forces? Not only that, if you have technology to turn civilians into very experienced soldiers in a matter of minutes, then what is the point of being careful, launching a planetary invasion to reduce collateral damage, and not commit to orbital bombardment so to try and avoid committing war crimes, if there are no innocent and unarmed civilians? If I am wrong, PLEASE, let me know, and I will change my thoughts.
4) This links to 3). If planetary invasions are useless, then what is the point of some military branches such as the Army, the Air Force or the Marines? In the future, would the Navy (in space, not the water one, of course) be the only branch which is needed in interstellar warfare?
5) We as human beings fight wars in the 21st Century, for resources, ideological reasons, and religion, etc. What would the motivations be for an interstellar war in the future? Not resources, because an interstellar nation has lots of those. Well, in Halo, the Covenant Prophets had a pretty good reason to wage war and commit genocide against Humanity and that was to keep the secret that their religion was bullshit. Humanity’s very existence contradicted the Covenant’s religion and the Prophets did not want the masses to find out, and potentially make the Prophets lose their power. So what would the motivations be for an interstellar war, if there is one? Or would warfare be obsolete, hopefully?
These are all my questions. I hope you, Arthur, or someone else can answer them. Bye for now.
Jans Kam.
I want to hear Isaac opinion on yesterdays UAP hearing like if you agree
21:00 we already have something like this, called the Fulton surface-to-air recovery system, or Skyhook lol
Here again to say that the TTRPG Eclipse Phase is great at the concepts this episode covers. Always cool to see Battletech cited, regardless.
A drop pod, we can do now. See powered landings with Crew Dragons from SpaceX. We can augment them for military.
Also Spring Drop Crater Based drop pods are also good to use. Shocks and springs that remove the need for parachutes or rockets.
Last time I was this early, I was gearing up for a drop in the Mobile Infantry.
Janking up cargo/people from the ground has already been done. I saw a WW2 movie produced during or immediately after the war where the protagonists left a jungle area in a glider plane. A powered aircraft essentially just swooped down to catch the glider without actually landing.
They also had this for picking up spies/intel/etc rather than an entire glider.
The Fulton Recovery System is the same concept, I think.
Chuds. LOL i watched that movie when I was a kid and still remember what it stands for.
There's a really good movie called "Genocidal Organ" that starts with a really cool scene of this...
The main military agency wanted to extract a VIP so they 1st launched a fragmentation bomb from a plane in low orbit to destroy all armored vehicles and enemy clusters in the landing zone.
They then launched pods made of a material that dissolved after drop.
In the movie the pods are made of bioengineered dolphin meat for grimdark reasons but it can really be almost any material foam you can imagine and i would rather consider a form of aerogel since it would be cheap, resilient to both heat and kinetic energy and made of very little actual material so dissolving it would be easy and leave pretty much zero trace of what it was before or who made it.
Those same pods carried high caliber machine guns to ensure the dropped troops safety by further saturating the landing zone with lead before proping parachutes and then eliminated any remaining combatants after landing before melting and letting soldiers and machine gun drones out.
While the drones patrolled the area, anihilating everything that moved and wasnt marked as ally to clear a path and sow chaos the soldiers went and secured the VIP.
If you have several million dollars around waiting to be burned away or those troops have some very specific and valuable missions like long term guerrilla warfare, espionage or extraction of high profile people/mcguffins then this method would be more or less how i envision a soldier drop onto a planet.
1st- Bomb the sh*t out of some specific areas chosen for strategic or military importance;
2nd - Drop operatives there into pods made to guarantee their survival and leave minimum traces of them ever being there in the 1st place after landing;
3rd - Allow the soldiers to move into an adjacent area;
4th - Disguise their drop with more bombing or pods with expendable drones and a secondary legitimate objective;
5th - Wait for contact and profit;
I think that Heinlein remains as the highest authority on this!
