could be useful for planetary assults if you can disguise it as just metaors for stealth missions, on the flip side if its a drop assult like in 40k were heavily armored troops are popping out then it can be extremely useful for a deep strike to frick up a command center and wreak havoc on supply line
The spacecraft from which they drop would out-range anti-air missiles both in speed and altitude. Also, good luck getting a positive radar lock and being able to distinguish it from meteors like said. The speeds needed to maintain orbit also means that you get the spacecraft over/near the drop zone a lot faster, and you don't need to slow down to a safe jump speed like we do with paratroopers. Get your guys where they need to go faster, and at the same time, your ship is less vulnerable.
The spacecraft from which they drop would out-range anti-air missiles both in speed and altitude. Also, good luck getting a positive radar lock and being able to distinguish it from meteors like said. The speeds needed to maintain orbit also means that you get the spacecraft over/near the drop zone a lot faster, and you don't need to slow down to a safe jump speed like we do with paratroopers. Get your guys where they need to go faster, and at the same time, your ship is less vulnerable.
Not like meteors are an everyday thing, the signatures coming down are pods and will be shot down.
I think air superiority might be a prereq for safe insertion operations.
They already shoot down missiles with CIWS, they could shoot down these things too. Basically any unidentified object entering their airspace is blasted, meteor or not.
You have to worth more than the equivalent weight of warhead, that weight includes whatever it is needed to keep you alive from launch to extraction. Pod designed to ease the G force, fuel, med, living quarters, on top of your own body weight.
Drop pods have their use, but you're thinking too small. Why drop a platoon for some mid paratrooper shit when you can drop a battalion into a neighboring ally and do it properly.
With reusable SHL rockets, you can get anything up to a few hundred tons anywhere in the world in a couple of hours, for less cost than a cargo flight.
God I miss the superscience military concepts of the 40s-60s.
We used to get cool shit and now we get "look it's the same soldier as 30 years ago but with a stupid helmet"
God I miss the superscience military concepts of the 40s-60s.
We used to get cool shit and now we get "look it's the same soldier as 30 years ago but with a stupid helmet"
The idea has been resurrected under the USSF "Rocket Cargo Vanguard" program and already received hundreds of millions in funding last year. Purely humanitarian purposes. Definitely no plans for clowning on the VDV.
Drop pods have their use, but you're thinking too small. Why drop a platoon for some mid paratrooper shit when you can drop a battalion into a neighboring ally and do it properly.
With reusable SHL rockets, you can get anything up to a few hundred tons anywhere in the world in a couple of hours, for less cost than a cargo flight.
's images are from Astronautix iirc, there used to be an archive at modernmechanix.com but you'd have to use the internet archive to browse it now, if it was even archived.
Heres something a bit more grounded in reality but still got that "War OF THE FUTURE" vibe.
That 50+ ton payload includes heavy mechanized forces and cargo, which shores up the two core weaknesses of conventional paratroops - limited firepower and their inability to resupply as soon as the enemy AD network re-orients itself. Ballistic missile defense is a far tougher challenge than closing the airspace to cargo jets and helicopters.
Absurd cost, absurd capability and prestige value for a hegemonic superpower.
>hot and fast orbital entry >heavy payload >heavy mechanized forces and firepower >pack enough resupply to support sustained action in the drop zone
without trying to derail the thread over mechs, that pretty much describes battletech dropships
I never understood why battletech is so light on space ship navys. You would figure naval ship supremacy would be more important than mechs since they can intercept them in flight.
the warship was supreme up until ares conventions when people decided that ortillery was bad since it kept being used to commit genocide. amaris coup had the SLDF trying to liberate their own worlds so they wouldn't use it (while the republicans used it a lot), resulting in more ground battles. 1st and 2nd succ war had warships be the big boys again but those got whittled down and then eventually disappeared, ending up with space battles now being between only dropships and aerospace fighters, and while tech recovered eventually culturally it stayed.
as as previous poster said, gameplay is all about ground warefare. warships being dominant means that doesn't happen.
They go into pretty good detail about why they don't have a big presence in the majority of the setting. Long and short of it, there's not enough left among most of the major powers to risk using and losing them, or even letting people know you have them. Building more is out of the question because the companies with the expertise were all destroyed, their paperwork destroyed, even retiree engineers and surviving technicians assasinated in some cases. It got to the point in setting where at least one technical university was nuked in a "terrorist attack"(by AT&T) because someone found some CAD files for an older model ship in their archives.
Jump ships are generally forbidden to attack as are drop ships docked to said jump ship.
