Ship's lockers and survival kits
Ship's lockers and survival kits (Standard equipment) posted in Equipment, Cybertech and Weapons forum comment posted by cobalt_phoenix| Author |
| Vault sounds better than citadel. The latter is a fortress and the former a place to keep one's valuables. These sorts of pods are definitely in the vault category. |
Citadel was probably used because the armor was intended to serve as a fortress against enemy fire. Remember that there is a part of modern ships known as a
forecastle, which was actually a wooden castle built on the ship's bow (there was also an aftercastle, though this term doesn't really remain in modern use). They don't build a castle there, and haven't for a very long time, but the term is still used. There was a lot of repetition in these sorts of terms between land, sea, and air (aircraft actually often use naval terms, even if the service didn't originate within a nation's navy).
Vault could work, but I would also say that citadel is just as good.
| Author |
| And as for their effectiveness, what else is there if there are no life pods at all? Jumping out in a space suit and hoping not to get shredded and cooked? |
Well, just going off of real-world naval designs, yes. Perhaps give the crew soft or hard e-suits that can be hooked into their general quarters positions, so they are supplied with air and power. If they get ejected, they will survive for long enough to hope for rescue. If their section is damaged and cut off from power, they can try to move through it.
In the real world, a warship (not a civilian vessel, but a military ship specifically) is equipped with a variety of survival gear, including life jackets, life preservers, and even very small life rafts (over-sized lift preservers that can hold about 6 people, but have open netting for their bottoms and floatation components at the top, so it can never really be turned upside-down). During battle, though, the safest place was always on board the warship, though, so warships tended to try everything they could to keep the ship afloat for as long as possible, with as much of the crew behind the armor plating as possible.
In space terms, I would think the same is basically true. You want to give the crew and passengers as much protection as possible, in case they get ejected from the ship (hence e-suits with at least a couple of hours of air), but lifepods aren't exactly the best thing on a warship. They take up space, which could have been used for something like more armor/defenses or point-defense weapons to help prevent the ship from getting hit in the first place. During combat, the use of very powerful weapons (like nukes, antimatter warheads, plasma bolts, and particle beams) would make the space dangerous enough that it would be hard to armor against accidental hits (I doubt anyone is going to intentionally target them as a general rule; criminals can collect them and hold them for ransom, and militaries tend to have a view of "they are just like me", even against enemy crews; besides, letting enemy crews live after giving them trouncing them could help kill the morale of the fleet).
I will point out, though, that the sort of protection needed to keep these sorts of things intact (along with their crews) is going to pretty much be the same as the protection needed by the main ship. Meters of armor, heavy shielding, etc. Since a lifepod is really only intended for a small number of people, you would need a lot of them, and each pod is probably going to have at least half of its mass devoted to armor. At that point, you have a lot of mass on your ship which really sits there and doesn't help the ship. It would likely be better to devote that to something which actively helps.
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