That's why I enjoy the starship troopers drop pods so much. They were basically a multi-layered egg wrapped around a soldier in power armor and the layers would peel away to create clouds of shrapnel confusing AA systems while slowing the power armor which would then use thrust to make a soft landing hopefully after the soldier was below the effective altitude of said systems
Robert Heinlein apparently put a lot more thought into the orbital insertion of troops than he did his political shoehorning with the history and moral philosophy classes.
@@hunterferguson5675 Heinlein didn't shoehorn his politics in......he made moral philosophy system that could be expressed algebraically. Mathematically justifying every decision. And it fit like a unicorn.
He's also possibly the only person who realised that a lot of soldiers packed tightly together is a target so juicy it causes involuntary orgasms to the enemy's gunnery crews. The Mobile Infantry seems to believe that their personal space extends beyond the horizon!
The concept behind drop pods, at least in Halo, was that loosing one pod resulted in a single death, as opposed to loosing a whole dropship resulting in a dozen plus deaths. The general idea behind the tactics involved is basically dropping ODST's on an area, securing that area, then bringing in regular troops on larger dropships.
A long time ago I did my own analysis of Planetary Invasions and really, that is something that deserves it's own video by our Dockmaster himself. Regardless I looked at initial planetary landings and yeah, the problem with big ships is big losses. A one man drop pod, you have thousands of targets to shoot at and each hit is one casualty, vs having a thousand troops in one ship an one big-ole target for ground stations to aim at. If you want to get back to planetary invasions. Invading a developed world, like EARTH.. today, 21st century. No magical tech. Just EARTH with her nations and standing armies. Invading earth.. is a DAUNTING task, presuming the goal is to capture in-tact. If you don't care about infrastructure condition and general planetary condition the nature of warfare changes and you just throw rocks at the planet until everything living on it is dead. But to "capture" a developed world with a population in the range above 8 BILLION... how many soldiers does the world have? How many would become partisans from that percentage of non-standing military 8 billion. So now you've got maybe a billion enemy combatants and probably another 2-3 BILLION active partisans and another 3-4 BILLION who would support the partisans. You are going to take a "TINY" 5 mile long battleship or troop ship to take that world? Good lucky, you can maybe cart 10K soldiers in your tin-cans to be opposed by BILLIONS of enemies. Sure, you've got the high ground and thus open battle would be suicide but the unconventional warfare side of things will see you bogged down for decades, even if you are an advanced alien species. Take developed planets is a truly enormous task, likely one involving hundreds if not THOUSANDS of ships and BILLIONS of combat soldiers + billions more support personnel. That's a big task. You are pretty much going to have to MOVE an entire planetary population to take over another planetary population. Keeping it? If the locals don't like you? Short of throwing rocks at it till nothing moves and then inheriting an earth reduced to MARS quality of life.. yeah. Not something done simply. Imagine landing ships the size of cities to cart down tens of millions of soldiers, and expecting to lose some of those ships. Yeah. How long do you think a civilization could keep that kind of warfare with what attrition rate numbers would be. The idea of planetary invasion goes from sci-fi to utter fantasy pretty fast. Even if you interstellar alien types are going to be taking humans with slug-throwers because bombs blow up alien cars as well as they do human ones and when you've got billions of pissed off people and you want them as slaves or for production or you like green hills and trees and don't want to burn the place to ash.. that's a tall order.
@@chexwarior the benefit of casket like drop pods. If the retros fail to fire then it becomes a self burying coffin. Reliability becomes less bothersome nat that point.
@@grayscribe1342 rocks I already covered. Insurgency negates the value of rocks in a precision attack method.. and rocks really are a giant hammer, WMD and not a precision munition. The destructive force calculations and actual ground effect are based on size, angle, material, and velocity. Get it wrong and you go from a nice controlled cratering of a single SAC airbase to glassing several hundreds of square miles with a plasma bath. Say the difference between Arizona crater vs the bolide that glassed the bronze age near east for about a thousand square miles without touching down. Air burst vs ground impact. In general meteors have a minimum size to reach the surface create explosive effects. So you have a minimum rock blast radius, which is about EQ to 1 MT thermonuclear weapons.. that's a Big hammer. Plus targeted bombardment will still put a lot of dust in the atmo leading to vast cold shifts in climate.. not to mention the secondary fires started by the rocks. In general war, at a certain scale becomes untenable. Interstellar conflict including invading developed worlds is one of them. Political or subterfuge is needed. Why fight, when you can come with a cure-all that also goes covax on the world and sterilize them. Let them run to you and sign their own doom. Don't even need to offer a cure-all, just buy off the politicians of a world and they will do all the heavy lifting for you. No invasion, no mess. Heck you might even get the surviving population to hug you when you come and off the politicians and claim you are saving then from the big bad men who have been killing and enslaving them. Political means are vastly more impactful than open war as warfare grows in scope and scale. Or you can just reduce an entire world to uninhabitable ash..
To be fair, even we humies Acknowledge that drop pods are a terrifying ride. But as those who do ride them say, “We are glad to plunge feet first into hell, knowing we will rise. “ Or “We are the Emperor’s angels of Death!” These are not sane members of our species. But by god are they the cool ones.
I got on e for you. 😉 How do you fit twelve, 8 foot tall dudes in power armor in a compartment the size of a FIAT Punto? _by dropping them from low orbit at supersonic speed_ XD
we already sorta do have drop pods, re-entry vehicle/capsule for astronauts. (also the martian entry capsules for the rovers and...) there’s also that mountain russian gel ball thing that does a pretty decent job of absorbing kinetic energy and keeping people alive...although deaths do still occur.
The Astartes barely qualify as members of our species. They're 7-8 feet tall 500+ pound slabs of muscle with bones harder than steel and redundant organs and all that jazz.
@@jakeaurod right, be he had paratrooper training in the naval academy, which he never used. there were plans to have "zero landings" on some islands early in the war..100% paratroopers..but someone realized how dumb that was after everyone got the training and they dropped it.
when you do not have the beaming to the surface technology at least.... because you can literally beam in to the combat zone once transporters are thing
Drop pods are the exactly right solution to anti-air systems, it’s called saturation. If you go down by big shuttle, you have much fewer number of targets to shoot at.
drop pods also arent the only thing in the air going down with the drop pods, they are shot out in waves alongside heavy artillery that moves just quickly enough that the Suicide Burn of the Drop Pods to achieve optimal slamdown pulls the pod just out of the overpressure tolerance radius.
Which could make a defender consider using nuclear airbursts against incoming waves. It could be an EMP problem for the defenders if they have a strong planetary magnetic field, but if the field is weak or non-existent and they have an atmosphere, then hundreds of cubic miles of saturation pods becomes dead-men dropping.
@@jakeaurod we're going to drop hundreds of men at supersonic speeds at the ground in unshielded coffins. And hope the enemy won't detente a nuclear weapon over there position???. Um did you actually think that one threw. Most universe's that have drop pods have either really small nuclear weapons. Or consider there use barbaric. But by the same token. How of these same universe's use ion, microwave, and emp weapons like there on a clearance sale. The pods are hardened against EMP
There's also the Starship Trooper [book] version of drop pods actually makes MORE sense because it deploys decoys during the drop, and uses breaking thrusters below the AA screen.... It also deploys the Power Armored troops before they reach the ground so they can both intercept and counter AA fire from that jackass with the bird gun. Also, thruster decel makes more sense for another reason... you may not be dropping on a rock that has an atmosphere that is useful for aero braking.
It also deploys several parachutes, which get torn away shortly after deployment while altering the speed of the pod enough that the chaff and decoys are closer to the enemy AA than the pod.
@@travisbishop782 "Nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure." Of course, in the raid on the Skinnies, they didn't want to hit them too hard because they wanted to convince them to switch sides. Objectives drive mission requirements.
I mean, in reality we strapped expensive silk parachutes onto soldiers and dumped them over enemy territory with little guarantee someone wouldn't take pot-shots at them as they parachute to the ground; and then that expensive parachute is more or less abandoned at the LZ as it would be dead weight. A disposable heat shield added to that isn't that much worse TBH. Only needing to survive one reentry would make it a lot cheaper than a fully reusable shuttle that also has to _return_ to orbit. I view drop pods as the space equivalent to paratroopers, specialist soldiers to get behind enemy lines that can go places that aircraft capable of landing wherever can't easily reach. 20 man-sized pods are harder to kill than one shuttle, and you can have redundancy too. If they kill maybe 5 of every 20 pods you drop, you still get 15 troops on the ground who can now potentially sabotage those AAA/AOA guns to let conventional forces land. You could fire drop pods from far, far outside the practical range of surface to orbit guns and make them hard to track. This assumes you want whatever's on the planet intact, but if you did bombarding the planet with rocks wouldn't work. If you can use commandos to break their defenses, you can park your fleet in orbit with impunity and force a surrender. A few hundred commands lost is definitely better than likely even one ship and a crew of hundreds, so if you can pull it off, all the power to you. Drop pods also have another potential that goes underused. If you're invading a planet, you could go for even bigger levels of subterfuge; get a civilian type ship that uses aerobraking upon arrival at a planet, during the end of aerobraking when you dump your ballute or other disposable components drop your commandos off too. Who would waste time trying to shoot routine debris from a cargo ship decelerating? On a third note, one way drop pods can also be used to get men and machines to the surface to build a more sustainable landing zone that allows for bigger things to land. Even if there is no threat of being shot, in a non-military situation, propulsive landing on loose soils can badly damage shuttle craft. So send down some cheap one-way landers that build you a nice hardened concrete landing pad with robots or maybe prisoners or something expendable. You could even shoot it out first to arrive weeks/days/years ahead and build you a whole settlement to arrive to.
Pretty much my thinking and also along the lines of what Heinlein described in Starship Troopers - small detachments dropped quickly in the heart of enemy territory to cause as much havoc as rapidly as possible before leaving. Fast, tactical strikes with fewer troops rather than a Stalin-esque wall of flesh. Another aspect is that this allows for a much shorter logistical tail. Yes, the gear per individual is going to be more expensive but there is significantly less of it that you need to ship. Boots on the ground are thought to win wars but they casn do none of that without a supply chain. Keeping this as compact as possible means that you're less likely to have it interrupted.
@@MrGrimsmith don’t forget that you can also drop extra pods with more supplies post drop or even during the drop giving the enemy more targets meaning they’re less likely to shoot at and take out the pods with actual people aboard
we already sorta do have drop pods, re-entry vehicle/capsule for astronauts. (also the martian entry capsules for the rovers and...) there’s also that mountain russian gel ball thing that does a pretty decent job of absorbing kinetic energy and keeping people alive...although deaths do still occur.
You could also just send down tanks or whatever instead of infantry, or even missile launchers instead of anything intended for sustained operations. Or all of these at the same time, just to make your enemy's life harder. The one thing that you _probably_ wouldn't want to do is throw aircraft in at the same time, since it's kinda pointless. Either you can justify sending in aircraft, in which case you won't need drop pods unless you're running short on more proper landing craft; or you can justify sending in drop pods, in which case there's probably no point in sending in reusable aerial assets until some time later.
In the immortal words of Max0r: "i specced entirely into speed and mobility, making my character a flimsy, crack-addled spidermonkey." (In the background image: faster. Faster. FASTER. FASTER!!!!)
1:17 "...you cannot wait to get to wherever you're going." In combat, there are certain times where if you wait to get to wherever you're going, you're going to be shot at. And no one wants to be shot at
At the same time, using drop pods implies that a: you have no forces on the ground, b: the enemy's anti-air/anti-ballistic defenses are very much active and c: you don't have any other way to address b without ground assault. This means that your deployed forces won't have any meaningful support, reinforcements, heavy weaponry or even air cover...
@@MoraFermi if you're smart enough, you can figure out how to make the pods so the troops can reconfigure the mass of the pod into weapons. That way even splats become potentially useful
@@mowgli2071 military grade nanotechnology assemblers can change all sorts of things about warfare if you can figure out how to make them work. Mostly drop troops like airborne, will not have time to stay where they land if your enemy knows where that is expect inbound artillery. Those that survive landing need to move as quickly as possible, this is why this tactic works best with something like Heinlien's Marauder suits, WH40K space Marine power armor, and HALOs Spartan armor, are ok but not as good mobility wise. Extraction of drop troops if their mission does not involve securing a beach head and not removing a lot of atmospheric defenses is always going to be high risk as well. Once a beach head is made by the drop troops and a section of sky is clear of significant AA then the shuttle's can land heavy equipment and more men.
@@jlokison that model always assumes that the dropship is following. What I'm talking about takes chaos into account. If the mass of your drop pod can be an asset after the drop, this can be useful in situations where the dropships are unexpectedly either delayed or destroyed. This way if the drop ships come that's great. If they are rendered unavailable, that's not as good but there's still something available to be used
I always get the shakes before a drop. I’ve had the injections, of course, and hypnotic preparation, and it stands to reason that I can’t really be afraid. The ship’s psychiatrist has checked my brain waves and asked me silly questions while I was asleep and he tells me that it isn’t fear, it isn’t anything important-it’s just like the trembling of an eager race horse in the starting gate.
Drop pods they are either bricks or slightly better parachutes. At least its not Section 8 where you drop from High Altitude low orbit with nothing but a suit of Power Armor.
@@sigmacademy its pretty clear the soldiers in section 8 are incredibly cyberneticly enhanced. Might just be full on cyborgs with no organic body parts left. IE batou from GITS/matoko, who literaly jumped off a skyscraper onto a metal walking tank and proceded to shoot said tank. They also have nano bots. So pretty much any ammount of damage can be repaired.
I honestly spent the whole video smiling and outright laughing at the singing parts :-) So damn glad I found this channel. Also drop pods is just the concept of Paratroopers taken to the Nth degree, a bunch of lunatics jumping out of a perfectly (well mostly) good craft. It is so human it hurts.
Ha! You saying this just gave me the mental image of the ork version. Which i picture several smaller orks holding on to the back of a larger ork, and using him as a heat shield! Then when they get closer to the ground, they use jetpacks to get off the charred skeleton of the bigger one.
Drop pods as a delivery mechanism for primarily sentient organics is a desperate solution to be sure. But drop pods as a delivery method for vehicles and material - especially automated equipment such as drones - would be a very effective way to deploy assets behind enemy defenses with minimal exposure of soldiers to direct attack.
The first thing I thought of when I saw the title in the thumbnail to this video was was Undying Mercenaries. They literally call their noobs "splats". And it's because of the drop pods
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within actually had a low-altitude variant known as "High-density gas." Several times throughout the movie, green bubbles of fog are fired downwards and then people/vehicles are dropped into them. The physics (like everything else in the movie) are dubious, but basically it's a gas that behaves like a gel for a few seconds after impact to cushion the fall, and then evaporates so it doesn't hinder whatever was dropped into it. Dubious physics, but I like the idea.
Yeah, I remember that movie (think it was the only FF movie I did see) and was very intrigued by that gas/gel. If you could manufacture something that did that it would make drops that much easier. If you could adjust the dispersal time it could work pretty well as an anti-personel weapon also...🤔
yah, without inertial dampening you end up with a repeat of poor Manéo Jung-Espinoza when he tried to transit the gate ring in The Expanse inside the power armor... its not the fall that kills you, its that sudden stop.
@@guitarfan01 His ship entered the ring at nearly 42km/s and decelerated to 0.6km/s in 5 seconds. Which essentially meant that he went from being a living human being to a smear on the forard bulkhead in about 1/10th of the time it takes you to blink. So at least it was fast.
