Dropship

The Quantradyne APOD-33 dropship was a terran aerospace transport, a heavily armored tactical craft equipped for both atmospheric and deep space flight. Designed by the Terran Confederacy and in service across the Koprulu sector, the dropship was built to carry anything from infantry to a siege tank into a hot zone with both safety and speed, and it remained a workhorse of terran forces well into the era of the Terran Dominion.

Design and capabilities#

The Quantradyne was a heavily armored tactical transport equipped for both atmospheric and deep space flight. It used twin engines fed by hypergolic tanks that produced a plasma exhaust, and those engines could shift their angles to control thrust. The craft was designed to carry a wide range of cargo, from squads of troops to a fully assembled siege tank, and it could deliver them by several means. Landings were usually carried out conventionally, with easy deployment through both aft and front ramps and a base that could descend from the ship, but soldiers could also rappel down using ropes. Side doors were fitted as well, and the dropship carried extraction fields and maglev lines for situations where the terrain was too difficult to land on. A dropship could also operate after being submerged.

Early experiments to arm dropships, including ordnance packages for an air-to-ground role, were abandoned in favor of maximizing payload capacity. Soldiers could still fire from the craft itself, such as from its bottom platform, and at least one captain, Jack Larimer, removed his dropship's side doors to make room for mounted weapons. The interior carried restraining bars for passengers and overhead racks for equipment. The dropship's power bus was compatible with the CMC-300 combat suit, allowing a wearer to jack in and view the craft's surroundings through its sensor system, with the image fed to the suit's HUD. Ammunition packs and stimulant dispensers were also featured.

The dropship had a number of shortcomings. It was difficult to maneuver, prone to mechanical failures, and far from comfortable, with an interior that ran uncomfortably hot, especially during re-entry. Cooling units and air scrubbers were installed to offset the heat. During the Guild Wars, dropships were apparently bereft of gravity accelerators, a deficiency that had been rectified by the time of the Great War. A single pilot could operate the craft, though a nav and comm console sat behind the pilot's seat. Each dropship also carried a signal booster that automatically rerouted the communications of ground forces in range to extend their reach, an involuntary process that left those forces unable to use long-range communications if the booster was damaged. Dropships were frequently attached to capital ships such as troopships and battlecruisers.

Service history#

Quantradynes were designed by the Terran Confederacy and were in use by 2480. The Colonial Fleet maintained high standards for its dropship pilots: its Preferred Experience Base required an applicant to hold both a combat pilot certification and a hot-zone certification before being granted access to a dropship. Police forces on Confederate worlds wealthy enough to afford them used dropships to ferry prisoners. After the fall of the Confederacy, the Terran Dominion maintained Quantradynes until at least 2503. Most were eventually converted into medivac dropships, the gunship-transports that combined troop carriage with a healing capability, though some unconverted dropships remained in service as late as 2511.