Also solar systems have zenith and nadir jump nodes and various other stable and unstable jump nodes. Rich planets are well defended by warships and aerospace fighters, but a lot of planets are lucky to have more than a few satellites.
Battletech uses drop pods for mechs all the time because dropships are much more expensive than mechs. Also if you have jump jets you can chance having no drop pod at all.
No, Halo ignores orbital mechanics. It's based on Aliens (based on Starship Troopers) and Starship Troopers the movie. You can't just drop straight down from orbit.
>Does orbital infantry insertion have any kind of practical usage/purpose?
No. Bombs and robots dropped from high altitude or orbit are useful, but sending in a small number of scattered, unsupported men with small arms and hand grenades will only result in those men getting surrounded and taken out. The ODST are a thing in the Halo games because they wanted to have WW2 but IN SPACE! like Star Wars and so many others. The FPS is a stagnant genre ill-adapted to modern war because there really isn't a whole lot you can do with a gun in modern war that wouldn't be better done with some other weapon. But a game about repairing and operating radar stations or tech support in a drone ops center isn't cool or exciting so we don't get those kinds of games.
To be fair, ODSTs were conceptualized for fighting against the space Taliban where you didn't want to go full war crimes with orbital bombardment but the setting has AI as either insanely expensive and short lived or very primitive so sending in killbots wasn't a great option either. The real problem with the ODST deployment system is that any sort of AA system is gonna swat them from the sky before they hit the ground unless they're deploying outside of it's engagement envelope and then why not just take a Pelican?
Not really, they are there primary for either secret squirrel shit (as stealthy as re-entry could be lol) and knocking out heavy AA to allow larger transports in since UNSC was loosing too many dropships to AA fire and that's like a whole squad gone and massive reduction in throwput at each loss. It's literally modern paratroopers but from higher up and faster going down
>but sending in a small number of scattered, unsupported men with small arms and hand grenades will only result in those men getting surrounded and taken out
Only if you use them like a moron and not as a recon, harassing and special force. War is not a video game where you count down enemy tickets.
>Bombard cities from orbit >Enemy is still fine because bunkers protect against literally everything including nuclear meteors >Enemy now has higher defender morale and an ethnic grudge to never surrender
There are practical reasons why your strategy is ineffective and as a bonus you're now a war criminal.
You can drop pod in troops anywhere, a bomb has to land on the target directly. Further, a target can conceivably be made more durable against bombardment than against infiltration or sabotage from the ground.
1 year ago
Anonymous
I disagree profoundly
a single infantryman, and a nuclear-tipped stealth cruise missile, have comparable logistics footprints when dropped from orbit.
only a lunatic would believe that 12 space men with rifles can achieve the same effect on target as 12 nuclear missiles.
1 year ago
Anonymous
>a single infantryman, and a nuclear-tipped stealth cruise missile, have comparable logistics footprints when dropped from orbit.
Because you say so in your fantasy world.
It makes sense if you have a hypersonic aircraft that is cruising really fast and really high and you really needed this airborne operation to start in 90minutes or less.
The pod would be to protect the paratroopers from 1000mph wind.
Otherwise it has the same drawback as an airborne operation where if you can land the aircraft it is safer to do that.
dropping something like a large cargo glider with a lot of troops seems more sensible as you quickly get a lot of men in one place, at least if infantry in general is usable in any way. an even more effective option is likely precision orbital bombardment though as it is much simpler and likely more effective
>paratroopers but many, many times more expensive >only use case is where normal paratroopers wouldn't be able to insert deep enough so they're even more risky to employ
no not really
>but many, many times more expensive
But are they really? Is an aerodynamic pod with a chute and braking rockets that much more expensive than a few dozen parachutes? Is a hypersonic glide aircraft that can't be shot down that much more expensive than a subsonic aircraft that can't get there in time and gets shot down with the loss of a crew of pilots, airmen and the paratroopers that didn't reach the drop zone?
Special ops shit, spy insertion, or during a very niche situation like during an active coordinated assault and you need some troops in certain areas to disrupt shit.
If you were trying to take a planet you had no forces on its kind of required unless you would want to risk a whole transport/war ship capable of shuttling on and off a planet.
yes. dropping in support for isolated groups and deployment of spec ops are two things that come to mind for the nearish future. however i doubt they'll be single-person pods for at least a while, and they'll require either dominance of the air, neutralization of things that could shoot them down, or be deployed alongside a lot of filler pods (maybe ones that deploy drones, or alongside missiles) to reduce losses.
of course, the single most useful ability for drop-pods isn't for dropping troops, but supplies.