I still think the Wh40k method is the best. Massive, overwhelming invasion so lots of targets. Armored and armed pods with incredibly durable super soldiers, further protected by inner pod systems and again protected by their own personal armor. Why slow down to car crash speed when your soldiers are built to walk away from greater than car crash speeds?
because that completely ignores what happens to your internal organs when you go from hundreds of miles per hour to stopped in less than a second...this is always the stupid thing about "power armor" protecting from a high fall, if you slam into the inside of it at 100 mph, your still dead. even if the power armor is skin tight, it's not going to stop your heart from exploding when it slams into your rib cage at 100mph. nor will your rib cage survive the crushing force of the rest of your body at that speed. There is literally no part of the human body able to take that. human pudding.
@@TheNitroG1 Exactly, that hang up is where I see Halo coming out on top of most sci-fi power armor tech. The Mjolnir Power Armor compensates for high speed impacts by 1. over pressurizing the wearer's body with a denser mix of gasses in the same way a diver does to prevent their bodies from liquifying. 2. The "gel layer" of the armor inflates to exert pressure on every part of the wearer's body to keep them together and to provide some external cushioning from an impact. 3. The armor "locks" it's joints in place to prevent the wearer's limbs from over extending and breaking, it's why Master Chief get's stuck in place in the beginning of Halo 3. In one of the Halo novels, Master Chief survives a very long fall and gets surrounded by enemies, and he has to weigh the risk of decompressing his armor and air supply and get nitrogen bubbles and "the bends" that might kill him to get up faster and stop the enemies from killing him first. He doesn't get up because it's too dangerous, and gets saved by other Spartans instead. Mjolnir still can't survive a fall from orbit undamaged without assistance, such as a re-entry module, drop pod or in Halo 3's case a massive slab of ship plating, but it still makes more sense than other sci-fi troopers just being "built different". Spartans are built different too, with greater muscle mass, bone density, hardened nerves and ceramic-titanium coated bones, but that doesn't mean they get to just ignore the effects of hard deceleration.
@@comet.x you can’t stop physics my guy, no matter how well your built, nobody is walking away from a planetfall. Your innards will still rupture like a water balloon. Maybe from half the height of orbit, sure. But not full orbital drop.
@@TheNitroG1 40k drop pods use powerful rockets just before impact to slow down enough so the super human cargo can survive. Their bones are infused with super strong materials and their rib cage is one solid armored mass. Between their suits life support systems and their ability to repair and heal from even major organ damage in minutes, I think they'll be just fine :)
I must say, that the droppods in Titanfall were primarily used when there was no other alternative to intercept enemy ground forces in time, or if the ship was literally blowing up while you are running for the pods.
@@Creeperboom60 I don't think that had to do with the drop pods, If you are talking about the TF2 scene where the pilot sticks you with a needle. Interestingly, the Forever War novel had ships guided by AI that would pull maneuvers at incredible G levels, starting at 25g in the early parts, and ending at 25,000g. The methods they used to keep the human passengers alive involved chambers full of a gel like fluid that would extend the impulse of the G-forces on the body to turn a 50g maneuver into only 5g's felt. Later on they would surgically alter human soldiers to be pumped full of a more refined fluid that would cushion the body's soft tissues even further, allowing thousands of G's to be withstood in conjunction with some of the first Sci-fi mentions of inertial compensation. Great book, it is incredibly overlooked compared to some other Sci-fi classics.
My favorite one that I have seen thus far was a series of pods which you would drop during the first volley to get ground scouts on the ground, mainly to set up beacons for targeting. Some were just bundles of rods from god to assault enemy positions, others were not so many rods from gods in which you would have a few scouts jump out of and perform high altitude sky diving.
Drop pods are cool, and would work provided you have a big retrograde thruster, which basically makes them Battletech Dropships. Alternatively, gavity magic!
Or the way the Imperium does it with their Titans, they get dropped from orbit inside their respective repair bays/bunkers. They essentially drop a Fortification, that has a Titan inside.
you still have to worry about the acceleration on your passengers though. doesn't do a whole lot of good if you have to start to slow down a few hundred feet off the ground where you are the easiest target. You can't just let them smash into the ground because...why even bother with the pod at that point. the whole point of the pod is to protect the passengers and by letting it slam into the ground you killed all of them.
i actually really enjoyed the math in the thermodynamics episode. You brought up a really valid point about how much heat is generated in space and how you would try to get rid of it. Prossibly ruining sci fi forever...
HALO (The Epidemy of Epicness (The Game)) The halo drop pods are basically escape pods. In this case, it's a good idea, because if your using them, you needed them apparently. You can't expect people to always be able to run to a ship and leave like that.
The HEVs and SOEOIVs were different from the escape craft on UNSC ships. Those were specifically designed to get ODSTs to the ground against human controlled worlds during the insurrection. They just tended to work pretty well against the Covenant depending upon how well dug in the Covenant forces were, so they hung around.
@@hellacoorinna9995 And drop pods fit the definition of HALO, even if the "opening" is the use of retro-thrust, or aero gel, or magic, or a high-speed compound parachute system.
@@hokutoulrik7345 Your, right, the escape pod thing wasn't exactly a drop pod, but crash landing pod is kind of close. I mean, they are soposed to come In on a diagonal, rather than straight down.
Huh...this going over of the entire premise honestly makes me feel that Halo's version is oddly...decent, when used against Covenant. While pioneered to strike against Insurrectionists (strong enough to steal and modify warships, be a serious stability threat, etc.), they would be far better suited against the Covenant. While computers are not impossible for the Covenant, they primarily don't use them except for ship-to-ship combat. Their aim is almost all manual. Even shows up in Halo 2, a sequence where there's a drop and Covenant AA attempts to shoot them down to little/no use. The next is that it's designed to have a detachable air brake, and a (presumably powerful, because it can slow a fully-suited Spartan weighing nearly half a ton) retro-rocket system to help slow it for landing. They're apparently durable (maybe not reusable, but definitely sturdy, considering ODST has a couple of them literally bouncing once or twice off buildings/streets) but...yeah. Interesting. I'm not too sure how well-suited Halo's version is as I'd hope it has some system to help negotiate the actual impact, but considering the Spartan armor is able to do high-altitude dives? Probably (hopefully) some measures of that got installed into their drop pods to allow some measure of comfort. At least less bruised tailbones...
even with computer targeting ODST aren't bad, intercepting something moving really fast, is really hard, and really expensive, against insurrectionists, they'd have the option to use their AA against the ODST, or save them for drop ships but they'd be unlikely to be able to do both, worst case, they expose the AA guns/missile battery and then those guns get hit by a missile best case, those guns are too busy dealing with missiles and the ODST get through, take them out and green light pelican drops.
The only difference between a drop pod and an escape pod is you want to be seen in the escape pod. That said the simplest escape pod design comes from NASA, Basically a small backpack that deploys a heat shield backed by extruded foam around the astronauts back with a chute that's deployed when atmospheric friction drops the speed enough. I can see a slightly more advanced version for use with power armor deployed troops where it would also deploy chaff on the way down and skip the chute for the armors flight systems. Cheap and disposable with the possibility of being manufactured aboard ship. Another great video by the Great Guernsey of the Galaxy. ;-)
I love the supply demand curve, you went exactly where I was thinking, with that. As you where talking about drop pods I was thinking you needed to compare cost to casualty rate to determine if a given invasion could financially justify using expendable 1 man pods. I also think the end cases where the AAA is so high that your drop pod would need to be incredibly advanced to get through, neither is any shuttle, as it's a larger target, so invasion becomes much more a matter if the old school ww2 school of amphibious assault, where you just shell the shit out of your target area ans hope you busted up enough defences, then stand by with counter battery fire to take out anything you missed that shoots at your first wave. And most importantly, you better have a fuck ton of troops, because as you said, if you throw enough shit at the ground, something will make it through.
It depends on what you attack. If the AAA is good enough to shoot drop-pods in orbit then the ships delivering them would similarly be under fire. A drop-pod insertion would necessarily be done over an area where less AAA is available and these insertions would be designed in shutting down AAA and opening up the way for larger craft to be landed and an invasion to begin. I would also like to add that 99% of all orbital defenses against invasions are done wrong. A good defense would have an in-depth defense, that means that at no point can the enemy destroy the space-based defenses without being engaged by the planetary defenses (missile installations, lasers, blasters, Ion cannons or whatever). If a 1+km space ship can carry enough energy to propel itself into orbit then a ground-based powerplant the size of our current one's would be able to power shields and anti-orbital weapons that make orbital bombardment a moot point. You would also never, ever end up in a situation where the enemy has cleared out everything in space and then start an invasion safely from orbit. Any planetary invasion would be a large scale operation where you have to deal with space-assets, orbital defenses and planetary defenses simultaneously the moment you start the engagement. This forces you to pick an orbital point where the least planetary installations can take a shot at you and then land troops that will have to take out the planetary defenses ASAP while their space-ships above them try to deal with the rest of the orbital and space-based defenses.
@@TheDemigans There are a few small problems with your analysis. 1. A massive ship is significantly better suited to absorb the damage any ground-based anti-space weaponry can dish out than a shuttle or a drop pod. 2. A planet has, of course the option to build even bigger weaponry than you can use on ships, but while the ships can use some ways to simply remove the heat generated (and before somebody argues about that, let's say the ship has a reservoir of sacrificial heat sinks, and when one is full, it gets thrown out, problem solved) the ground based weaponry has to be much more careful where it puts the waste heat or it will destroy it's own environment (a very good book series, Antares cycle from Michael McCollum places planetary defense centers under the ice caps, and they are worried that a strong attack will melt them). 3. The planet has the annoying tendency to be predictable. That means if you can't go in close with your ships, you capture a handy asteroid and throw it at the PDC. In wars where these kinds of weapons are used you tend to ignore the collateral damage to your opponent. Or, even more interesting, accelerate, from far out the system) as fast as you can, if possible to a single or even double digit percentage of c, space a few 100k blocks of steel with a guidance system and thrusters, and then brake down again.
individual drop pods make it much more difficult for the enemy to inflict significant casualties before they reach the ground. drop ships however are much bigger and slower moving targets. drop pods actually make a whole lot of sense if the concept is designed properly.
@@alfredkugler3043 counter to your first point, ships are also a lot slower moving and larger targets, also aircraft have a tough time being armored enough to take any significant damage especially if they are not designed to use the atmosphere to assist their flight. (thrusters instead of wings means you don't get much weight allowance.) so it seems much more effective to have lots of small, expendable, fast moving targets instead of giant slow moving expensive ones. to the second point explosives is not the only way to launch something out of the atmosphere to attack something in space. Lasers for instance, hell there is a a real system being developed right now that is intending to throw things into orbit by spinning them at extremely high speeds and releasing at the precise right time. but lets say it generates a lot of heat...not like they can't build heat sinks that are hundreds of feet in the air or find a way to focus the heat from the previous shot into the next shot. I also think you vastly underestimate the amount of heat you would have to generate to melt the polar ice caps...it's kind of ridiculous I promise you we could launch space shuttles from there for months and not make a dent. throwing an astriod was the strategy used in starship troopers against the earth, it generally wasn't very effective, only having succeeded one time out of hundreds of attempts because the humans had an advanced space stations that could track these objects and destroy them before they even got close. They also did this in the series "the expanse" but the only reason it worked was because they managed to cloak the asteroid until it was too late to stop it. Any species capable of space warfare is going to have technology to detect and track that sort of thing. look at air combat and radar, underwater combat and sonar, ground combat and sat tracking. if you are going to be effective in any arena of combat you have to be able to know when attacks are coming as soon as possible. Look at how many asteroids we track now and we haven't even colonized our own moon yet.
Even if their efficiency is dubious at times, I still love drop pods. Nothing screams human quite like “Hurl myself from orbit in a metal ball at breakneck speeds so I can kill things faster.”
As for the defense shield argument, it depends on what the shield actually stops. Some shielding technology might allow for broad spectrum defense (stopping multiple things at once), while other shielding systems might only stop things like lasers, projectiles or radiation. Another consideration is how your shield gets affected with each impact - does it weaken gradually based on intensity of an attack or the massed fired directed at it, or do you need to send a ground force to the surface to go and take out the power/field generator?
This is a very good point! I could see Drop Pods being rather useful in a setting like Dune with their speed-dependent shields, or even Star Wars, since they use different shields for energy and matter.
Oh the drop pod. A.K.A. The self interring casket. Sort of like paying for your burial in advance, and then taking an active role in doing the job before you are expired. Throwing yourself at the ground and missing is the definition of orbit. The really hard part is getting to equilibrium with the gravity. If you can't do that, you have a decaying orbit. Or a drop pod. Love the singing, but I don't know why you say we can't leave. We undocked two weeks ago. Have to come back though, still have problems with the warp drive. Everytime we engage it pulls to the second star on the right, and we can't stop till morning.
Ironically, I don't have 'drop pods' so much as 'drop bunkers'. They're attached to a craft that helps guide them to target and set down more or less level. They've got everything a squad of 20 soldiers would need for 1-2 weeks, including ammo, basic medical supplies and integrated anti-infantry defenses. Ideally, they're dropped in groups of a dozen with landing points arranged to secure an area and reinforce each other. With enough time, the bunkers can be interconnected and form a crude base or LZ for supplies. They're actually NOT intended to be dropped in a hot zone, but rather dropped away from AO and AA. The surface attack ship tries to offer screening fire as well. Atop the craft is a Dragonfly shuttle. While it can't lift the bunker, it can detach, the men can strap themselves to it in exosuits, and be extracted back to low orbit. It's not a FUN experience, and every trainee has to go through it to be drop qualified. Another version can drop a tank or industrial equipment like a combat dozer, which is basically just an armored dozer with an anti-personnel turret on top, to assist. Ironically, the biggest problems soldiers have with them is they rarely land level, and even though they have hydraulic legs to try to even things out, everything will eventually slide somewhere. There's two other versions. One is a bare shell 'shelter' that is dropped for civilian and refugee use. They're not rated for combat, but do save lives if available in a crisis. The other is hazardous environment bunkers which have an airlock, magnetic anchors, and environmental support systems. They're twice the size of normal bunkers and usually not dropped into combat if at all possible. Dropping a hazardous bunker on a high G world (anything over 1.5g) is extremely difficult. Also, while they're never INTENDED to be used in combat, an enterprising officer or two has loaded them with explosives and dropped them as devastatingly unpredictable bombs.
Thrawn's response to Coruscant having a double planetary shield {yes it's two shields, one above the other with only one opening at a time - like an airlock} was to cloak a bunch of asteroids, ferry them into Coruscant's gravity well and just drop them there so the shield couldn't be opened in case one got through. Basically locking the entire planet away from its supplies as Coruscant couldn't supply its own populace it was that vastly overcrowded. The Shield however was powerful enough to deflect Asteroids - The people on the ground just had to keep the shield in place as they didn't know how many Asteroids were up there. - In Rogue One Disney also had a planetary shield {though this one was only a single shield} and the Rebels had to either open it from the ground by insertion or destroy the machinery around the one actual gate in the shield to allow their ships to pass through that - They eventually managed the second scenario by causing a star destroyer to ram the machinery around the gate. But most Star Wars planets don't actually have a full planetary shield - Hothbase for instance was protected by shield generators but the shield only extended a hundred kilometres or so from the base itself which was why the Imperials dropped AT-AT Walkers outside the Shield that could just walk through it {it's either the same type of Shield as Goa-uld have in Stargate that stops anything going above a certain speed OR it's not capable of reaching the ground although this second possibility makes you wonder why the Imperials wouldn't send TIE Fighters to fly below it as the AT-AT Walkers are taller than TIEs and nowhere near as fast}. - The Rogue Squadron books {not sure about the video games} had X-Wings flying below the Shields of Imperial Bases so maybe some shields did have this problem of providing an umbrella against bombardment but not actually reaching the ground.