As you already touched upon I think there's definitely going to be cases where you want to land troops on the ground and can't just bombard it from orbit. Maybe the place is a factory both sides want intact, or you want to recover data, or you want to extract an important hostage, or it's a counteroffensive on an occupied part of your own city/space station. Sometimes you need a scalpel, not a hammer. I do think the scifi trope of landing troops to destroy the enemy is silly though. At the very least they should be supported with heavy orbital bombardments, and more often than not they should outright be replaced by them.
@23:07 This is how the Necromongers did it in "The Chronicles of Riddick" (2004). Giant, building-sized spears, whose sides were lined with smaller drop ships and troop carriers.
"Yes anti dropship batteries may be firing low yield nukes at you" Look up the USAF NIKE program. We already tested this. The first anti air missiles were nukes. You only had to be close.
Now combine the use of robotic troops with an AI driving them as the first wave with the humans as the follow-on troops in later arriving ships.
droid gunship.
I work for a company that has actually done work on developing these, as a troop insertion vehicle, an emergency evacuation system, and as a emergency bailout system for ISS or "Other vehicles".
I am surprised (shocked, really!) that Isaac Arthur didn't mention the Mobile Infantry (MI) of Robert A. Heinlein's classic novel Starship Troopers. In the novel (forget about the train wreck of a movie), each trooper is enclosed in a "drop capsule" that is ejected from an orbiting troopship. The capsule enters the planet's atmosphere on a ballistic trajectory and slows down using aero-braking. For landing, the capsule breaks apart and the trooper's armored suit deploys a series of parachutes. The trooper's armor is totally sealed and self-contained, so that he can fight in a poisonous atmosphere or in vacuum. He's equipped with a full sensor suite including radar, sonar, lidar, sound, light, infrared, and ultraviolet. He has radio communication with his squad mates and his chain of command. His weapons include an assault rifle, light and heavy flamers for incendiary work, a grenade launcher, and a missile launcher with tactical nuclear weapons.
IA covered the relevant details without mentioning Heinlein, probably for copyright reasons. Another important role of the drop pod was the ablative armour peeling off in sheets, cluttering up the radar of ground based defenses. I thought that was a nice touch. Hammer's Slammers is another series of novels you can have a look at if you enjoyed Starship Troopers!
@@PersonalityMalfunction
Yeah, the heat shield becoming chaff was a nice touch. I'm also familiar with the Hammer's Slammers books. That brings up a question. Who would win in a battle between the Mobile Infantry and Hammer's Slammers?
@@spaceman081447 Good question... leaning towards Hammer's Slammers due to tanks and artillery. The MI insertion method and lack of logistics train would give them a huge advantage in any army vs army scenario though.. damn, that's a really good question. Your thoughts?
@@PersonalityMalfunction
The novel Starship Troopers doesn't say much about the MI's supporting forces. However, it does explicitly say that, "A single MI private could take out a squadron of those things [tanks] if anyone was silly enough to put tanks against MI." Also there is the implication that the Navy could bombard artillery positions and other targets from orbit. Concerning the MI's logistics train, the Navy's retrieval boats could be used to ferry down heavy weapons and other equipment from orbit. The extreme mobility of the MI plus their armored suits could be a problem for Hammer's Slammers. That's all I have for now.
I’v always seen drop troopers as a evolution of paratroopers a way to deploy troops behind enemy lines either as shock troopers attacking the enemy’s flank or as commandos striking key targets within enemy territory.
The augment against just orbital bombardment depending on the setting starship weaponry could have a similar energy output of atomic weaponry the destruction caused would be too costly potentially glassing the surface still causing long term damage similar to nuclear weapons.
We've had a solid decade of demonstration for all the tech required to drop a squad of troops anywhere on the planet within two hours.
