Drop Pods

An orbital drop pod is a reinforced closet with a drive in the back. It does two jobs. Fired from your ship it drops you onto the planet you are sitting over, so a crew does not have to land the whole hull to put people on the ground. Loaded into an assault pod tube it becomes a boarding weapon: the weapons officer throws it at another ship, and it cuts its own hole in their plating on the way in. Either way it is a one-way trip. Each pod fires once.

Getting one

Pods are printed, not crafted. They come off a protolathe once someone has researched Assault Pods, which sits under Shuttle Warfare Systems in the research tree alongside missiles and shields.

The advanced pod is what you want for a hostile world or a hot boarding action: it holds its own air and temperature, and it does not throw its hatch open the moment it stops moving. You choose when to be seen. Goon hulls have a pod aboard from the start.

Dropping onto a planet

Click the pod to bring up its control panel. Use it to open the doors, get in, and close them again. It will refuse to launch with the doors open. Then pick one of two launches:

• Random launch. Drops you on a random clear spot on the surface, never inside a cave.
• Directed launch. Puts you behind a targeting camera over the planet and lets you pick the tile.

The targeting view marks each tile green or red. It refuses walls and unmined rock, chasms and anything else with no floor, the cordoned-off ground past the planet's edge, and any tile with a megafauna standing on it. Everything else is fair game. A pod crushes what is under it.

Requirements, in short:

• The ship has to be sitting on a planet's tile, and that planet's surface has to be live. A planet that has been abandoned long enough to release its surface (see Planets) will not take a pod until a ship docks there and brings it back up.
• The pod has to be aboard the ship, closed, and unused.

Boarding another ship

Boarding needs three things aboard: a pod, an assault pod tube, and a weapons system to fire it from.

The tube is a machine built from a circuit board, and like every other ship weapon it has to be bolted against the outside of the hull, a tube buried in the middle of the ship has nothing to fire through. Multitool it onto the weapons system the same way you link a missile launcher; a tube that boots up next to a console links itself.

Then:

1. Someone climbs into the pod and seals the doors.
2. Someone else drags the sealed pod onto the tube and loads it. That takes a few seconds, and once it is racked the pod's own launch controls are locked out: the weapons officer owns the launch from here.
3. The weapons officer locks the target, enters the targeting camera, aims at a tile on the enemy hull, and hits Board.

The pod crosses the gap like a missile, punches through the plating where it lands, and comes to rest inside, leaving a hole behind it that the rest of the boarding party can use. It will cut through a double-thickness hull, and no further: it is a doorway, not a tunnel. Armoured plating that refuses to break. Outpost hulls, mostly. Stops the pod on the outside face instead.

The same rules that stop you shooting at people apply to boarding them, you cannot launch a pod in patrolled green space, and a tube reports itself safed when the zone forbids it.

Getting home

The pod is a one-shot. It stays where it lands and makes a serviceable shelter, but it will not fly again.

Plan the trip back before you launch:

• Link a quantum pad. Buffer a quantum pad with a multitool and use the multitool on the pod before launching. Once the pod is down, its Teleport button sends everything inside it (or, if the doors are open, everything on its tile) to that pad. It works exactly once, and the pad has to be powered and intact when you press it.
• Or have the ship collect you. The alternative is the ship coming to you and the pod crew walking to it. That costs nothing but time, and it is the usual answer when the whole crew went down together.

See Planets for what is waiting on the surface, Piloting for getting the ship into orbit over one, and Ship Combat for the fight that comes before a boarding action.