Rogue One also had X-wings flying below shields. At any rate, I think the thing with the AT-ATs was that they were slabs of armor on legs, so you have your transports fly them to just over the horizon, then they stand up and walk the rest of the way. This allows you to use non-repulsor vehicles & tech for the entire operation, thereby avoiding the effects of any anti-repulsor defenses that the enemy might have deployed. It also explains the height- every foot of height reduces the distance they have to travel before they can shoot at their target(s).
@@absalomdraconis In Rogue One the X-Wings flew through the opened gate in the Planetary Shield - Once they were through that gate of course they were flying under the shield....The point was to get them through the gate in the first place. - Star Wars: A New Hope and Empire never made any mention of "anti-repulsor defenses" - That's pure Fan theory with no evidence in the movies - I don't recall them mentioning Anti-Repulsor defenses in any of the 1990s/early 2000s {I stopped reading after Vector Prime} EU Novels either but even if they had been in those novels the X-Wing series was set 3-5 years after Empire anyway and Heir to the Empire was set 6 years after Empire, 5 after Jedi.....There's no reason to believe the Empire would have expected the Rebels to have Anti-Repulsor technology in Empire without evidence of such beforehand...This was still before the Rebel Cells had united {Rogue One retconned the Rebellion to being a fully united effort prior to A New Hope}. The AT-ATs were specifically sent in outside the Shield to walk in BECAUSE the shield was there stopping bombardment from orbit BUT if the Shield was touching the ground rather than just providing an umbrella effect then the only way the AT-ATs could have walked through it would have been for it to be based on stopping anything moving faster than say 30 miles an hour - If it was an umbrella effect then TIEs which obviously move faster than 30 miles an hour would also be able to be dropped outside it and fly under it which would cause a major plot hole {they didn't give either explanation in the film so no it's not a plot hole, just something for fans to theorise about}. TIEs would have destroyed the rebel speeders with ease, flying rings around them and TIE Bombers could have destroyed the base with ease too and would have got there far faster than the AT-AT Walkers which probably had a max speed of about 50 miles an hour....It certainly took them long enough not just to get through the shield but to get into range to shoot the shield generators.
@@franohmsford7548 My pet theory. The walkers are able to get through a shield because they are grounded, not because of speed. I seem to recall that is mentioned in one of the Legends books , but can't recall for certain. Other possibility, TIEs could have gotten under the shield, but if the interior volume was small enough, it would constrict their possible movement and make avoiding AA difficult. And the Rebels had X-wings ready to counter TIEs if that did happen. And X-wings( in old canon) are superior in atmospheric flight to TIEs, and definitely to the TIE Bombers. But the whole thing is kind of moot, because the way shields work in Star Wars is never really explained properly, and most descriptions are contradictory to others.
@@MandoWookie It's not about just being grounded vs just speed - It's just being grounded vs being grounded AND slow enough to get through. That's my point - If grounded was all that was needed then TIEs can fly low to the ground. The Rebel X-Wings were being used to fly guard duty alongside the fleeing transport ships - Luke's was left on the ground because Luke was in a speeded and he needed his X-Wing there to transfer to to get off planet himself. The Imperials would have seen the Rebel ships fleeing guarded by X-Wings with time to send TIEs down if that had been a possibility....The Empire didn't bother sending TIEs to stop the fleeing rebel transports so those TIEs were available. The Imperials knew the Rebels had been forewarned and were already fleeing so not trying to get the shields down as quickly as possible would have been yet another error on the Empire's part - Again this is evidence towards the idea that the Shield must have covered low enough to the ground that TIEs couldn't fly under it. TIE Fighters are 29ft high - AT-ATs are 50ft high - That's a good 20 ft of clearance if the AT-ATs were able to go UNDER the shield rather than through it. BUT WHY were the AT-ATs able to go through the Shield if TIEs weren't - Well the answer to that has to be speed - TIEs can't fly slow enough to pass through the shield whilst AT-ATs being walkers can easily slow down to 10, 5 or even 1 mph to pass through. Remember that Lucas was inspired partly by Dune and Dune's shields are based on Speed - Specifically why Dune only uses hand to hand fighting.
@@franohmsford7548 I will buy that. When it comes to the X-wings though, the escorts I always assumed were to fend off TIEs while the ground based Ion Cannon cleared the road. The reason for only 2 at a time would be to hold some back to counter air strikes, with the ion cannon doing the heavy lifting. Edit to add: The TIEs likely could go slow enough, they can hover and maneuver to land after all, so speed can't be the sole reason.
Well we humies like to have the high ground and there’s no higher ground than space. On the other hand this can only be countered by also having the ultimate high ground, or if that is not an option make use of the ultimate low ground. Bunker down and sit it out, while harassing the enemies that step on your „desolate rock“ so much they either think it’s not worth it, or resort to „planet crackers“, which also could mean pushing big ass rocks down the gravity well, just out of spite! Also if you think drop pods are bad, wait until you hear about „orbital drop tanks“! Yes that is a concept, if you manage to squeeze in foot soldiers to establish a bridge head and the defense is suddenly confronted by lightly armored infantry tanks as well this may become even more messy, just how we like it! More guns, more DAKA! More DAKA, more better! And all that?
The biggest problem I have with "drop pods" is one of combat efficacy. By definition, the "drop pods" are going to be deployed where other means of transport are not feasible, so right into the fire. But this also means your soldiers will be deployed without any heavy weaponry, without any major supplies, without support, without air cover... just some guys and their guns. Wouldn't it be far better to put some seekers and extra engines into these "pods" and sic them onto the known anti-air/anti-ballistic sites in order to make the theater safer for more useful means of transporting the troops -- and resupplying them -- down?
In 40k it is a common practice to sent a lot of droppods containing explosives or automatic weaponry to surprise the defenders. Also at least in halo they can send small vehicels or more equiptment in them. They are really just paratroppers. You send them in to either clear a specific objectiv (killing x) or to make first strikes against an enemy and weaken the defences or occupy their attention. And for that you don't necessary need any form of support. If you can live with the casualitys.
I imagine they would be used together. The seekers would be priority target to the defenders and thus pull fire away from the drop pods. If the seekers kill some defenses, great. If not, well you now have troops on the ground to do what the seekers can't. Also, who says you can't drop combat vehicles and supplies the same way you drop troops?
"by definition" not in the slightest. drop pods are used any time you need to quickly get something from ORBIT to the GROUND! that is the entire point of them. you seem to be stuck on "if you are using drop pods it's a last resort" when that is not at all how they would be used. they are most closely related to paratroopers which if you notice were deployed often, behind enemy lines, without heavy weaponry, without major supplies, without support, without air cover...because they are not the main military force, they are special operations. but if you were using drop pods to get your entire army to the battlefield obviously you would drop 100s of thousands at the same time and with proper equipment and supplies to setup a forward base...otherwise why send them at all? a drop pod passenger is going to be far better protected and armed because they have a vehicle. who would design a drop pod but not make it capable of carrying anything but basic weapons...that's stupid. HELL they could make it so the drop pod is equipped with weaponry so heavy it can't even be moved...it's literally moronic the way you are approaching this as though it is a last resort sending soldiers in their underwear. it completely ignores logic and military tactics. If you want to strawman drop pods into being a fundamentally bad idea I guess I can't stop you...but you literally are pretending like there are rules for technology that doesn't exist...it's real dumb.
Also of note- there's no particular reason why you can't deploy e.g. _tanks_ with drop pods, it's really just an issue of building a big enough pod. Further, for anyone that actually uses drop pods, you can be pretty certain that every drop is going to include a bunch of air-deployed missile launchers. Basically _everything_ that can be shoved into the drop is going to go within perhaps a minute of each other, simply because that increases the saturation of that target's defenses, maximizing the success rate of the drop.
@@SacredCowShipyards it can't be my fault, you don't do this for me... Can we blame the minions instead? Or better yet, the trolls who think it's worth their time to leave a "nasty-gram"!
Oh I remember Gundam uses either wide sheets of metal( Gundam IBO), a ballute system or a drop pod for deployment of mobile suits. Though later UC Gundam series also use energy shielding to mitigate heat rentry. But the weird one is the reentry condom the RX-78-2 had( man that was weird).
Do not forgot early in the OYW in the UC how the Principality of Zeon used massive drop pods that held about 3 MS or various other vehicles. Then to add, the MS could actually be released in midair from those same pods.
2 problems with drop pods: 1) If you release an object from an orbiting craft it falls AT FIRST then, 1/2 an orbital period later it comes up ABOVE and behind YOU. So, it needs to de-orbit burn before it can fall. 2) one pod for every planet in the Universe? Nope. Every invasion would need its' to be specially designed for the gravity of that world, atmospheric makeup and state variables (Temp, Pressure, humidity, gas content), known hazards that will blow your forces around and out for the central LZ. Frankly, you'd need a meteorologist to plan the descent along with a physicist and a chemist at minimum. (Imagine if there is a single layer of Sulphur dioxide that will corrode pods and they pass through... look at Venus for how that works) Landing on a planet with then a combat capable cohesive unit that can establish a beach-head WITHOUT possibility of retreat? No ground side mission planner would want to send anybody into that. It is literally asking for a slaughter of your own troops.
To me droppods fill the same role as the classic paratrooper did furfill .. and if you tried to drop those over a well prepared AA well ... it wont be pretty ... But every defense takes time to gear up and having many many tiny humans in tiny flying coffins makes it actually quite hard to intercept all or even many of them especially if you are not prepared for something that crazy. Still ... splat or boom is the most likely outcome unless you employ a lot of breaking and or maneuvering ... or one of the trusters fail/gets damaged. But then .. you are in orbit all you need to clear an LZ is to toss down some rocks .. heavy rocks of course but meh if you can jump between star systems doing that shouldn't be that hard .. and once the LZ is clear why ride there so fast?
to get troops on the ground before enemy ground forces that would be too close to friendly units to target by orbital strikes can get to the freshly cleared LZ before your own guys get there
The role that airborne pro formed in theory. In practice…..I can’t think of a single combat effective jump. America never performed one, & in each case were they tried people died without even holding the ground they fell onto.
The most physics defying thing drop pods do is stop at the surface of the ground. Because even though there's a human inside, it's still basically a massive artillery round launched from orbit. This creates a few more problems. The first of which is it'll destroy the drop zone. If the drop zone is an enemy you want destroyed this may be a good thing since you might take them out before the squishy even leaves the pod. But the problem is if you're deploying pods in groups, whoever hits the ground first is now on the receiving end of the artillery barrage consisting of all of his buddies landing. The second problem is both artillery rounds and meteors create impact craters. That pod isn't going to stop *at* the ground. It'll keep going until it buries itself several feet *below* the ground. So the squishy's next problem after surviving the scariest ride ever is how to dig himself out of the literal coffin he's now in. Also he's going to want to do it quickly since otherwise what's the entire point of using a drop pod? Which leads to the third problem of what's the way to move a large amount of dirt quickly? Explosives! The pod is going to need to be equipped with some sort of secondary explosive device to unbury the operator out of the hole they just buried themselves in. Which means more destruction and chaos. All in all my opinion is the easiest way to make all of this work is to drop the pods without the squishies inside until everything at the target site is dead, and then send the squishies down in a shuttle or something. But then again that's just orbital bombardment followed by assault.
Helldivers hellpods solve this problem. The hellpod buries itself completely leaving only its rear end out of the ground where there is an armored hatch. The helldiver then crawls out of the pod from that hatch
I think it was a GL comic scene that said the following: "Any crash you can walk away from is a good landing. Now let's see if I can still walk." There's some truth in the dark comedy, and it's easy to see why it would stick in your mind. It's hilariously awful. XD
Drop pods - It doesn't matter how much metal you wrap your human in, if the stop at the end causes all the internal organs to get squished into mush. Because when the pod stops, the organs of the person inside do not.
@@SacredCowShipyards oh, i'm aware that the definiton of "to damp" has been added to the dictionary as the secondary definition of "to dampen". I just passionately disagree with it.
@@SacredCowShipyards lol, fair enough. I can tell you from experience that "from the files" is the worst way to learn a human language. I had the "pleasure" of being assigned Farsi by Uncle Sam...
People didn’t like your technical deep dive in the X-Wing episode? That’s the best part of these videos! The heavy shot of engineering end technical know-how is what makes this channel great. Along with the sass…
I like how in titanfall, the grunt drop pods literally have an automated medical system because they know someone is gonna get hurt in that drop pod. No, I'm not talking about the lifeboat at the start of the second game's campaign, i'm talking about the drop pods themselves. Their solution is to make as good of an effort at braking the pod as they can, and then treating the people inside as necessary after it does hit the ground. Talk about deliquifying your organs. Still, not a "hard sci-fi" game and it probably wouldn't work, but it's cool. But, in their defense, they're usually deployed from the upper portions of the atmosphere rather than straight up from orbit.
07:45. "Intercepting things coming from orbit, at high speed is hard". Try throwing enough things in its path, and it becomes way easier. The only way you can bypass that, is with a pretty much instantaneous delivery to the surface of a planet from orbit.
There once a American general that said something along the lines of "jumping out a perfectly good air plane is a bad idea." His mind was later changed when the germans dropped troops on france
Some space emprie: makes super advanced and expensive drop pods to invade planets, with swarms of them overwhelming planetary defences. Old shool flak anti air: So anynway I started blasting.
my idea isnt drop pods. but drop ships. Vehicles that come in free fall, dampen hard to touch down without issue, then abandon the site, destroy it, or use it. because we are no where near the ability to get the dropship back to the mother ship. But wait! this is reality. so. launching a drop ship into or near orbit with a booster is possible. release the booster and maybe a ferring, let the drop ship freefall to the target, use dampening/retro thrusters to slow and land. then remaining fuel will be used just fine to fling itself into an ocean or allied territory. easier.
This is a continuation of the outmoded combat form of incertion that is paratroopers. Because during the Second World War paratroopers played an important role and have been idolized for the desperate battles they fought. So yes, scifi paratroopers.
The best "Drop Pod" would be a pair of Bolo M-XXX mounted tread to tread on their transit vessel. They come out of warp near atmosphere, drop through while killing anything that shoots back, and separate 100 meters up. Once on the ground, it's mostly over. But that's not quite the same thing really.
If the invading army is using lithobraking, surrender immediately because whatever is about to crawl out of the impact crater didn't give a flying fuck about being hit in the face with a PLANET, so odds are good your guns won't do shit either!
I do like how the ODSTs acknowledge that their job is really dangerous. The nicknames of the drop pods are Coffins. Because if the burn in atmosphere they burn up like in a Viking funeral.
Yeah the supply and demand logistics for drop pods which technically applies to escape pods (one person) is a logistical nightmare, oddly enough if I recall some science fiction novels/tv/movies had this idea that drop pods were filled to the brim with a breathable liquid that would upon impact with the ground of a planet or moon would semi become a solid object until the hatch was opened and the liquid drained out.
that liquid thing sounds like it would do almost nothing to mitigate the damage. if it turns into a solid than it's no different than just smashing into the ground with no protection at all. it's the sudden deceleration that kills people not being crushed or something. if you go from several hundred miles an hour to stopped in less than a second...all your vital organs are going to slam into each other at several hundred miles an hour simply form inertia...also known as making people pudding. as far as logistics though...I don't get the problem, it's like dropping smart bombs that don't explode. they are all going to end up relatively close to each other and it's up to the commanders to get the troops assembled. unless you are talking about building them...in that case you are assuming quite a bit. you can't say how difficult it would be to build something that is a fantasy to begin with... 40 years ago nobody could imagine we would all be able to have our own personal super computers (compared to their technology) in our pockets that connect us to the entire world. So it's invalid to claim that building drop pods would be prohibitively expensive or difficult. that's just now how mass production works. Building them in the first place means that they have already solved that problem as well so it's entirely moot.