Almost didn't bother to reply since the answer was so fricking obvious. But here we are. On /k/ of all places and nobody mentioned it yet. I saw this exact thread on tg and they got it in less than 10 replies.
The reason drop pods would be a core part of any hypothetical orbit to surface troop insertion is tømanyfold, but most importantlyfor the same main reason which prompted MIRV's development. Shooting down a Mach 15+ object is feasible only with missiles as it stands, which turn it into a simple numbers game. Can you outgun their gun? It would take a single missile to blow up 50 infantry troops on some kind of shuttle dropship, it would take 50 missiles to nail a dispersed swarm of drop pods. Even if they all impact within a minute their velocity would put them hundreds of meters apart in spacing. This figure can be skewed even further in the infantry's favor by deploy XX additional dumme drop pods that do not contain live soldiers.
The second advantage is speed. Big things slamming into lower altitude atmospheric densities might as well hit a brick wall if they move at 8k mph. They'll KABLOOWIE. A drop pod has better resistance and could more economically be produced as partly being composed of an outer single use shell of heat shielding material that sheds and ablate during reentry. Thirdly. Square cube law actually dictates that smaller objects are in fact straight up better and more efficient at using atmospheric resistance to aerobrake. So spreading a reentry load across several units is pretty smart if you aim for unpowered ballistic aerobreaking trajectories. Which you should. Any digital or remote system would be liable to be the target of enemy jamming and other e-warfare. Worst case they reveal which pods were dummies and which hold meat. Also, drop pods aren't as problematic g forces wise as some thing. Submerging in tissue-density breathable liquid inside the pop allow momentary 150-200g survival and continuous 30-45g. More if you add in stim
could be useful for planetary assults if you can disguise it as just metaors for stealth missions, on the flip side if its a drop assult like in 40k were heavily armored troops are popping out then it can be extremely useful for a deep strike to frick up a command center and wreak havoc on supply line
The spacecraft from which they drop would out-range anti-air missiles both in speed and altitude. Also, good luck getting a positive radar lock and being able to distinguish it from meteors like said. The speeds needed to maintain orbit also means that you get the spacecraft over/near the drop zone a lot faster, and you don't need to slow down to a safe jump speed like we do with paratroopers. Get your guys where they need to go faster, and at the same time, your ship is less vulnerable.
Not like meteors are an everyday thing, the signatures coming down are pods and will be shot down.
I think air superiority might be a prereq for safe insertion operations.
They already shoot down missiles with CIWS, they could shoot down these things too. Basically any unidentified object entering their airspace is blasted, meteor or not.
You have to worth more than the equivalent weight of warhead, that weight includes whatever it is needed to keep you alive from launch to extraction. Pod designed to ease the G force, fuel, med, living quarters, on top of your own body weight.
Drop pods have their use, but you're thinking too small. Why drop a platoon for some mid paratrooper shit when you can drop a battalion into a neighboring ally and do it properly.
With reusable SHL rockets, you can get anything up to a few hundred tons anywhere in the world in a couple of hours, for less cost than a cargo flight.
God I miss the superscience military concepts of the 40s-60s.
We used to get cool shit and now we get "look it's the same soldier as 30 years ago but with a stupid helmet"
Do you know how I can find more of these?
The idea has been resurrected under the USSF "Rocket Cargo Vanguard" program and already received hundreds of millions in funding last year. Purely humanitarian purposes. Definitely no plans for clowning on the VDV.
>hmmm this looks shitty must be AI art
>reverse image search
>"Air force illustrator" designed it by hand
even our mock ups are dogshit now
Obligatory not him, but
's images are from Astronautix iirc, there used to be an archive at modernmechanix.com but you'd have to use the internet archive to browse it now, if it was even archived.
Heres something a bit more grounded in reality but still got that "War OF THE FUTURE" vibe.
>Integrated claymore mine skirt
Nice
That 50+ ton payload includes heavy mechanized forces and cargo, which shores up the two core weaknesses of conventional paratroops - limited firepower and their inability to resupply as soon as the enemy AD network re-orients itself. Ballistic missile defense is a far tougher challenge than closing the airspace to cargo jets and helicopters.
Absurd cost, absurd capability and prestige value for a hegemonic superpower.
>hot and fast orbital entry
>heavy payload
>heavy mechanized forces and firepower
>pack enough resupply to support sustained action in the drop zone
without trying to derail the thread over mechs, that pretty much describes battletech dropships
I never understood why battletech is so light on space ship navys. You would figure naval ship supremacy would be more important than mechs since they can intercept them in flight.
