What would a 1/2 ton, KCr 100 Escape Pod consist of, capabilities wise?

MarcusIII

MarcusIII

Emperor Mongoose
It's 7 cubic meters in volume per person. So it would need 7 days food/water/air & waste elimination (waste can be jettisoned). Radio beacon. Inertial nav module that is constantly updated from the ship's nav computer until pod is launched so it automatically sets the best course for rescue. A small solid fuel motor with probably ~300 G seconds of burn = a reached speed of ~2.9 Km/sec.

Could you stuff anything else needed into that 7 cubic meters?
 
Absinthe said:
Needed; a first aid kit and survival gear. Appreciated; some kind of entertainment to distract the passengers from their situation.
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First aid stuff good idea. Drugs listed as common would be there too. Planetary survival gear? Probably not as any inhabited planet will see you rescued quickly or before planet fall. Uninhabited planets probably don't support human life so you are dead anyway. Pods on exploratory ships might have survival gear if surveying new inhabitable but not yet colonized planets.
 
Bare min.
The ability to make planet fall.
The ability to sustain one sophont alive for 8 weeks just within the pod, in a sitting position. This can be achieved with Fast Drug.
An RTG Radio beacon.
Something lightweight and deployable to make the cross section of the scape pod as large possible to be discoverable. Something like a solar sail but not quite a solar sail. Though anything that can reflect RADAR is probably just gonna be a solar sail.
First aid to stop bleeding and to tie off broken limbs.
 
agentwigggles said:
Though anything that can reflect RADAR is probably just gonna be a solar sail.
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One uses a radar reflector to make the apparent radar cross-section (RCS) much larger. These are just small metal objects designed to do that. We already have them. Here's a pic. They don't have to be large at all to make a huge RCS. This one is from a sailboat and it is about 18 inches across.


radar-reflector-1.webp
 
Yea but I was thinking making a a person appear on radar to be like a kilometer wide. We have to remember the extreme distances we're dealing with. We have to gather as much signal as possible and requires square area.
 
agentwigggles said:
Yea but I was thinking making a a person appear on radar to be like a kilometer wide. We have to remember the extreme distances we're dealing with. We have to gather as much signal as possible and requires square area.
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That's what this devise does. It blows up the apparent RCS to huge. Also, for very distant ships the beacon outdoes any solar sail you could pack as far as alerting ships system wide as to the presence of the pod
 
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The real test might be a misjump into an empty hex.


The starship on fire off the shoulder of Orion.

I watched magnetic beams glitter in the dark from the Tokamak reactor.

Sprinkler system droplets dousing flames, like tears in rain.

Time to evacuate.


IMG_LA-J163381502_2_1_NL5LM01C.jpg
 
KCr100 is quite a lot of money to be spending considering the default capsule is KCr20.

I would go m-drive rather than reaction drive. It requires a power plant but life support will need that anyway. A regular ship style plant (rather than the portable version) will be cheaper and less bulky. If you can refill it using water you can keep it going indefinitely. A thrust 1 M-Drive for such a small craft will be tiny and the power and fuel requirements minimal.

If you never leave the pod then Fast Drug is a must have and any other equipment is largely irrelevant.

If the expectation is to touch down then the pod should be useable as an emergency shelter. The survival kit on p109 would be a useful addition and quite cheap and compact. A field kit CSC p105 will fill in if you had to leave in your undies and provide spares otherwise. A bivvy bag will make the evenings far more comfortable and in less hostile environments allow sleeping outside the cramped pod. A small first aid kit for minor cuts some pain relief would be useful in case evacuation or landing is less smooth than anticipated. Metallised Survival blankets (like they give out to marathon runners) should cost Cr1 and can be used for additional warmth, light-duty shelters, carrying water or signalling.

Nice to haves:
A dedicated pocket computer with expert Survival-1 will easily repay its marginal cost. It can be charged from the pod, but some sort of compact human and/or solar powered recharger would be useful.
A light carbine with 100 rounds for hunting small game or providing semi-credible self defence (or signalling) could be constructed using the Field Guide for less than Cr150. Alternatively a bolt action small-bore rifle could be constructed that has greater range but is more bulky for Cr50 more. A single shot full-bore weapon (likely double barrel)could be even cheaper.
A self-inflating metallised mylar ballute could be deployed to massively increase the radar cross-section. This is probably only useful in space as even mild winds would soon shred it.

A beacon/communicator is probably the most essential item. Planetary range (to reach orbit) would be too cumbersome to be portable but it could be built into the pod. A hand held transceiver with 500km range could be used as a repeater if leaving the vicinity of the landing site was deemed necessary. The transceiver could be combined with the survival computer.
 
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