The best sci fi sidestep I've seen to what acceleration and deceleration can do to human viscera is Haldeman's Forever War. Troopers are modified with a port that allows for their body cavities to be filled with something to that makes splatting less likely to happen while the lay in cushioned pods. This is all happening on a ship in deep space that is on autopilot evading enemy space drones. There is still a pretty gruesome effect of all this to one of the characters of the story. It's been a while since I read the book, so some details may not be exact. It really doesn't take a lot of force to scramble up a human being.
@@ericepperson8409 my point was that inside the drop pod there would be a fluid of honey-like viscosity that also allowed for breathing. That when impact with a solid surface of a planet or moon would act as the shock absorber while the user was totally fine ready to flip the hatch and deploy, regroup, establish F.O.B, establish main base, wage war. Except for those rare few whom had an allergy to it that they weren't aware of.
@@xyreniaofcthrayn1195 the physics still don’t work unless you do something to harden and support the entire internal organ structure of the occupant. Do you know how much force it takes to squish a liver? You can find out yourself by buying a a bag of chicken livers at the nearest grocery store. Breathing that liquid would at best help your lungs retain their shape for a fraction of a second longer before they exploded like a balloon filled with jello when they landed on your pelvis. The human body is not a single fully supported unit. It’s mostly a loose connection of tissues that are largely softer than the skeleton and sinew that manages to barely hold it altogether
The Sanheili said the humans were polite enough to drop a soldier pre packaged in their own coffin. I suppose thats one way to look at it, fail the assault and it doesn't smell as bad as normal after a few days. At least you are guaranteed a burial if you die because your pod air brakes fail...
A semi-guided headlong (well, footlong, but that sounds like a hot dog) plummet, with braking applied at low altitude so as to keep most of the descent fast and/or use a minimal amount of propellant for braking... well, it could work. In theory. But that's one of those crazy ideas like having a spaceship land on its tail: it'll never work in practice. (Laughs in SpaceX and/or DC-X.)
I was under the impression that at least in Halo, the idea was stealth. Its supposed to be the equivalent of a modern High Altitude Low Opening drop, except the pods were necessitated due to dropping from space rather than in the air. They are tiny pods rather than big dropships and you're unlikely to see them due to their tiny size. I think of times i've been to airshows where even large aircraft can easily slip from view and only reappear as they are passing over you.
Inertial dampening? Too many variables. (16 primary) The two better questions are, "How absolute is your stasis field, and how reliable is the off trigger?" ... Make that three questions. "And how small is your stasis field generator?" A drop pod within a pure stasis field becomes both artillery and invasion force in one. You could fire them ON the bunker until the shields go down and you're firing them INTO it. And the "rounds" that bounce off are just more invasion forces on the ground. Just set a longer field delay after impact. (There's that trigger question.) However, very few sentients have developed pure stasis projection generators. On top of that, and thankfully, fewer who have managed to bring them down in sizes small enough to fit in a light star cruiser. Could you imagine a multi-use, stasis projecting, drop pod ship?! Make impact, drop crew stasis, project stasis over enemies, move into position, drop stasis one foe at a time and take prisoners. Good rift, Chief. (BTW- Having a ship reduced to a solid cube could also be called "destruction of evidence". ijs)
What about the Titans from Titanfall? They make even less sense. Why would you literally throw a forty ton robot at the ground that might contain a person at such high speed that it can go from orbit to ground in two seconds?
Well, let's face it, if we start thinking too much about the logisitics of Titanfall, there are many, many issues, the cost of a replacement robot evey 5 min being the first one. The games were fun enough to ignore that for me though.
If I recall, they used the kind of drop pods that deploy early and let the cargo fend for itself, so it could be that the squishy-less versions rode the drop pods, braked hard as hell, and then just dropped to the ground.
@@SacredCowShipyards I don’t remember any drop pods from the campaign of Titanfall 2. To be fair, though, the only Titanfall we actively rode to the surface is relatively small, so maybe drop pods weren’t needed.
as Isaac said on this matter, if an alien walks out of the crater it just made from it's ballistic or superluminal impact with the surface of your planet, run and hope they don't notice you. if they can survive being the dinosaur ending impactor, it's a good bet everything you have will do nothing to them.
I always thought of drop pods in the same light as WW2 paratroopers, you use them as a first wave to preferably knock out AA and scout ground positions. Simi elite troops to get a slight advantage via intel and sabotage. Probably going to have a ridiculously high mortality rate but thats why they get paid more
Usually drop pods get used when the AA is sufficient that shuttles have a 100 percent chance of getting blown up on approach, and you hope the drop pods will be to hard to hit, or that enough will make it to make the assault feasable.
Drop pods seem to be the sci-fi equivalent of paratroopers. Drop lots of troops in individual kits over a dispersed area with the hope that some or most of them get through. They first job of this initial wave of troopers would be to disable localized anti-space or anti-air defenses. With that job out of the way, you bring in your main force in dropships / shuttles (sci-fi equivalent of helicopters or landing craft).
10:34. Yes, there were planets in the Star Trek universe that had shields, but one of the films showed defense satellites around Earth being "deactivated", so we can assume that Earth had a mixed system at one point at least. FUN FACT: several different kinds of "stargate"/sling systems were also shown. :/
I always thought the idea of drop pods was silly for just the reasons you outlined. Before trying to put boots on the ground you would want to first use your orbital ships firepower and fighters for precision strikes to knock down as much of a planet's defenses as you could before calling in the Marines. Once you've done that you can bring down large troop transports safely with all the support they need, field hospitals, chow lines, and merry go rounds for the Air Force guys.
boy that assumes a lot...1 that you know where the enemy anti air is 2. that you are capable of destroying all of it from space 3. that a slow moving large vehicle with lots of soldiers in it is somehow less risky than 100s of thousands of individual fast moving small targets. You miss one soldier with a rocket launcher...well there goes 3rd platoon. 4. that along with the drop they would not be dropping any equipment or supplies which would be idiotic to deploy an army without equipment. people are basing these assumptions on paratroopers but they are different in that they are a small force doing special operations. if you are dropping a whole army to a planet you are going to bomb the shit out of probably a 100 square mile area to land in, then drop everything including equipment as quickly as possible. Probably while also sending down close air support to protect them while they establish a forward base. the concept of a drop pod is great, it's the technology required to make it survivable that is a little far fetched. but if the science of the universe says they solved that problem well then what is your problem with it?
@@TheNitroG1 I basically outlined our strategy during Gulf War 1. Spend months blasting them from above and then sending in the troops but instead of the ships being in water they’re in space. Its a systematic approach that to a planetary invasion.
"Aircraft throw themselves at the ground and miss". I see what you did there. Also, you left lasers out of the missile defense possibilities, even though those are being tested now and could work quite well.
the problem with lasers is in an atmosphere, you lose a lot of energy TO the atmosphere. best way to stop an orbital infantry assault would be for the lasers to be also in orbit. welcome to Reagan's Star Wars...
@@warhorse03826 True. I suppose that's arguably the problem with every weapon in atmosphere, especially against spacecraft. Probably just comes down to how advanced each piece of tech is, and whether the drop pod still needs a parachute. It would also be heavily weather dependent, which means you could actually have a fun sort of counterplay where the attacker uses some kind of smoke bomb type thing to prevent the lasers from working well. Your comment has given me ideas, and I thank you for it.
@@RorikH well, here's an idea for you...tunneling electron guns. ionize the air before you fire the laser. it cuts back the atmospheric resistance by about half. it also looks really cool (in the lab anyway, that's the only place I've seen it done) it's like a lightning flash followed by a faint flash of whatever color the laser is. it turns the ionized air into a sort of conductive tube.
Drop pods aren’t just shaped like coffins, a lot of them will actually be coffins by the time they reach the ground. Forgot to factor in the price of coffins for the crew’s of downed drop ships against that of the drop coffins
So the Jenkins verse on r/hfy actually has the inertial dampening technology of just manipulating time, most of the time it’s referred it to by the authors as stasis fields. But in the story before some alien race decides to try to contain us with a stellar shield they had built for protecting their systems. You had the galaxies nastiest bogeyman shoot themselves in drop pods with frozen time onto earth, in the middle of a hockey game. Oh and by the way in this universe we are on The there shouldn’t be intelligent life side of high gravity according to the aliens, so the cybernetics enhanced Predators got beat to a literal pulp with hockey sticks after jumping out of the frozen time Drop pods. Yeah that event is why in that fictional universe the whole galaxy browned their pants and A rogue government decided to quarantine us until we kill ourselves off with a system shield. Us being the wackos we are we did find a way through it.
Jenkinsverse is hilarious and some of the writers are great at thinking through all the ways we would casually break almost everything we touched as a species
Even if you solve the physics problems of getting a human from orbit to surface without liquifying them, there are still major problems to overcome. Look at the major airborne operations of WW2. Of them, Operation Varsity was the most successful and it was not so much an assault as it was a supporting action: capture important crossroads to slow down enemy reinforcements from reaching the real assault (Operation Plunder, the crossing of the Rhine). They still suffered high casualties from AA. Modern mass para drops are done exclusively against targets with no opposition - even a token enemy ground force can inflict heavy casualties now that every soldier is capable of spraying bullets into the air at a rapid rate (eg. UA-cam video ID: UPAotqngBJc ).
Star trek... seems to have large scale planetary defenses? What they are _exactly_ never comes up, but various forms have been shown, from mines to shields to defense satellite grids, to etc, so core feddie planets probably have an array of different options that would need to be overcome, bypassed, or subverted. And even then, it would probably be more efficient and far safer to have unmanned pods that contained transporter beacons of some variety to allow bypassing of anti-transport measures...
Welp those germans put up barbed wire and metal blockades I guess Normandy is theirs permanently now. wait...what are you even talking about drop pods aren't used in star trek...they transport or use shuttles...they don't need a beacon unless there is something causing signal interference. Fun Fact: the reason transporters were created for star trek was because showing a ship landing on a planet was WAAAY out of budget initially.
So, my understanding of how a drop pod COULD work is as follows: Armored paratrooping. Basically a protection mechanism for an inter-orbital paradrop. It would likely have inbuilt disposable chaff and flare launchers, and one-time use thrusters to land it safely on the ground once it reaches a low altitude.
Only drop pods I've actually *liked* were the Basilisk droids from the Old Republic era in Star Wars :) Sure, they didn't make a lot of sense from a scientific standpoint, but Star Wars is basically space magic anyway and the Basilisks looked like they'd be a hell of a lot of fun to ride.
05:36. "how good is your drop pod's inertial dampeners?" Well, if it prevents you from becoming a red-colored memory, the answer is: Good Enough, SIR! :P
First of all, I'm glad you decided to use my suggestion. I enjoyed this video very much. Now to the part where I play Devil's Advocate. To be fair, the universes where drop pods are a thing do flat out admit that they're suicidally dangerous. Only genetically enhanced super soldiers, such as the Astartes, or a volunteer force of unique crazies, such as the ODSTs, are deployed in this fashion. But here's the thing. When these things work, they work beautifully. Imagine you and your squad mates are manning a machine gun position and a giant metal box slams into the ground in the middle of you all with the force of an artillery strike. Assuming that doesn't kill you outright, you're gonna be out of it for at least a few seconds, giving the soldier or squad of soldiers who just stepped out of that box ample time to make sure you never get back up. Drop troops would basically be paratroopers on steroids.
Good episode, but I've never really understood the need for organic-occupied drop pods. If you can cross interstellar space, then your tech is advanced enough to field AI drones/soldiers, and none of your living people have to risk actual death. I've also never understood the need for planetary invasions. If you already control orbital space (necessary for an invasion), you already control the planet. Just issue an ultimatum: "Surrender or we'll destroy you piece by piece until you do surrender." Start with defense installations and work up to population centers. At some point either the planet surrenders or resistance is beaten down to a negligible level.
I really like the Tyranids version of a drop pod, their mother ships are, basically, just giant space whales that randomly nut into the void and, because the universe is frigging huge, they have to eventually land somewhere.
Drop pods are for when you really just want to run headlong at the enemy but there's an annoying lack of ground between you and the target.
*notices who wrote the comment*
Ruh-roh.
Best crossover. Ever!
That's why I enjoy the starship troopers drop pods so much. They were basically a multi-layered egg wrapped around a soldier in power armor and the layers would peel away to create clouds of shrapnel confusing AA systems while slowing the power armor which would then use thrust to make a soft landing hopefully after the soldier was below the effective altitude of said systems
Robert Heinlein apparently put a lot more thought into the orbital insertion of troops than he did his political shoehorning with the history and moral philosophy classes.
@@hunterferguson5675 You just described half of all scifi shows as well though.
@@hunterferguson5675 Heinlein didn't shoehorn his politics in......he made moral philosophy system that could be expressed algebraically. Mathematically justifying every decision. And it fit like a unicorn.
He's also possibly the only person who realised that a lot of soldiers packed tightly together is a target so juicy it causes involuntary orgasms to the enemy's gunnery crews. The Mobile Infantry seems to believe that their personal space extends beyond the horizon!
Especially since it was first published in 1959, and is considered a young adult novel.
The concept behind drop pods, at least in Halo, was that loosing one pod resulted in a single death, as opposed to loosing a whole dropship resulting in a dozen plus deaths. The general idea behind the tactics involved is basically dropping ODST's on an area, securing that area, then bringing in regular troops on larger dropships.
A long time ago I did my own analysis of Planetary Invasions and really, that is something that deserves it's own video by our Dockmaster himself. Regardless I looked at initial planetary landings and yeah, the problem with big ships is big losses. A one man drop pod, you have thousands of targets to shoot at and each hit is one casualty, vs having a thousand troops in one ship an one big-ole target for ground stations to aim at. If you want to get back to planetary invasions. Invading a developed world, like EARTH.. today, 21st century. No magical tech. Just EARTH with her nations and standing armies. Invading earth.. is a DAUNTING task, presuming the goal is to capture in-tact. If you don't care about infrastructure condition and general planetary condition the nature of warfare changes and you just throw rocks at the planet until everything living on it is dead. But to "capture" a developed world with a population in the range above 8 BILLION... how many soldiers does the world have? How many would become partisans from that percentage of non-standing military 8 billion. So now you've got maybe a billion enemy combatants and probably another 2-3 BILLION active partisans and another 3-4 BILLION who would support the partisans. You are going to take a "TINY" 5 mile long battleship or troop ship to take that world? Good lucky, you can maybe cart 10K soldiers in your tin-cans to be opposed by BILLIONS of enemies. Sure, you've got the high ground and thus open battle would be suicide but the unconventional warfare side of things will see you bogged down for decades, even if you are an advanced alien species. Take developed planets is a truly enormous task, likely one involving hundreds if not THOUSANDS of ships and BILLIONS of combat soldiers + billions more support personnel. That's a big task. You are pretty much going to have to MOVE an entire planetary population to take over another planetary population. Keeping it? If the locals don't like you? Short of throwing rocks at it till nothing moves and then inheriting an earth reduced to MARS quality of life.. yeah. Not something done simply. Imagine landing ships the size of cities to cart down tens of millions of soldiers, and expecting to lose some of those ships. Yeah. How long do you think a civilization could keep that kind of warfare with what attrition rate numbers would be. The idea of planetary invasion goes from sci-fi to utter fantasy pretty fast. Even if you interstellar alien types are going to be taking humans with slug-throwers because bombs blow up alien cars as well as they do human ones and when you've got billions of pissed off people and you want them as slaves or for production or you like green hills and trees and don't want to burn the place to ash.. that's a tall order.