Lore is a lot heavier on space stuff, but gameplay is about big stompy mechs, so it focuses on them.
the warship was supreme up until ares conventions when people decided that ortillery was bad since it kept being used to commit genocide. amaris coup had the SLDF trying to liberate their own worlds so they wouldn't use it (while the republicans used it a lot), resulting in more ground battles. 1st and 2nd succ war had warships be the big boys again but those got whittled down and then eventually disappeared, ending up with space battles now being between only dropships and aerospace fighters, and while tech recovered eventually culturally it stayed.
as as previous poster said, gameplay is all about ground warefare. warships being dominant means that doesn't happen.
They go into pretty good detail about why they don't have a big presence in the majority of the setting. Long and short of it, there's not enough left among most of the major powers to risk using and losing them, or even letting people know you have them. Building more is out of the question because the companies with the expertise were all destroyed, their paperwork destroyed, even retiree engineers and surviving technicians assasinated in some cases. It got to the point in setting where at least one technical university was nuked in a "terrorist attack"(by AT&T) because someone found some CAD files for an older model ship in their archives.
Jump ships are generally forbidden to attack as are drop ships docked to said jump ship.
Also solar systems have zenith and nadir jump nodes and various other stable and unstable jump nodes. Rich planets are well defended by warships and aerospace fighters, but a lot of planets are lucky to have more than a few satellites.
Battletech uses drop pods for mechs all the time because dropships are much more expensive than mechs. Also if you have jump jets you can chance having no drop pod at all.
Stoke Space's upper stage is similar to that, albeit smaller.
Damn how many space startups are there. But also neat.
Estronaut did a tour of their facility a while ago, their design is pretty interesting. Particularly the regeneratively cooled heatshield.
I fully believe that tactical dropships will be the ultimate tank replacement in the future
No, Halo ignores orbital mechanics. It's based on Aliens (based on Starship Troopers) and Starship Troopers the movie. You can't just drop straight down from orbit.
You can drop VDV from space? Da, very intradasting, very intradasting.
>Does orbital infantry insertion have any kind of practical usage/purpose?
No. Bombs and robots dropped from high altitude or orbit are useful, but sending in a small number of scattered, unsupported men with small arms and hand grenades will only result in those men getting surrounded and taken out. The ODST are a thing in the Halo games because they wanted to have WW2 but IN SPACE! like Star Wars and so many others. The FPS is a stagnant genre ill-adapted to modern war because there really isn't a whole lot you can do with a gun in modern war that wouldn't be better done with some other weapon. But a game about repairing and operating radar stations or tech support in a drone ops center isn't cool or exciting so we don't get those kinds of games.
To be fair, ODSTs were conceptualized for fighting against the space Taliban where you didn't want to go full war crimes with orbital bombardment but the setting has AI as either insanely expensive and short lived or very primitive so sending in killbots wasn't a great option either. The real problem with the ODST deployment system is that any sort of AA system is gonna swat them from the sky before they hit the ground unless they're deploying outside of it's engagement envelope and then why not just take a Pelican?
Not really, they are there primary for either secret squirrel shit (as stealthy as re-entry could be lol) and knocking out heavy AA to allow larger transports in since UNSC was loosing too many dropships to AA fire and that's like a whole squad gone and massive reduction in throwput at each loss. It's literally modern paratroopers but from higher up and faster going down
>but sending in a small number of scattered, unsupported men with small arms and hand grenades will only result in those men getting surrounded and taken out
Only if you use them like a moron and not as a recon, harassing and special force. War is not a video game where you count down enemy tickets.
Interplanetary warfare is limited by the observation that orbital bombardment is usually enough.
>Bombard cities from orbit
>Enemy is still fine because bunkers protect against literally everything including nuclear meteors
>Enemy now has higher defender morale and an ethnic grudge to never surrender
There are practical reasons why your strategy is ineffective and as a bonus you're now a war criminal.
>conventional warfare is confined to strategically important civilian-inhabited locations
Orbital bombardment wins.
I'm sure you'll take the colony of 20,000 in two weeks of bombardment.
Don't need to. It'll be the marine's problem after the navy has gotten them there and will protect them from any relief efforts.
You just drop troops to take out ground to space supergun emplacements to make your bombardments cheaper.