Virgin Galactic has the piggyback launch; NASA showed us autonomous shuttlecraft; Red Bull televised sub-orbital jumps... Then we got an official 'Space Force'
So one thing I liked about 40k is they also have pods that are just for resupply allowing front line units to get emergency resupply when needed which I don't see much other then say halo with weapon supply drops
Interesting ideas that you mention "beaming down energy from the mothership to the dropship to give the dropship energy/fuel to slow it down" cause I don't know if that would be possible. On a fundamental level, if you are blasting a dropship with X amount of energy, if it is absorbing that energy, then re-blasting it downwards to slow it down, or using it to power grab generators or something. Even accounting for 100% efficient engines and machines, it would still only be able to emit X energy downwards to slow it down, meaning that the net change in momentum would be Zero so the dropship couldn't slow down.
Fascinating little loophole I think
I imagine the ideal size and type of insertion vehicle will also depend on the stage of the invasion.
For the first waves you probably want lots of small drop pods, thoroughly mixed with decoys and munitions that share the real thing's radar signature, to oversaturate and/or deplete ground defenses. I also imagine that many apparent landing sites will be targeted by nothing but decoys and bombs, in attempts to draw enemy QRFs away from your actual soldiers, and that even if you do use organic infantry there will be quite a lot of autonomous weapons, be they drones, turrets, nanites, or more general robots, and mine dispensers scattered around outside the LZs proper to hinder enemy movement while your troops get to work.
Once they have gotten up to their business of securing LZs, descent corridors, and generally causing chaos you start reinforcing them with your larger landers. Send platoon dropships screeching through holes in the AA net, or your brigade landers drop straight down above suppressed zones, or, further down the road, send transatmospheric shuttles far closer to civilian grade to captured starports. Whatever floats your star dreadnought.
Read Heinlein's "Starship Troopers" - what you describe sounds like Mobile Infantry doctrine followed by a full invasion force.
@@muninrob Yeah, Starship troopers is the first thing I thought of. So cool!
You'd also probably want the first wave hitting the atmosphere to be smaller ships less because of survivability but also because those big regiment landers and logistical ships are also very very big baskets with lots and lots of eggs in them. So for the first wave you put a few eggs in a many baskets as you can and throw them in all at once so that they enemy can't kill them all and you don't lose as much combat power per kill.
It depends on which 40K drop pod you’re using such as the dreadclaw assault pod can carry up to about twenty marines vs the ten man pods usually used, also there’s dedicated vehicle pods such as the dreadnought drop pod which replaces the ten man squad with a single walker, armed with a heavy laser cannon, plasma cannon or an assault cannon and a powerful claw on the other arm with a heavy machine gun or flamethrower strapped underneath it, or the raven guards tarantula assault pod which replaces its internal cargo for a single automated heavy weapons platform, be it a multi missile launcher or a twin heavy bolter variant
Longest sentence I've ever (struggled) to read
I always felt the Heinlein drop pods from Starship Troopers were fairly realistic. It's a disposable onion that, as it breaks through the atmosphere, it sheds layers that slow the pod down and act like chaff. Eventually opening up and dropping the trooper mid air. But their power armor has gyro-jets for slowing down further. Even with AI and modern targeting systems, the chaff off of 45 pods would probably blanket a good portion of the sky. Especially if it releases a lot of radio noise, junk, flares, what have you.
This is one of those things where I know it's stupid, impractical, and probably won't work. But I know damn well humanity is gonna figure out how to make it work. Mostly out of spite and also because it's cool.
Just how I am certain, big stompy robots will be made.
Drop pods are more advanced and useful. Cabal drop pods from Destiny 2 can prove that, it’s the most horrifying “weapons” in the whole franchise 😂
I must correct your definitions. Term Mothership was used in Military. Prior to WW1, with emergence of Torpedo Bats. There was attempt of caring them in dedicated transport ship, called Torpedo Boat Tender or Motherships. Like French Foudre. But concept died fast when they realised that it make more sense to use large Torpedo Gunboat capable of sea fearing, what become first Destroyer. In SF sense term is used for mobile bases, commonly doubling as shipyard and civilian population centers. With examples being Mothership from Homeworld or Supremacy from Star Wars.