Feet first into hell
@@chexwarior the benefit of casket like drop pods. If the retros fail to fire then it becomes a self burying coffin. Reliability becomes less bothersome nat that point.
@@grayscribe1342 rocks I already covered. Insurgency negates the value of rocks in a precision attack method.. and rocks really are a giant hammer, WMD and not a precision munition. The destructive force calculations and actual ground effect are based on size, angle, material, and velocity. Get it wrong and you go from a nice controlled cratering of a single SAC airbase to glassing several hundreds of square miles with a plasma bath. Say the difference between Arizona crater vs the bolide that glassed the bronze age near east for about a thousand square miles without touching down. Air burst vs ground impact. In general meteors have a minimum size to reach the surface create explosive effects. So you have a minimum rock blast radius, which is about EQ to 1 MT thermonuclear weapons.. that's a Big hammer. Plus targeted bombardment will still put a lot of dust in the atmo leading to vast cold shifts in climate.. not to mention the secondary fires started by the rocks. In general war, at a certain scale becomes untenable. Interstellar conflict including invading developed worlds is one of them. Political or subterfuge is needed. Why fight, when you can come with a cure-all that also goes covax on the world and sterilize them. Let them run to you and sign their own doom. Don't even need to offer a cure-all, just buy off the politicians of a world and they will do all the heavy lifting for you. No invasion, no mess. Heck you might even get the surviving population to hug you when you come and off the politicians and claim you are saving then from the big bad men who have been killing and enslaving them. Political means are vastly more impactful than open war as warfare grows in scope and scale. Or you can just reduce an entire world to uninhabitable ash..
So ITS Trojan horse 🤔🤔🤔🤔
To be fair, even we humies Acknowledge that drop pods are a terrifying ride. But as those who do ride them say, “We are glad to plunge feet first into hell, knowing we will rise. “
Or “We are the Emperor’s angels of Death!”
These are not sane members of our species. But by god are they the cool ones.
I got on e for you. 😉
How do you fit twelve, 8 foot tall dudes in power armor in a compartment the size of a FIAT Punto?
_by dropping them from low orbit at supersonic speed_ XD
we already sorta do have drop pods, re-entry vehicle/capsule for astronauts. (also the martian entry capsules for the rovers and...)
there’s also that mountain russian gel ball thing that does a pretty decent job of absorbing kinetic energy and keeping people alive...although deaths do still occur.
Feet first into hell, trooper.
@@draconisthewyvern3664 fair, but no one shoots at those as they are basically escape pods.
The Astartes barely qualify as members of our species. They're 7-8 feet tall 500+ pound slabs of muscle with bones harder than steel and redundant organs and all that jazz.
"Throw yourself at the ground and miss"
Somewhere in a dimension we know nothing of, Douglas Adams is smiling down at you👍🤘
Ha!
Drop pods are basically the Sci-if version of Paratroopers
I think that's what Heinlein was going for..he was trained as a paratrooper..
@@warhorse03826 I thought he was a radio comms officer in the Navy.
@@jakeaurod I think he was Navy.
@@jakeaurod right, be he had paratrooper training in the naval academy, which he never used. there were plans to have "zero landings" on some islands early in the war..100% paratroopers..but someone realized how dumb that was after everyone got the training and they dropped it.
when you do not have the beaming to the surface technology at least....
because you can literally beam in to the combat zone once transporters are thing
Drop pods are the exactly right solution to anti-air systems, it’s called saturation.
If you go down by big shuttle, you have much fewer number of targets to shoot at.
Yep. And every hit hurts that much more because you're losing multiple troops instead of one per successful hit by the enemy.
drop pods also arent the only thing in the air going down with the drop pods, they are shot out in waves alongside heavy artillery that moves just quickly enough that the Suicide Burn of the Drop Pods to achieve optimal slamdown pulls the pod just out of the overpressure tolerance radius.
Which could make a defender consider using nuclear airbursts against incoming waves. It could be an EMP problem for the defenders if they have a strong planetary magnetic field, but if the field is weak or non-existent and they have an atmosphere, then hundreds of cubic miles of saturation pods becomes dead-men dropping.
@@jakeaurod a shuttle is not nuclear bomb proof anyway.
@@jakeaurod we're going to drop hundreds of men at supersonic speeds at the ground in unshielded coffins. And hope the enemy won't detente a nuclear weapon over there position???.
Um did you actually think that one threw. Most universe's that have drop pods have either really small nuclear weapons. Or consider there use barbaric.
But by the same token. How of these same universe's use ion, microwave, and emp weapons like there on a clearance sale. The pods are hardened against EMP
There's also the Starship Trooper [book] version of drop pods actually makes MORE sense because it deploys decoys during the drop, and uses breaking thrusters below the AA screen.... It also deploys the Power Armored troops before they reach the ground so they can both intercept and counter AA fire from that jackass with the bird gun.
Also, thruster decel makes more sense for another reason... you may not be dropping on a rock that has an atmosphere that is useful for aero braking.
That book is awesome.
It also deploys several parachutes, which get torn away shortly after deployment while altering the speed of the pod enough that the chaff and decoys are closer to the enemy AA than the pod.
I don't know, a hard counter to this tactic would be to just saturate those lower altitudes with AA shrapnel.
@@chrisowens4550 True, but a counter to that would be orbital barbardment of the LZ first.
@@travisbishop782 "Nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
Of course, in the raid on the Skinnies, they didn't want to hit them too hard because they wanted to convince them to switch sides. Objectives drive mission requirements.
I mean, in reality we strapped expensive silk parachutes onto soldiers and dumped them over enemy territory with little guarantee someone wouldn't take pot-shots at them as they parachute to the ground; and then that expensive parachute is more or less abandoned at the LZ as it would be dead weight. A disposable heat shield added to that isn't that much worse TBH. Only needing to survive one reentry would make it a lot cheaper than a fully reusable shuttle that also has to _return_ to orbit.
I view drop pods as the space equivalent to paratroopers, specialist soldiers to get behind enemy lines that can go places that aircraft capable of landing wherever can't easily reach. 20 man-sized pods are harder to kill than one shuttle, and you can have redundancy too. If they kill maybe 5 of every 20 pods you drop, you still get 15 troops on the ground who can now potentially sabotage those AAA/AOA guns to let conventional forces land. You could fire drop pods from far, far outside the practical range of surface to orbit guns and make them hard to track.
This assumes you want whatever's on the planet intact, but if you did bombarding the planet with rocks wouldn't work. If you can use commandos to break their defenses, you can park your fleet in orbit with impunity and force a surrender. A few hundred commands lost is definitely better than likely even one ship and a crew of hundreds, so if you can pull it off, all the power to you.
Drop pods also have another potential that goes underused. If you're invading a planet, you could go for even bigger levels of subterfuge; get a civilian type ship that uses aerobraking upon arrival at a planet, during the end of aerobraking when you dump your ballute or other disposable components drop your commandos off too. Who would waste time trying to shoot routine debris from a cargo ship decelerating?
On a third note, one way drop pods can also be used to get men and machines to the surface to build a more sustainable landing zone that allows for bigger things to land. Even if there is no threat of being shot, in a non-military situation, propulsive landing on loose soils can badly damage shuttle craft. So send down some cheap one-way landers that build you a nice hardened concrete landing pad with robots or maybe prisoners or something expendable. You could even shoot it out first to arrive weeks/days/years ahead and build you a whole settlement to arrive to.
I wholeheartedly agree with this
Pretty much my thinking and also along the lines of what Heinlein described in Starship Troopers - small detachments dropped quickly in the heart of enemy territory to cause as much havoc as rapidly as possible before leaving. Fast, tactical strikes with fewer troops rather than a Stalin-esque wall of flesh.
Another aspect is that this allows for a much shorter logistical tail. Yes, the gear per individual is going to be more expensive but there is significantly less of it that you need to ship. Boots on the ground are thought to win wars but they casn do none of that without a supply chain. Keeping this as compact as possible means that you're less likely to have it interrupted.
@@MrGrimsmith don’t forget that you can also drop extra pods with more supplies post drop or even during the drop giving the enemy more targets meaning they’re less likely to shoot at and take out the pods with actual people aboard
we already sorta do have drop pods, re-entry vehicle/capsule for astronauts. (also the martian entry capsules for the rovers and...)
there’s also that mountain russian gel ball thing that does a pretty decent job of absorbing kinetic energy and keeping people alive...although deaths do still occur.
You could also just send down tanks or whatever instead of infantry, or even missile launchers instead of anything intended for sustained operations.
Or all of these at the same time, just to make your enemy's life harder. The one thing that you _probably_ wouldn't want to do is throw aircraft in at the same time, since it's kinda pointless. Either you can justify sending in aircraft, in which case you won't need drop pods unless you're running short on more proper landing craft; or you can justify sending in drop pods, in which case there's probably no point in sending in reusable aerial assets until some time later.
In the immortal words of Max0r:
"i specced entirely into speed and mobility, making my character a flimsy, crack-addled spidermonkey."
(In the background image: faster. Faster. FASTER. FASTER!!!!)
Where's it from?
@@caav56 ua-cam.com/video/LKPYOfZpegc/v-deo.html
1:17 "...you cannot wait to get to wherever you're going."
In combat, there are certain times where if you wait to get to wherever you're going, you're going to be shot at. And no one wants to be shot at
At the same time, using drop pods implies that a: you have no forces on the ground, b: the enemy's anti-air/anti-ballistic defenses are very much active and c: you don't have any other way to address b without ground assault. This means that your deployed forces won't have any meaningful support, reinforcements, heavy weaponry or even air cover...
@@MoraFermi if you're smart enough, you can figure out how to make the pods so the troops can reconfigure the mass of the pod into weapons. That way even splats become potentially useful
@@MoraFermi airborne infantry started doing that during WWII
@@mowgli2071 military grade nanotechnology assemblers can change all sorts of things about warfare if you can figure out how to make them work.
Mostly drop troops like airborne, will not have time to stay where they land if your enemy knows where that is expect inbound artillery. Those that survive landing need to move as quickly as possible, this is why this tactic works best with something like Heinlien's Marauder suits, WH40K space Marine power armor, and HALOs Spartan armor, are ok but not as good mobility wise.
Extraction of drop troops if their mission does not involve securing a beach head and not removing a lot of atmospheric defenses is always going to be high risk as well.
Once a beach head is made by the drop troops and a section of sky is clear of significant AA then the shuttle's can land heavy equipment and more men.
@@jlokison that model always assumes that the dropship is following.
What I'm talking about takes chaos into account.
If the mass of your drop pod can be an asset after the drop, this can be useful in situations where the dropships are unexpectedly either delayed or destroyed.
This way if the drop ships come that's great. If they are rendered unavailable, that's not as good but there's still something available to be used
Extra orbital human lawn darts will always have a place near and dear to my heart
I always get the shakes before a drop. I’ve had the injections, of course, and hypnotic preparation, and it stands to reason that I can’t really be afraid. The ship’s psychiatrist has checked my brain waves and asked me silly questions while I was asleep and he tells me that it isn’t fear, it isn’t anything important-it’s just like the trembling of an eager race horse in the starting gate.
Let's go kill some BUGS!!!!!!
@@sethgilcrist8088 I'm from Buenos Aires and i say KILL 'EM ALL!
They use the classic Saiyan Landing System. It uses the planet's crust to gently bring your vehicle to a stop.
Lithobraking, Yay!
Lol.
Yeah, gentle for a creature that can take a pounding, and if they can't, they get stronger.
@@JainZar1 The fact there's a specific name for it makes me extremely uncomfortable.
@@AnesidoraAston It's just crashing with style.
@@AnesidoraAston Nerds playing Kerbal Space Program coined that term, it stems from Lithos, the Greek word for Stone.
Drop pods they are either bricks or slightly better parachutes. At least its not Section 8 where you drop from High Altitude low orbit with nothing but a suit of Power Armor.
That was a great game though
Wow I forgot about that game. Talk about a blast from the past.
Man
I can’t believe people remember section 8
... and land feet first on a planetary surface without breaking every bone in your lower body, you mean? :P
@@sigmacademy its pretty clear the soldiers in section 8 are incredibly cyberneticly enhanced. Might just be full on cyborgs with no organic body parts left. IE batou from GITS/matoko, who literaly jumped off a skyscraper onto a metal walking tank and proceded to shoot said tank. They also have nano bots. So pretty much any ammount of damage can be repaired.
I honestly spent the whole video smiling and outright laughing at the singing parts :-)
So damn glad I found this channel.
Also drop pods is just the concept of Paratroopers taken to the Nth degree, a bunch of lunatics jumping out of a perfectly (well mostly) good craft. It is so human it hurts.
Ha! You saying this just gave me the mental image of the ork version. Which i picture several smaller orks holding on to the back of a larger ork, and using him as a heat shield! Then when they get closer to the ground, they use jetpacks to get off the charred skeleton of the bigger one.
Drop pods as a delivery mechanism for primarily sentient organics is a desperate solution to be sure. But drop pods as a delivery method for vehicles and material - especially automated equipment such as drones - would be a very effective way to deploy assets behind enemy defenses with minimal exposure of soldiers to direct attack.
The first thing I thought of when I saw the title in the thumbnail to this video was was Undying Mercenaries.
They literally call their noobs "splats". And it's because of the drop pods
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within actually had a low-altitude variant known as "High-density gas." Several times throughout the movie, green bubbles of fog are fired downwards and then people/vehicles are dropped into them. The physics (like everything else in the movie) are dubious, but basically it's a gas that behaves like a gel for a few seconds after impact to cushion the fall, and then evaporates so it doesn't hinder whatever was dropped into it.
Dubious physics, but I like the idea.
Whoa, I haven't thought of that film in years. Thanks for the reference.
Yeah, I remember that movie (think it was the only FF movie I did see) and was very intrigued by that gas/gel. If you could manufacture something that did that it would make drops that much easier.
If you could adjust the dispersal time it could work pretty well as an anti-personel weapon also...🤔
Non-newtonian gas is interesting.
Drop pods, still a better landing option than de-orbiting an escape pod.
it's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop.
yah, without inertial dampening you end up with a repeat of poor Manéo Jung-Espinoza when he tried to transit the gate ring in The Expanse inside the power armor... its not the fall that kills you, its that sudden stop.
hmm I don't remember that part. I remember dude dying from overdosing on that juice that makes them able to take extreme G's though.
@@TheNitroG1 it's the big splat of the first guy trying to go through the ring
@@guitarfan01 His ship entered the ring at nearly 42km/s and decelerated to 0.6km/s in 5 seconds. Which essentially meant that he went from being a living human being to a smear on the forard bulkhead in about 1/10th of the time it takes you to blink.
So at least it was fast.
@@TheNitroG1 season 3, episode 7. Delta-V
Any physics equation with delta-(factor) tends to be lethal, Delta V, Delta P, the list goes on
I still think the Wh40k method is the best. Massive, overwhelming invasion so lots of targets. Armored and armed pods with incredibly durable super soldiers, further protected by inner pod systems and again protected by their own personal armor. Why slow down to car crash speed when your soldiers are built to walk away from greater than car crash speeds?
because that completely ignores what happens to your internal organs when you go from hundreds of miles per hour to stopped in less than a second...this is always the stupid thing about "power armor" protecting from a high fall, if you slam into the inside of it at 100 mph, your still dead. even if the power armor is skin tight, it's not going to stop your heart from exploding when it slams into your rib cage at 100mph. nor will your rib cage survive the crushing force of the rest of your body at that speed. There is literally no part of the human body able to take that. human pudding.