>You just drop troops to take out ground to space supergun emplacements
why wouldn't you just drop bombs instead
You can drop pod in troops anywhere, a bomb has to land on the target directly. Further, a target can conceivably be made more durable against bombardment than against infiltration or sabotage from the ground.
I disagree profoundly
a single infantryman, and a nuclear-tipped stealth cruise missile, have comparable logistics footprints when dropped from orbit.
only a lunatic would believe that 12 space men with rifles can achieve the same effect on target as 12 nuclear missiles.
>a single infantryman, and a nuclear-tipped stealth cruise missile, have comparable logistics footprints when dropped from orbit.
Because you say so in your fantasy world.
It makes sense if you have a hypersonic aircraft that is cruising really fast and really high and you really needed this airborne operation to start in 90minutes or less.
The pod would be to protect the paratroopers from 1000mph wind.
Otherwise it has the same drawback as an airborne operation where if you can land the aircraft it is safer to do that.
dropping something like a large cargo glider with a lot of troops seems more sensible as you quickly get a lot of men in one place, at least if infantry in general is usable in any way. an even more effective option is likely precision orbital bombardment though as it is much simpler and likely more effective
>paratroopers but many, many times more expensive
>only use case is where normal paratroopers wouldn't be able to insert deep enough so they're even more risky to employ
no not really
>but many, many times more expensive
But are they really? Is an aerodynamic pod with a chute and braking rockets that much more expensive than a few dozen parachutes? Is a hypersonic glide aircraft that can't be shot down that much more expensive than a subsonic aircraft that can't get there in time and gets shot down with the loss of a crew of pilots, airmen and the paratroopers that didn't reach the drop zone?
Just launch them from cannons
On earth, there would be no advantage over airborne paratroopers.
The pods themselves would be too expensive to build and deploy at scale.
Special ops shit, spy insertion, or during a very niche situation like during an active coordinated assault and you need some troops in certain areas to disrupt shit.
If you were trying to take a planet you had no forces on its kind of required unless you would want to risk a whole transport/war ship capable of shuttling on and off a planet.
For drop pods? No. A one-way trip to a planetary insertion that can't offer support or supply is a good way to get your troops VDV'd.
For dropships, yes, since they're basically trans-atmospheric helicopters.
Clearing landing zones or ground to orbital defences/sensors/communications for your invasion force
yes. dropping in support for isolated groups and deployment of spec ops are two things that come to mind for the nearish future. however i doubt they'll be single-person pods for at least a while, and they'll require either dominance of the air, neutralization of things that could shoot them down, or be deployed alongside a lot of filler pods (maybe ones that deploy drones, or alongside missiles) to reduce losses.
of course, the single most useful ability for drop-pods isn't for dropping troops, but supplies.
Almost didn't bother to reply since the answer was so fricking obvious. But here we are. On /k/ of all places and nobody mentioned it yet. I saw this exact thread on tg and they got it in less than 10 replies.
The reason drop pods would be a core part of any hypothetical orbit to surface troop insertion is tømanyfold, but most importantlyfor the same main reason which prompted MIRV's development. Shooting down a Mach 15+ object is feasible only with missiles as it stands, which turn it into a simple numbers game. Can you outgun their gun? It would take a single missile to blow up 50 infantry troops on some kind of shuttle dropship, it would take 50 missiles to nail a dispersed swarm of drop pods. Even if they all impact within a minute their velocity would put them hundreds of meters apart in spacing. This figure can be skewed even further in the infantry's favor by deploy XX additional dumme drop pods that do not contain live soldiers.
The second advantage is speed. Big things slamming into lower altitude atmospheric densities might as well hit a brick wall if they move at 8k mph. They'll KABLOOWIE. A drop pod has better resistance and could more economically be produced as partly being composed of an outer single use shell of heat shielding material that sheds and ablate during reentry. Thirdly. Square cube law actually dictates that smaller objects are in fact straight up better and more efficient at using atmospheric resistance to aerobrake. So spreading a reentry load across several units is pretty smart if you aim for unpowered ballistic aerobreaking trajectories. Which you should. Any digital or remote system would be liable to be the target of enemy jamming and other e-warfare. Worst case they reveal which pods were dummies and which hold meat. Also, drop pods aren't as problematic g forces wise as some thing. Submerging in tissue-density breathable liquid inside the pop allow momentary 150-200g survival and continuous 30-45g. More if you add in stim
yes, it distracts the enemy and draws their fire thus wasting their ammo
>Does orbital infantry insertion have any kind of practical usage/purpose?
Anti-Smurf combat duties
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUSTAIN_(military)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOOSE