Escape Pod

Trope-a-Day: Conveniently Close Planet

Posted by

Conveniently Close Planet: Averted.  This is also why Escape Pods are useless anywhere except planetary orbit and libration point habitat-clusters; even if you can leave your ship, there’s nowhere to go without another ship with about as much delta-v as your first ship.  And you can’t fit that into an escape pod.

(Since fusion reactors don’t explode and antimatter explodes Too Vigorously, there’s not much point in leaving the ship and hanging around in the same vicinity, which escape pods could theoretically do, vis-à-vis just hanging around the hulk.)

Trope Update: Escape Pod

Posted by

Original trope here; a comment left on the original posting of it was:

“Now you have me wondering about parentally-assisted pods: “Well, we have just enough emergency reserves to give this ship a delta-vee of 0.1 km/s… or we can use the same joules to give 10 km/s to an escape pod.”

That could conceivably be useful, if you have a way of dumping large amounts of KE into a pod without turning the occupants into strawberry jam.”

Interesting thought – and it probably could be done using their vector-control inertial dampers, although that’s a lot of systems to put into the pod, and if you don’t put them in the pod, the sort of thing you’d hate to rely on once the mother ship got all shot up.

But even then, even 10 km/s isn’t going to get you anywhere (even away from the AM explosion) very fast, except in situations where you’re already close enough to somewhere that they can, equally, get someone out there to help you in about the same time-frame, better equipped than the pod probably is.  (And if you aren’t, you might as well stick close to the resources, however damaged, that you have got; and if nothing else, that at least does include a bigger radar/thermal signature.)  So while I can see the possibility, I’m still not sure what it buys you, in practical terms.

Trope-a-Day: Escape Pod

Posted by

3

Escape Pod: Averted.  Fusion reactors don’t explode, they fizzle.  Antimatter reactors (well, really, the storage cryocels) do explode, but in general, there’s no way you’re going to get away from them fast enough in order to matter.  And unless you’re in orbit around a planet or co-orbiting with a habitat cluster (in which case there are almost certainly plenty of people around with small craft anyway), you’re not going to be able to get anywhere with the delta-v that can be packed into an escape pod, so you might as well stay with the hulk of your ship, however shot up it is and whatever resources it represents.  Escape pods are (mostly) pointless.

And even in the military scenario when you want to get to a different ship, Dodge for the getting out of, that’s what mindcasting is for.