@@TheNitroG1 i think you misunderstand. Space marines are built to walk away from stuff like that with or without power armor
@@TheNitroG1 Exactly, that hang up is where I see Halo coming out on top of most sci-fi power armor tech. The Mjolnir Power Armor compensates for high speed impacts by 1. over pressurizing the wearer's body with a denser mix of gasses in the same way a diver does to prevent their bodies from liquifying. 2. The "gel layer" of the armor inflates to exert pressure on every part of the wearer's body to keep them together and to provide some external cushioning from an impact. 3. The armor "locks" it's joints in place to prevent the wearer's limbs from over extending and breaking, it's why Master Chief get's stuck in place in the beginning of Halo 3. In one of the Halo novels, Master Chief survives a very long fall and gets surrounded by enemies, and he has to weigh the risk of decompressing his armor and air supply and get nitrogen bubbles and "the bends" that might kill him to get up faster and stop the enemies from killing him first. He doesn't get up because it's too dangerous, and gets saved by other Spartans instead.
Mjolnir still can't survive a fall from orbit undamaged without assistance, such as a re-entry module, drop pod or in Halo 3's case a massive slab of ship plating, but it still makes more sense than other sci-fi troopers just being "built different". Spartans are built different too, with greater muscle mass, bone density, hardened nerves and ceramic-titanium coated bones, but that doesn't mean they get to just ignore the effects of hard deceleration.
@@comet.x you can’t stop physics my guy, no matter how well your built, nobody is walking away from a planetfall. Your innards will still rupture like a water balloon. Maybe from half the height of orbit, sure. But not full orbital drop.
@@TheNitroG1 40k drop pods use powerful rockets just before impact to slow down enough so the super human cargo can survive. Their bones are infused with super strong materials and their rib cage is one solid armored mass. Between their suits life support systems and their ability to repair and heal from even major organ damage in minutes, I think they'll be just fine :)
I must say, that the droppods in Titanfall were primarily used when there was no other alternative to intercept enemy ground forces in time, or if the ship was literally blowing up while you are running for the pods.
Also, don't they pump the occupant up with a cocktail of various drugs to reduce the effects of the drop on the human body?
@@Creeperboom60 I don't think that had to do with the drop pods, If you are talking about the TF2 scene where the pilot sticks you with a needle. Interestingly, the Forever War novel had ships guided by AI that would pull maneuvers at incredible G levels, starting at 25g in the early parts, and ending at 25,000g. The methods they used to keep the human passengers alive involved chambers full of a gel like fluid that would extend the impulse of the G-forces on the body to turn a 50g maneuver into only 5g's felt. Later on they would surgically alter human soldiers to be pumped full of a more refined fluid that would cushion the body's soft tissues even further, allowing thousands of G's to be withstood in conjunction with some of the first Sci-fi mentions of inertial compensation. Great book, it is incredibly overlooked compared to some other Sci-fi classics.
@@MUJUNKY No, the pod literally injects Cooper with various drugs, the pod AI did a checklist on him after landing.
If I remember correctly, the sansufentanyl was because it got knocked off course and crashed in a way it wasn't intended to
My favorite one that I have seen thus far was a series of pods which you would drop during the first volley to get ground scouts on the ground, mainly to set up beacons for targeting. Some were just bundles of rods from god to assault enemy positions, others were not so many rods from gods in which you would have a few scouts jump out of and perform high altitude sky diving.
Drop pods are cool, and would work provided you have a big retrograde thruster, which basically makes them Battletech Dropships. Alternatively, gavity magic!
Do not forget drop cocoons for mechs, drop pods for mechs.
Or the way the Imperium does it with their Titans, they get dropped from orbit inside their respective repair bays/bunkers. They essentially drop a Fortification, that has a Titan inside.
@@JainZar1 TIL
you still have to worry about the acceleration on your passengers though. doesn't do a whole lot of good if you have to start to slow down a few hundred feet off the ground where you are the easiest target. You can't just let them smash into the ground because...why even bother with the pod at that point. the whole point of the pod is to protect the passengers and by letting it slam into the ground you killed all of them.
battletech has drop cocoons for 'mechs.
i actually really enjoyed the math in the thermodynamics episode. You brought up a really valid point about how much heat is generated in space and how you would try to get rid of it. Prossibly ruining sci fi forever...
Drop Pods!
Fast way to turn your troops into smoothie
HALO (The Epidemy of Epicness (The Game))
The halo drop pods are basically escape pods. In this case, it's a good idea, because if your using them, you needed them apparently. You can't expect people to always be able to run to a ship and leave like that.
The HEVs and SOEOIVs were different from the escape craft on UNSC ships. Those were specifically designed to get ODSTs to the ground against human controlled worlds during the insurrection. They just tended to work pretty well against the Covenant depending upon how well dug in the Covenant forces were, so they hung around.
HALO allcaps is High Altitude, Low Opening
@@hellacoorinna9995 ah, sorry. Too hard to tell when someone is talking about HALO/HAHO jumps or the Halo games sometimes.
@@hellacoorinna9995 And drop pods fit the definition of HALO, even if the "opening" is the use of retro-thrust, or aero gel, or magic, or a high-speed compound parachute system.
@@hokutoulrik7345 Your, right, the escape pod thing wasn't exactly a drop pod, but crash landing pod is kind of close. I mean, they are soposed to come In on a diagonal, rather than straight down.
Huh...this going over of the entire premise honestly makes me feel that Halo's version is oddly...decent, when used against Covenant. While pioneered to strike against Insurrectionists (strong enough to steal and modify warships, be a serious stability threat, etc.), they would be far better suited against the Covenant. While computers are not impossible for the Covenant, they primarily don't use them except for ship-to-ship combat. Their aim is almost all manual. Even shows up in Halo 2, a sequence where there's a drop and Covenant AA attempts to shoot them down to little/no use.
The next is that it's designed to have a detachable air brake, and a (presumably powerful, because it can slow a fully-suited Spartan weighing nearly half a ton) retro-rocket system to help slow it for landing. They're apparently durable (maybe not reusable, but definitely sturdy, considering ODST has a couple of them literally bouncing once or twice off buildings/streets) but...yeah. Interesting.
I'm not too sure how well-suited Halo's version is as I'd hope it has some system to help negotiate the actual impact, but considering the Spartan armor is able to do high-altitude dives? Probably (hopefully) some measures of that got installed into their drop pods to allow some measure of comfort. At least less bruised tailbones...
even with computer targeting ODST aren't bad, intercepting something moving really fast, is really hard, and really expensive, against insurrectionists, they'd have the option to use their AA against the ODST, or save them for drop ships but they'd be unlikely to be able to do both, worst case, they expose the AA guns/missile battery and then those guns get hit by a missile best case, those guns are too busy dealing with missiles and the ODST get through, take them out and green light pelican drops.
so, basically a drop pod is just a way to fit a trooper entirely into his socks.
The only difference between a drop pod and an escape pod is you want to be seen in the escape pod. That said the simplest escape pod design comes from NASA, Basically a small backpack that deploys a heat shield backed by extruded foam around the astronauts back with a chute that's deployed when atmospheric friction drops the speed enough. I can see a slightly more advanced version for use with power armor deployed troops where it would also deploy chaff on the way down and skip the chute for the armors flight systems. Cheap and disposable with the possibility of being manufactured aboard ship. Another great video by the Great Guernsey of the Galaxy. ;-)
I love the supply demand curve, you went exactly where I was thinking, with that. As you where talking about drop pods I was thinking you needed to compare cost to casualty rate to determine if a given invasion could financially justify using expendable 1 man pods. I also think the end cases where the AAA is so high that your drop pod would need to be incredibly advanced to get through, neither is any shuttle, as it's a larger target, so invasion becomes much more a matter if the old school ww2 school of amphibious assault, where you just shell the shit out of your target area ans hope you busted up enough defences, then stand by with counter battery fire to take out anything you missed that shoots at your first wave. And most importantly, you better have a fuck ton of troops, because as you said, if you throw enough shit at the ground, something will make it through.
It depends on what you attack. If the AAA is good enough to shoot drop-pods in orbit then the ships delivering them would similarly be under fire. A drop-pod insertion would necessarily be done over an area where less AAA is available and these insertions would be designed in shutting down AAA and opening up the way for larger craft to be landed and an invasion to begin.
I would also like to add that 99% of all orbital defenses against invasions are done wrong. A good defense would have an in-depth defense, that means that at no point can the enemy destroy the space-based defenses without being engaged by the planetary defenses (missile installations, lasers, blasters, Ion cannons or whatever). If a 1+km space ship can carry enough energy to propel itself into orbit then a ground-based powerplant the size of our current one's would be able to power shields and anti-orbital weapons that make orbital bombardment a moot point. You would also never, ever end up in a situation where the enemy has cleared out everything in space and then start an invasion safely from orbit. Any planetary invasion would be a large scale operation where you have to deal with space-assets, orbital defenses and planetary defenses simultaneously the moment you start the engagement. This forces you to pick an orbital point where the least planetary installations can take a shot at you and then land troops that will have to take out the planetary defenses ASAP while their space-ships above them try to deal with the rest of the orbital and space-based defenses.
@@TheDemigans Very good points.
@@TheDemigans There are a few small problems with your analysis.
1. A massive ship is significantly better suited to absorb the damage any ground-based anti-space weaponry can dish out than a shuttle or a drop pod.
2. A planet has, of course the option to build even bigger weaponry than you can use on ships, but while the ships can use some ways to simply remove the heat generated (and before somebody argues about that, let's say the ship has a reservoir of sacrificial heat sinks, and when one is full, it gets thrown out, problem solved) the ground based weaponry has to be much more careful where it puts the waste heat or it will destroy it's own environment (a very good book series, Antares cycle from Michael McCollum places planetary defense centers under the ice caps, and they are worried that a strong attack will melt them).
3. The planet has the annoying tendency to be predictable. That means if you can't go in close with your ships, you capture a handy asteroid and throw it at the PDC. In wars where these kinds of weapons are used you tend to ignore the collateral damage to your opponent. Or, even more interesting, accelerate, from far out the system) as fast as you can, if possible to a single or even double digit percentage of c, space a few 100k blocks of steel with a guidance system and thrusters, and then brake down again.
individual drop pods make it much more difficult for the enemy to inflict significant casualties before they reach the ground.
drop ships however are much bigger and slower moving targets.
drop pods actually make a whole lot of sense if the concept is designed properly.
@@alfredkugler3043 counter to your first point, ships are also a lot slower moving and larger targets, also aircraft have a tough time being armored enough to take any significant damage especially if they are not designed to use the atmosphere to assist their flight. (thrusters instead of wings means you don't get much weight allowance.) so it seems much more effective to have lots of small, expendable, fast moving targets instead of giant slow moving expensive ones.
to the second point explosives is not the only way to launch something out of the atmosphere to attack something in space. Lasers for instance, hell there is a a real system being developed right now that is intending to throw things into orbit by spinning them at extremely high speeds and releasing at the precise right time. but lets say it generates a lot of heat...not like they can't build heat sinks that are hundreds of feet in the air or find a way to focus the heat from the previous shot into the next shot. I also think you vastly underestimate the amount of heat you would have to generate to melt the polar ice caps...it's kind of ridiculous I promise you we could launch space shuttles from there for months and not make a dent.
throwing an astriod was the strategy used in starship troopers against the earth, it generally wasn't very effective, only having succeeded one time out of hundreds of attempts because the humans had an advanced space stations that could track these objects and destroy them before they even got close. They also did this in the series "the expanse" but the only reason it worked was because they managed to cloak the asteroid until it was too late to stop it. Any species capable of space warfare is going to have technology to detect and track that sort of thing. look at air combat and radar, underwater combat and sonar, ground combat and sat tracking. if you are going to be effective in any arena of combat you have to be able to know when attacks are coming as soon as possible. Look at how many asteroids we track now and we haven't even colonized our own moon yet.
Even if their efficiency is dubious at times, I still love drop pods. Nothing screams human quite like “Hurl myself from orbit in a metal ball at breakneck speeds so I can kill things faster.”
Upside: most drop pods are already cube shaped or crushed after use.
Don't even need to waste time on squishing if left unattended.
As for the defense shield argument, it depends on what the shield actually stops. Some shielding technology might allow for broad spectrum defense (stopping multiple things at once), while other shielding systems might only stop things like lasers, projectiles or radiation. Another consideration is how your shield gets affected with each impact - does it weaken gradually based on intensity of an attack or the massed fired directed at it, or do you need to send a ground force to the surface to go and take out the power/field generator?
This is a very good point! I could see Drop Pods being rather useful in a setting like Dune with their speed-dependent shields, or even Star Wars, since they use different shields for energy and matter.
Yeah for most fans of Star Wars that I know that entire trilogy of books is still canon and one of the best trilogy of books from SW.
Quadrilogy...
Oh the drop pod. A.K.A. The self interring casket.
Sort of like paying for your burial in advance, and then taking an active role in doing the job before you are expired.
Throwing yourself at the ground and missing is the definition of orbit. The really hard part is getting to equilibrium with the gravity. If you can't do that, you have a decaying orbit. Or a drop pod.
Love the singing, but I don't know why you say we can't leave. We undocked two weeks ago. Have to come back though, still have problems with the warp drive. Everytime we engage it pulls to the second star on the right, and we can't stop till morning.
Ironically, I don't have 'drop pods' so much as 'drop bunkers'. They're attached to a craft that helps guide them to target and set down more or less level. They've got everything a squad of 20 soldiers would need for 1-2 weeks, including ammo, basic medical supplies and integrated anti-infantry defenses. Ideally, they're dropped in groups of a dozen with landing points arranged to secure an area and reinforce each other. With enough time, the bunkers can be interconnected and form a crude base or LZ for supplies. They're actually NOT intended to be dropped in a hot zone, but rather dropped away from AO and AA. The surface attack ship tries to offer screening fire as well. Atop the craft is a Dragonfly shuttle. While it can't lift the bunker, it can detach, the men can strap themselves to it in exosuits, and be extracted back to low orbit. It's not a FUN experience, and every trainee has to go through it to be drop qualified. Another version can drop a tank or industrial equipment like a combat dozer, which is basically just an armored dozer with an anti-personnel turret on top, to assist. Ironically, the biggest problems soldiers have with them is they rarely land level, and even though they have hydraulic legs to try to even things out, everything will eventually slide somewhere.
There's two other versions. One is a bare shell 'shelter' that is dropped for civilian and refugee use. They're not rated for combat, but do save lives if available in a crisis. The other is hazardous environment bunkers which have an airlock, magnetic anchors, and environmental support systems. They're twice the size of normal bunkers and usually not dropped into combat if at all possible. Dropping a hazardous bunker on a high G world (anything over 1.5g) is extremely difficult. Also, while they're never INTENDED to be used in combat, an enterprising officer or two has loaded them with explosives and dropped them as devastatingly unpredictable bombs.
... I love this idea. Nnnh I so want to use it but I don't want to steal it and become an ass XD
@@Nalothisal If it's a useful idea to your story, use it. Tell a better story.
Think Halo Wars had similiar concept with their bases
Thrawn's response to Coruscant having a double planetary shield {yes it's two shields, one above the other with only one opening at a time - like an airlock} was to cloak a bunch of asteroids, ferry them into Coruscant's gravity well and just drop them there so the shield couldn't be opened in case one got through.
Basically locking the entire planet away from its supplies as Coruscant couldn't supply its own populace it was that vastly overcrowded.
The Shield however was powerful enough to deflect Asteroids - The people on the ground just had to keep the shield in place as they didn't know how many Asteroids were up there.
-
In Rogue One Disney also had a planetary shield {though this one was only a single shield} and the Rebels had to either open it from the ground by insertion or destroy the machinery around the one actual gate in the shield to allow their ships to pass through that - They eventually managed the second scenario by causing a star destroyer to ram the machinery around the gate.