Term Dropship is typically used in context of military space shuttle. Basically more futuristic version Assault Helicopter. With examples being Pelican from Halo. Though larger versions also exist like Dropship from Command and Counter.
I would also like to reference the kinetic rods/hangars/WMDs used by the Necromongers in chronicles of Riddick. It may not apply but it did serve multiple purposes and was essentially an enormous version of the "Rods from god".
Drop 'em Mechs!
Standby for Titanfall
My first thought when seeing the title on this one was the marine drop ship from the alien movies.
"We're in the pipe, five by five"
There's a happy medium between Space Marine with a drop-pack, and all eggs in one basket. Also Drop-ships can have Drop Pods, a best of both worlds.
regarding lithobraking, this has come up in pop sci videos about things like power armour and jumping off buildings. Would it not be possible to have a massive crumple zone on a drop pod to enable you to slam into the ground and have the deceleration eased by the extra material? Either in the form of a kilometre long crumple shins on a mech suit, or perhaps something more complex like explosives and expanding foam?
And remember, the Sargent has to yell, "Come on you apes! Do you want to live forever?!" right when you board the pod.
Why people say flak cannon when the acronym flak already has the word cannon in it? Flak is a german term that stands for flugabwehrkanone, you can guess what kanone means.
Drop pods don't make much sense to land troops, unless it strictly to land assault troops as soon as possible. I would go with a dropship having troops freefall from around 140,000 ft in specialized spacesuits (more advanced than what we have today) with steerable parachute packs. I believe that drop pods would be easily tracked for targeting by air defense systems or to determine their landing zone to alert forces to that area. Dropping troops from near space makes more sense and you don't have to land ships if the goal is to land on the planet undetected. Also, there is a lot of planning that goes into insertions from the air, so they don't happen randomly. It is very much an opportunistic tactic if the conditions support it.
Many years ago I read an article about an idea where you have a meteoroid in the size of a buss or a car as a heat shield, and then strap your self to the rock and dropp everything from space. So when you are close to the ground you release your self from the rock and open a parachute. If we think that we have a couple of these then we could fool the ground forces that it's just a natural meteoroid rain.
We track nearly every asteroid in our vicinity and their orbits on a plane. It would be odd if some suddenly went on a collision course with our home planet. Anything extrasolar would surely be detected much like with oumuamua.
@@rea280 very recently we missed a astroid e which passed between Earth and the moon. We have the incident over russia a couple of years ago which we missed. But the thing is that we only see a rock or couple of rocks hitting earth, not artificial made objects. So if you don't expect this type of inception you will miss it. It is good for SOF missions which can be denied that they have ever happened.
The space 1999 Eagles seen in some of the art work, did have lasers but they where never meant or designed for battle.
Spacex Dragon v2 already has the potential capability to be a drop pod, capable of landing anywhere on earth in a less than two hours from orbit.
I was gonna play something, but then I saw this in my notifications and couldn’t resist. Good work
i had an idea once where ground troops themselves could be large mass-driver launched probes that float on a set trajectory towards their target with little to no guidance, using some sort of (if its even possible) particle shield for atmospheric entry and of course defense from projectiles. once it lands it just unfolds, gets up on whatever it has to move (my idea involved tall, lanky legs to pull itself out of whatever crater it made while lithobraking, like the tripods from war of the worlds) and starts the invasion wherever it happened to land. Effectively giant robots launched by the dozen like how the aliens from Starship Troopers got to earth, minus the asteroid and unexplained speedy arrival.
"Beam me up Scotty" - most well known captain in star trek
Fun fact. That phrase was never actually used.
@@icecold9511 wait what!!?? So it was just a meme!!!!!!!
@@icecold9511Mandela effect
hey issac can you link those studies where the ESA did make studies on liquid breathing or being submerged in liquid to survive hundreds of Gs?
23:00 Overlord Class Dropship: "You called?"