But most Star Wars planets don't actually have a full planetary shield - Hothbase for instance was protected by shield generators but the shield only extended a hundred kilometres or so from the base itself which was why the Imperials dropped AT-AT Walkers outside the Shield that could just walk through it {it's either the same type of Shield as Goa-uld have in Stargate that stops anything going above a certain speed OR it's not capable of reaching the ground although this second possibility makes you wonder why the Imperials wouldn't send TIE Fighters to fly below it as the AT-AT Walkers are taller than TIEs and nowhere near as fast}.
-
The Rogue Squadron books {not sure about the video games} had X-Wings flying below the Shields of Imperial Bases so maybe some shields did have this problem of providing an umbrella against bombardment but not actually reaching the ground.
Rogue One also had X-wings flying below shields.
At any rate, I think the thing with the AT-ATs was that they were slabs of armor on legs, so you have your transports fly them to just over the horizon, then they stand up and walk the rest of the way. This allows you to use non-repulsor vehicles & tech for the entire operation, thereby avoiding the effects of any anti-repulsor defenses that the enemy might have deployed. It also explains the height- every foot of height reduces the distance they have to travel before they can shoot at their target(s).
@@absalomdraconis In Rogue One the X-Wings flew through the opened gate in the Planetary Shield - Once they were through that gate of course they were flying under the shield....The point was to get them through the gate in the first place.
-
Star Wars: A New Hope and Empire never made any mention of "anti-repulsor defenses" - That's pure Fan theory with no evidence in the movies - I don't recall them mentioning Anti-Repulsor defenses in any of the 1990s/early 2000s {I stopped reading after Vector Prime} EU Novels either but even if they had been in those novels the X-Wing series was set 3-5 years after Empire anyway and Heir to the Empire was set 6 years after Empire, 5 after Jedi.....There's no reason to believe the Empire would have expected the Rebels to have Anti-Repulsor technology in Empire without evidence of such beforehand...This was still before the Rebel Cells had united {Rogue One retconned the Rebellion to being a fully united effort prior to A New Hope}.
The AT-ATs were specifically sent in outside the Shield to walk in BECAUSE the shield was there stopping bombardment from orbit BUT if the Shield was touching the ground rather than just providing an umbrella effect then the only way the AT-ATs could have walked through it would have been for it to be based on stopping anything moving faster than say 30 miles an hour - If it was an umbrella effect then TIEs which obviously move faster than 30 miles an hour would also be able to be dropped outside it and fly under it which would cause a major plot hole {they didn't give either explanation in the film so no it's not a plot hole, just something for fans to theorise about}.
TIEs would have destroyed the rebel speeders with ease, flying rings around them and TIE Bombers could have destroyed the base with ease too and would have got there far faster than the AT-AT Walkers which probably had a max speed of about 50 miles an hour....It certainly took them long enough not just to get through the shield but to get into range to shoot the shield generators.
@@franohmsford7548 My pet theory. The walkers are able to get through a shield because they are grounded, not because of speed. I seem to recall that is mentioned in one of the Legends books , but can't recall for certain. Other possibility, TIEs could have gotten under the shield, but if the interior volume was small enough, it would constrict their possible movement and make avoiding AA difficult. And the Rebels had X-wings ready to counter TIEs if that did happen. And X-wings( in old canon) are superior in atmospheric flight to TIEs, and definitely to the TIE Bombers. But the whole thing is kind of moot, because the way shields work in Star Wars is never really explained properly, and most descriptions are contradictory to others.
@@MandoWookie It's not about just being grounded vs just speed - It's just being grounded vs being grounded AND slow enough to get through.
That's my point - If grounded was all that was needed then TIEs can fly low to the ground.
The Rebel X-Wings were being used to fly guard duty alongside the fleeing transport ships - Luke's was left on the ground because Luke was in a speeded and he needed his X-Wing there to transfer to to get off planet himself.
The Imperials would have seen the Rebel ships fleeing guarded by X-Wings with time to send TIEs down if that had been a possibility....The Empire didn't bother sending TIEs to stop the fleeing rebel transports so those TIEs were available.
The Imperials knew the Rebels had been forewarned and were already fleeing so not trying to get the shields down as quickly as possible would have been yet another error on the Empire's part - Again this is evidence towards the idea that the Shield must have covered low enough to the ground that TIEs couldn't fly under it.
TIE Fighters are 29ft high - AT-ATs are 50ft high - That's a good 20 ft of clearance if the AT-ATs were able to go UNDER the shield rather than through it.
BUT WHY were the AT-ATs able to go through the Shield if TIEs weren't - Well the answer to that has to be speed - TIEs can't fly slow enough to pass through the shield whilst AT-ATs being walkers can easily slow down to 10, 5 or even 1 mph to pass through.
Remember that Lucas was inspired partly by Dune and Dune's shields are based on Speed - Specifically why Dune only uses hand to hand fighting.
@@franohmsford7548 I will buy that. When it comes to the X-wings though, the escorts I always assumed were to fend off TIEs while the ground based Ion Cannon cleared the road.
The reason for only 2 at a time would be to hold some back to counter air strikes, with the ion cannon doing the heavy lifting.
Edit to add: The TIEs likely could go slow enough, they can hover and maneuver to land after all, so speed can't be the sole reason.
Well we humies like to have the high ground and there’s no higher ground than space. On the other hand this can only be countered by also having the ultimate high ground, or if that is not an option make use of the ultimate low ground. Bunker down and sit it out, while harassing the enemies that step on your „desolate rock“ so much they either think it’s not worth it, or resort to „planet crackers“, which also could mean pushing big ass rocks down the gravity well, just out of spite!
Also if you think drop pods are bad, wait until you hear about „orbital drop tanks“!
Yes that is a concept, if you manage to squeeze in foot soldiers to establish a bridge head and the defense is suddenly confronted by lightly armored infantry tanks as well this may become even more messy, just how we like it! More guns, more DAKA! More DAKA, more better! And all that?
The biggest problem I have with "drop pods" is one of combat efficacy. By definition, the "drop pods" are going to be deployed where other means of transport are not feasible, so right into the fire. But this also means your soldiers will be deployed without any heavy weaponry, without any major supplies, without support, without air cover... just some guys and their guns.
Wouldn't it be far better to put some seekers and extra engines into these "pods" and sic them onto the known anti-air/anti-ballistic sites in order to make the theater safer for more useful means of transporting the troops -- and resupplying them -- down?
In 40k it is a common practice to sent a lot of droppods containing explosives or automatic weaponry to surprise the defenders. Also at least in halo they can send small vehicels or more equiptment in them. They are really just paratroppers. You send them in to either clear a specific objectiv (killing x) or to make first strikes against an enemy and weaken the defences or occupy their attention. And for that you don't necessary need any form of support. If you can live with the casualitys.
In Halo 2, there were ammo/weapon drop pods…so just drop extra supplies in extra pods.
I imagine they would be used together. The seekers would be priority target to the defenders and thus pull fire away from the drop pods. If the seekers kill some defenses, great. If not, well you now have troops on the ground to do what the seekers can't.
Also, who says you can't drop combat vehicles and supplies the same way you drop troops?
"by definition" not in the slightest. drop pods are used any time you need to quickly get something from ORBIT to the GROUND! that is the entire point of them. you seem to be stuck on "if you are using drop pods it's a last resort" when that is not at all how they would be used.
they are most closely related to paratroopers which if you notice were deployed often, behind enemy lines, without heavy weaponry, without major supplies, without support, without air cover...because they are not the main military force, they are special operations. but if you were using drop pods to get your entire army to the battlefield obviously you would drop 100s of thousands at the same time and with proper equipment and supplies to setup a forward base...otherwise why send them at all?
a drop pod passenger is going to be far better protected and armed because they have a vehicle. who would design a drop pod but not make it capable of carrying anything but basic weapons...that's stupid. HELL they could make it so the drop pod is equipped with weaponry so heavy it can't even be moved...it's literally moronic the way you are approaching this as though it is a last resort sending soldiers in their underwear. it completely ignores logic and military tactics.
If you want to strawman drop pods into being a fundamentally bad idea I guess I can't stop you...but you literally are pretending like there are rules for technology that doesn't exist...it's real dumb.
Also of note- there's no particular reason why you can't deploy e.g. _tanks_ with drop pods, it's really just an issue of building a big enough pod.
Further, for anyone that actually uses drop pods, you can be pretty certain that every drop is going to include a bunch of air-deployed missile launchers. Basically _everything_ that can be shoved into the drop is going to go within perhaps a minute of each other, simply because that increases the saturation of that target's defenses, maximizing the success rate of the drop.
"Could we put troops in a rail gun?" -- Humans, b/c why not?
"How good are your anti-air defenses?"
*laughs in Sprint/Spartan*
SCS is singing?
Just compress me to a cube now... I'd rather listen to the screeching of an X-wing
Love the content SCS, keep it up! 😇
It's all your fault.
@@SacredCowShipyards it can't be my fault, you don't do this for me...
Can we blame the minions instead? Or better yet, the trolls who think it's worth their time to leave a "nasty-gram"!
Oh I remember Gundam uses either wide sheets of metal( Gundam IBO), a ballute system or a drop pod for deployment of mobile suits. Though later UC Gundam series also use energy shielding to mitigate heat rentry. But the weird one is the reentry condom the RX-78-2 had( man that was weird).
Do not forgot early in the OYW in the UC how the Principality of Zeon used massive drop pods that held about 3 MS or various other vehicles. Then to add, the MS could actually be released in midair from those same pods.
The Gundam 00 one uses the GN particles that gundams uses for propulsion to protect them from reentry
2 problems with drop pods: 1) If you release an object from an orbiting craft it falls AT FIRST then, 1/2 an orbital period later it comes up ABOVE and behind YOU. So, it needs to de-orbit burn before it can fall.
2) one pod for every planet in the Universe? Nope. Every invasion would need its' to be specially designed for the gravity of that world, atmospheric makeup and state variables (Temp, Pressure, humidity, gas content), known hazards that will blow your forces around and out for the central LZ. Frankly, you'd need a meteorologist to plan the descent along with a physicist and a chemist at minimum. (Imagine if there is a single layer of Sulphur dioxide that will corrode pods and they pass through... look at Venus for how that works) Landing on a planet with then a combat capable cohesive unit that can establish a beach-head WITHOUT possibility of retreat? No ground side mission planner would want to send anybody into that. It is literally asking for a slaughter of your own troops.
To me droppods fill the same role as the classic paratrooper did furfill .. and if you tried to drop those over a well prepared AA well ... it wont be pretty ... But every defense takes time to gear up and having many many tiny humans in tiny flying coffins makes it actually quite hard to intercept all or even many of them especially if you are not prepared for something that crazy. Still ... splat or boom is the most likely outcome unless you employ a lot of breaking and or maneuvering ... or one of the trusters fail/gets damaged. But then .. you are in orbit all you need to clear an LZ is to toss down some rocks .. heavy rocks of course but meh if you can jump between star systems doing that shouldn't be that hard .. and once the LZ is clear why ride there so fast?
to get troops on the ground before enemy ground forces that would be too close to friendly units to target by orbital strikes can get to the freshly cleared LZ before your own guys get there
The role that airborne pro formed in theory.
In practice…..I can’t think of a single combat effective jump.
America never performed one, & in each case were they tried people died without even holding the ground they fell onto.
Drop pods. For when you tick both boxes on your preferred funeral funeral options.
Cremated and buried it is...
The most physics defying thing drop pods do is stop at the surface of the ground. Because even though there's a human inside, it's still basically a massive artillery round launched from orbit. This creates a few more problems.
The first of which is it'll destroy the drop zone. If the drop zone is an enemy you want destroyed this may be a good thing since you might take them out before the squishy even leaves the pod. But the problem is if you're deploying pods in groups, whoever hits the ground first is now on the receiving end of the artillery barrage consisting of all of his buddies landing.
The second problem is both artillery rounds and meteors create impact craters. That pod isn't going to stop *at* the ground. It'll keep going until it buries itself several feet *below* the ground. So the squishy's next problem after surviving the scariest ride ever is how to dig himself out of the literal coffin he's now in. Also he's going to want to do it quickly since otherwise what's the entire point of using a drop pod?
Which leads to the third problem of what's the way to move a large amount of dirt quickly? Explosives! The pod is going to need to be equipped with some sort of secondary explosive device to unbury the operator out of the hole they just buried themselves in. Which means more destruction and chaos.
All in all my opinion is the easiest way to make all of this work is to drop the pods without the squishies inside until everything at the target site is dead, and then send the squishies down in a shuttle or something. But then again that's just orbital bombardment followed by assault.
Helldivers hellpods solve this problem. The hellpod buries itself completely leaving only its rear end out of the ground where there is an armored hatch. The helldiver then crawls out of the pod from that hatch
20. Never forget that your weapon is made by the lowest bidder. Murphy's laws of Combat.
I think it was a GL comic scene that said the following: "Any crash you can walk away from is a good landing. Now let's see if I can still walk." There's some truth in the dark comedy, and it's easy to see why it would stick in your mind. It's hilariously awful. XD
Drop pods - It doesn't matter how much metal you wrap your human in, if the stop at the end causes all the internal organs to get squished into mush. Because when the pod stops, the organs of the person inside do not.
I'm going to be that guy:
Damping - reducing the severity of a shock or the amplitude of a wave
Dampening - making something damp/wet
Check the second definition of the second word.
@@SacredCowShipyards oh, i'm aware that the definiton of "to damp" has been added to the dictionary as the secondary definition of "to dampen". I just passionately disagree with it.
Don't blame me. I just download your linguistic files and go from there.
@@SacredCowShipyards lol, fair enough. I can tell you from experience that "from the files" is the worst way to learn a human language. I had the "pleasure" of being assigned Farsi by Uncle Sam...
People didn’t like your technical deep dive in the X-Wing episode? That’s the best part of these videos! The heavy shot of engineering end technical know-how is what makes this channel great. Along with the sass…
I like how in titanfall, the grunt drop pods literally have an automated medical system because they know someone is gonna get hurt in that drop pod. No, I'm not talking about the lifeboat at the start of the second game's campaign, i'm talking about the drop pods themselves. Their solution is to make as good of an effort at braking the pod as they can, and then treating the people inside as necessary after it does hit the ground. Talk about deliquifying your organs.
Still, not a "hard sci-fi" game and it probably wouldn't work, but it's cool. But, in their defense, they're usually deployed from the upper portions of the atmosphere rather than straight up from orbit.
07:45. "Intercepting things coming from orbit, at high speed is hard". Try throwing enough things in its path, and it becomes way easier. The only way you can bypass that, is with a pretty much instantaneous delivery to the surface of a planet from orbit.
Well, the trick then is making the "stuff" large enough to do anything.
There once a American general that said something along the lines of "jumping out a perfectly good air plane is a bad idea." His mind was later changed when the germans dropped troops on france
Some space emprie: makes super advanced and expensive drop pods to invade planets, with swarms of them overwhelming planetary defences.
Old shool flak anti air: So anynway I started blasting.
I can also see why some of the drop pod soldiers might feel kinda iffy about future missions, as well? :P
Asking how the Emperors drop pods work…..that’s some tech Hersey right there
The astartes drop pods are fueled by faith and rage
@@austinmorris3766 and that’s all we need to know.
my idea isnt drop pods. but drop ships.
Vehicles that come in free fall, dampen hard to touch down without issue, then abandon the site, destroy it, or use it. because we are no where near the ability to get the dropship back to the mother ship.
But wait! this is reality. so. launching a drop ship into or near orbit with a booster is possible. release the booster and maybe a ferring, let the drop ship freefall to the target, use dampening/retro thrusters to slow and land. then remaining fuel will be used just fine to fling itself into an ocean or allied territory. easier.
This is a continuation of the outmoded combat form of incertion that is paratroopers. Because during the Second World War paratroopers played an important role and have been idolized for the desperate battles they fought. So yes, scifi paratroopers.
The best "Drop Pod" would be a pair of Bolo M-XXX mounted tread to tread on their transit vessel. They come out of warp near atmosphere, drop through while killing anything that shoots back, and separate 100 meters up. Once on the ground, it's mostly over.
But that's not quite the same thing really.
If the invading army is using lithobraking, surrender immediately because whatever is about to crawl out of the impact crater didn't give a flying fuck about being hit in the face with a PLANET, so odds are good your guns won't do shit either!
I do like how the ODSTs acknowledge that their job is really dangerous. The nicknames of the drop pods are Coffins. Because if the burn in atmosphere they burn up like in a Viking funeral.
drop pods as a military tool should only be used for initial landings, this way a landing zone can be created to get the bulk of the troops down.
Drop Pods. When you Absolutely, Positively, HAVE to take somone else's stuff intact from orbit.
Yeah the supply and demand logistics for drop pods which technically applies to escape pods (one person) is a logistical nightmare, oddly enough if I recall some science fiction novels/tv/movies had this idea that drop pods were filled to the brim with a breathable liquid that would upon impact with the ground of a planet or moon would semi become a solid object until the hatch was opened and the liquid drained out.
that liquid thing sounds like it would do almost nothing to mitigate the damage. if it turns into a solid than it's no different than just smashing into the ground with no protection at all. it's the sudden deceleration that kills people not being crushed or something. if you go from several hundred miles an hour to stopped in less than a second...all your vital organs are going to slam into each other at several hundred miles an hour simply form inertia...also known as making people pudding.
as far as logistics though...I don't get the problem, it's like dropping smart bombs that don't explode. they are all going to end up relatively close to each other and it's up to the commanders to get the troops assembled. unless you are talking about building them...in that case you are assuming quite a bit. you can't say how difficult it would be to build something that is a fantasy to begin with...
40 years ago nobody could imagine we would all be able to have our own personal super computers (compared to their technology) in our pockets that connect us to the entire world. So it's invalid to claim that building drop pods would be prohibitively expensive or difficult. that's just now how mass production works. Building them in the first place means that they have already solved that problem as well so it's entirely moot.
The best sci fi sidestep I've seen to what acceleration and deceleration can do to human viscera is Haldeman's Forever War. Troopers are modified with a port that allows for their body cavities to be filled with something to that makes splatting less likely to happen while the lay in cushioned pods. This is all happening on a ship in deep space that is on autopilot evading enemy space drones. There is still a pretty gruesome effect of all this to one of the characters of the story. It's been a while since I read the book, so some details may not be exact. It really doesn't take a lot of force to scramble up a human being.
@@ericepperson8409 my point was that inside the drop pod there would be a fluid of honey-like viscosity that also allowed for breathing. That when impact with a solid surface of a planet or moon would act as the shock absorber while the user was totally fine ready to flip the hatch and deploy, regroup, establish F.O.B, establish main base, wage war. Except for those rare few whom had an allergy to it that they weren't aware of.
@@xyreniaofcthrayn1195 the physics still don’t work unless you do something to harden and support the entire internal organ structure of the occupant. Do you know how much force it takes to squish a liver? You can find out yourself by buying a a bag of chicken livers at the nearest grocery store. Breathing that liquid would at best help your lungs retain their shape for a fraction of a second longer before they exploded like a balloon filled with jello when they landed on your pelvis. The human body is not a single fully supported unit. It’s mostly a loose connection of tissues that are largely softer than the skeleton and sinew that manages to barely hold it altogether
The Sanheili said the humans were polite enough to drop a soldier pre packaged in their own coffin. I suppose thats one way to look at it, fail the assault and it doesn't smell as bad as normal after a few days. At least you are guaranteed a burial if you die because your pod air brakes fail...
A semi-guided headlong (well, footlong, but that sounds like a hot dog) plummet, with braking applied at low altitude so as to keep most of the descent fast and/or use a minimal amount of propellant for braking... well, it could work. In theory. But that's one of those crazy ideas like having a spaceship land on its tail: it'll never work in practice. (Laughs in SpaceX and/or DC-X.)
I was under the impression that at least in Halo, the idea was stealth. Its supposed to be the equivalent of a modern High Altitude Low Opening drop, except the pods were necessitated due to dropping from space rather than in the air.
They are tiny pods rather than big dropships and you're unlikely to see them due to their tiny size.
I think of times i've been to airshows where even large aircraft can easily slip from view and only reappear as they are passing over you.
From memory, ODSTs are not infantry. They're special forces.
Inertial dampening? Too many variables. (16 primary) The two better questions are, "How absolute is your stasis field, and how reliable is the off trigger?" ... Make that three questions. "And how small is your stasis field generator?" A drop pod within a pure stasis field becomes both artillery and invasion force in one. You could fire them ON the bunker until the shields go down and you're firing them INTO it. And the "rounds" that bounce off are just more invasion forces on the ground. Just set a longer field delay after impact. (There's that trigger question.)
However, very few sentients have developed pure stasis projection generators. On top of that, and thankfully, fewer who have managed to bring them down in sizes small enough to fit in a light star cruiser. Could you imagine a multi-use, stasis projecting, drop pod ship?! Make impact, drop crew stasis, project stasis over enemies, move into position, drop stasis one foe at a time and take prisoners.
Good rift, Chief.
(BTW- Having a ship reduced to a solid cube could also be called "destruction of evidence". ijs)
“How good is your intertial damping?” Suuuuuuper important question
What about the Titans from Titanfall? They make even less sense. Why would you literally throw a forty ton robot at the ground that might contain a person at such high speed that it can go from orbit to ground in two seconds?
I knew there was some method they were leaving out in W40K's Exterminatus optional arsenal? XD
Well, let's face it, if we start thinking too much about the logisitics of Titanfall, there are many, many issues, the cost of a replacement robot evey 5 min being the first one. The games were fun enough to ignore that for me though.
If I recall, they used the kind of drop pods that deploy early and let the cargo fend for itself, so it could be that the squishy-less versions rode the drop pods, braked hard as hell, and then just dropped to the ground.
@@amahashadow True. I just embrace the fun when I’m playing, but when you step back, it doesn’t really make sense.
@@SacredCowShipyards I don’t remember any drop pods from the campaign of Titanfall 2. To be fair, though, the only Titanfall we actively rode to the surface is relatively small, so maybe drop pods weren’t needed.
as Isaac said on this matter, if an alien walks out of the crater it just made from it's ballistic or superluminal impact with the surface of your planet, run and hope they don't notice you. if they can survive being the dinosaur ending impactor, it's a good bet everything you have will do nothing to them.
I always thought of drop pods in the same light as WW2 paratroopers, you use them as a first wave to preferably knock out AA and scout ground positions. Simi elite troops to get a slight advantage via intel and sabotage. Probably going to have a ridiculously high mortality rate but thats why they get paid more
"Drop pods are expensive coffins".
Tanks, planes, subs and space stations: We exist?
Usually drop pods get used when the AA is sufficient that shuttles have a 100 percent chance of getting blown up on approach, and you hope the drop pods will be to hard to hit, or that enough will make it to make the assault feasable.
Drop pods seem to be the sci-fi equivalent of paratroopers. Drop lots of troops in individual kits over a dispersed area with the hope that some or most of them get through. They first job of this initial wave of troopers would be to disable localized anti-space or anti-air defenses. With that job out of the way, you bring in your main force in dropships / shuttles (sci-fi equivalent of helicopters or landing craft).
10:34. Yes, there were planets in the Star Trek universe that had shields, but one of the films showed defense satellites around Earth being "deactivated", so we can assume that Earth had a mixed system at one point at least.
FUN FACT: several different kinds of "stargate"/sling systems were also shown. :/
Para troopers. Orbital drop shock troopers. Same concept, but different plans.
I always thought the idea of drop pods was silly for just the reasons you outlined. Before trying to put boots on the ground you would want to first use your orbital ships firepower and fighters for precision strikes to knock down as much of a planet's defenses as you could before calling in the Marines. Once you've done that you can bring down large troop transports safely with all the support they need, field hospitals, chow lines, and merry go rounds for the Air Force guys.
boy that assumes a lot...1 that you know where the enemy anti air is 2. that you are capable of destroying all of it from space 3. that a slow moving large vehicle with lots of soldiers in it is somehow less risky than 100s of thousands of individual fast moving small targets. You miss one soldier with a rocket launcher...well there goes 3rd platoon. 4. that along with the drop they would not be dropping any equipment or supplies which would be idiotic to deploy an army without equipment.
people are basing these assumptions on paratroopers but they are different in that they are a small force doing special operations. if you are dropping a whole army to a planet you are going to bomb the shit out of probably a 100 square mile area to land in, then drop everything including equipment as quickly as possible. Probably while also sending down close air support to protect them while they establish a forward base.
the concept of a drop pod is great, it's the technology required to make it survivable that is a little far fetched. but if the science of the universe says they solved that problem well then what is your problem with it?
@@TheNitroG1 I basically outlined our strategy during Gulf War 1. Spend months blasting them from above and then sending in the troops but instead of the ships being in water they’re in space. Its a systematic approach that to a planetary invasion.
"mostly people but not always just people" and shows a box-naught, Person+heavy equipment, this checks out
"Aircraft throw themselves at the ground and miss". I see what you did there.
Also, you left lasers out of the missile defense possibilities, even though those are being tested now and could work quite well.
the problem with lasers is in an atmosphere, you lose a lot of energy TO the atmosphere. best way to stop an orbital infantry assault would be for the lasers to be also in orbit. welcome to Reagan's Star Wars...
@@warhorse03826 True. I suppose that's arguably the problem with every weapon in atmosphere, especially against spacecraft. Probably just comes down to how advanced each piece of tech is, and whether the drop pod still needs a parachute.
It would also be heavily weather dependent, which means you could actually have a fun sort of counterplay where the attacker uses some kind of smoke bomb type thing to prevent the lasers from working well. Your comment has given me ideas, and I thank you for it.
@@RorikH well, here's an idea for you...tunneling electron guns. ionize the air before you fire the laser. it cuts back the atmospheric resistance by about half. it also looks really cool (in the lab anyway, that's the only place I've seen it done) it's like a lightning flash followed by a faint flash of whatever color the laser is. it turns the ionized air into a sort of conductive tube.
That...version...of Hotel California...may be the most terrifying thing I've heard this week
Drop pods aren’t just shaped like coffins, a lot of them will actually be coffins by the time they reach the ground. Forgot to factor in the price of coffins for the crew’s of downed drop ships against that of the drop coffins
In Starship Troopers the drop pods are used to get mobile infantry onto the ground to establish a beach head.
So the Jenkins verse on r/hfy actually has the inertial dampening technology of just manipulating time, most of the time it’s referred it to by the authors as stasis fields. But in the story before some alien race decides to try to contain us with a stellar shield they had built for protecting their systems. You had the galaxies nastiest bogeyman shoot themselves in drop pods with frozen time onto earth, in the middle of a hockey game.
Oh and by the way in this universe we are on The there shouldn’t be intelligent life side of high gravity according to the aliens, so the cybernetics enhanced Predators got beat to a literal pulp with hockey sticks after jumping out of the frozen time Drop pods. Yeah that event is why in that fictional universe the whole galaxy browned their pants and A rogue government decided to quarantine us until we kill ourselves off with a system shield. Us being the wackos we are we did find a way through it.
Jenkinsverse is hilarious and some of the writers are great at thinking through all the ways we would casually break almost everything we touched as a species
Even if you solve the physics problems of getting a human from orbit to surface without liquifying them, there are still major problems to overcome. Look at the major airborne operations of WW2. Of them, Operation Varsity was the most successful and it was not so much an assault as it was a supporting action: capture important crossroads to slow down enemy reinforcements from reaching the real assault (Operation Plunder, the crossing of the Rhine). They still suffered high casualties from AA. Modern mass para drops are done exclusively against targets with no opposition - even a token enemy ground force can inflict heavy casualties now that every soldier is capable of spraying bullets into the air at a rapid rate (eg. UA-cam video ID: UPAotqngBJc ).
Star trek... seems to have large scale planetary defenses? What they are _exactly_ never comes up, but various forms have been shown, from mines to shields to defense satellite grids, to etc, so core feddie planets probably have an array of different options that would need to be overcome, bypassed, or subverted. And even then, it would probably be more efficient and far safer to have unmanned pods that contained transporter beacons of some variety to allow bypassing of anti-transport measures...
Welp those germans put up barbed wire and metal blockades I guess Normandy is theirs permanently now.
wait...what are you even talking about drop pods aren't used in star trek...they transport or use shuttles...they don't need a beacon unless there is something causing signal interference.
Fun Fact: the reason transporters were created for star trek was because showing a ship landing on a planet was WAAAY out of budget initially.
@@TheNitroG1 i'm talking about drop pods as regards star trek because... it was mentioned in the video?
So, my understanding of how a drop pod COULD work is as follows:
Armored paratrooping.
Basically a protection mechanism for an inter-orbital paradrop.
It would likely have inbuilt disposable chaff and flare launchers, and one-time use thrusters to land it safely on the ground once it reaches a low altitude.
Only drop pods I've actually *liked* were the Basilisk droids from the Old Republic era in Star Wars :) Sure, they didn't make a lot of sense from a scientific standpoint, but Star Wars is basically space magic anyway and the Basilisks looked like they'd be a hell of a lot of fun to ride.
Watching UA-cam, and not wishing to learn more about maths?
HERESY!!
Pretty sure for the most part Star Trek didn't have planetary shields (beyond one or two the Enterprise came across, and those had... issues).
planetary shields: no!
starsystem shields: YES!
05:36. "how good is your drop pod's inertial dampeners?"
Well, if it prevents you from becoming a red-colored memory, the answer is: Good Enough, SIR! :P
First of all, I'm glad you decided to use my suggestion. I enjoyed this video very much. Now to the part where I play Devil's Advocate. To be fair, the universes where drop pods are a thing do flat out admit that they're suicidally dangerous. Only genetically enhanced super soldiers, such as the Astartes, or a volunteer force of unique crazies, such as the ODSTs, are deployed in this fashion. But here's the thing. When these things work, they work beautifully. Imagine you and your squad mates are manning a machine gun position and a giant metal box slams into the ground in the middle of you all with the force of an artillery strike. Assuming that doesn't kill you outright, you're gonna be out of it for at least a few seconds, giving the soldier or squad of soldiers who just stepped out of that box ample time to make sure you never get back up. Drop troops would basically be paratroopers on steroids.
Good episode, but I've never really understood the need for organic-occupied drop pods. If you can cross interstellar space, then your tech is advanced enough to field AI drones/soldiers, and none of your living people have to risk actual death.
I've also never understood the need for planetary invasions. If you already control orbital space (necessary for an invasion), you already control the planet. Just issue an ultimatum: "Surrender or we'll destroy you piece by piece until you do surrender." Start with defense installations and work up to population centers. At some point either the planet surrenders or resistance is beaten down to a negligible level.
Planetairy shields.
@@robertharris6092 Assuming it's possible to protect something as vast as a whole world, planetary shields stop drop pods and troop transports anyway.
D-line for Coruscant planetary shields: very high
Yuzhan'vong: How about if we just crash an entire fleet into it?
Wait, what?
I blame Robert Heinlein for drop pods as a concept.
I really like the Tyranids version of a drop pod, their mother ships are, basically, just giant space whales that randomly nut into the void and, because the universe is frigging huge, they have to eventually land somewhere.