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Marines have Thunderhawk transporters and the Guard have Valkyrie Sky Talons for their vehicles. What picks up all the drop pods after they've been deployed and crashed onto a planet?

Thunderhawk Transports, with carrying slings.

No. Really.

Yep, done by the mortal serfs, servitors and/or green scouts and overseen by the Techmarines.

Failing that, the enemy might salvage it for scrap recycling or to display as trophies from a defeated enemy.

So we therefore must assume that each Battle Barge has to have at least one of this sort of transports inside, right?

How many pods can you simltaneously lift with a single THT? Trying to work out how long redeploying from a drop pod assault might take.. Lets consider an assault for a small Strike Force would be up to 4 pods in either config (deathstorm or regular), and around 15 minutes for launching from the ground to orbit

The ship would presumably carry (significantly) more drop pods than are required to deploy its full troop complement.

Otherwise they'd not be able to have any pods disabled once landed...

 tauist wrote:
How many pods can you simltaneously lift with a single THT?

I'd guess 2-4, depending on how careful they want to be with them. There's also the larger Lander:

Do you suppose each Barge has such a Lander?

But good point about the drop pod failure rate, that must exist also.. do we have any details regarding such a failure rate from existing lore?

Imperial Armour Volume 2 says that drop pods can be hundreds of years old (yawn), so presumably the loss rate is surprisingly low for seemingly expendable one-way glorified escape pods.

Hundreds of years old? Why it seems I've been way off base regarding the weathering & battle damage modelling on my pods..

Ah yes, myst be some snazzy STC tech indeed, robust af

 Lord Damocles wrote:
Imperial Armour Volume 2 says that drop pods can be hundreds of years old (yawn), so presumably the loss rate is surprisingly low for seemingly expendable one-way glorified escape pods.

Well, they are probably very salvageable, so even if one is knocked out it can likely be brought back into service fairly easily.

In addition, most enemies Space Marines face are thoroughly outclassed and losses likely very low in most engagements. The ones we see in the tabletop and major lore events are the minority when fighting major incursions and peer opponents.

One way to envision such robustness is to consider that perhaps only the engines & thrusters are considered to be the "pod", maybe the six pieces that constitute the sides of the pod are "disposable" in the sense that new sides can be installed to replace damaged ones, and that each barge has plenty of spare "sides" in their cargo bay

attached pict

Drop Pods are things designed not only for rapid atmospheric entry, but to survive well enough that even with their armour and enhanced physiology it’s precious cargo aren’t rendered to soup over the journey.

So they are clearly robust enough to be repaired, refuelled and reused time and time and time again.

But….one does have to wonder if those claimed to be hundreds, if not thousands, of years old are now Ships of Theseus. Reclaimed, repaired, relaunched so often that No Actual Original Parts remain.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Drop Pods are things designed not only for rapid atmospheric entry, but to survive well enough that even with their armour and enhanced physiology it’s precious cargo aren’t rendered to soup over the journey.

There's three things needed for the cargo to survive the drop

1) Space Marine Armour and enhanced physiology combined form some resilience (regular human without protective armour and proper musculature snap/break bones)
2) braking thrusters activate moments before impact to the surface
3) The protective harness which Marines tehter into acts as further shock absorver (again, the harness would be useless without the powered armour synergy)

my headcanon handwavium about it anyway..

Epic rulebook lists the Strike Cruiser carrying a company of marines deployable by drop pod, 20 vehicles of various types, 6 thunderhawks of various types and landing craft sufficient to transport any vehicles the 'hawks aren't configured to carry.
Barges were 3 companies, 60 vehicles, 9 thunderhawks and the rest pods and landing craft.
Personally I imagine they have tubes loaded up with stacked pods as well as the more durable troop carrying pods. Those stacked ones are full of consumables for marines to resupply from and would be salted over the battlefield or near key objectives.

Incidentally the rulebook has the marines being planetside 30 seconds after leaving the spacecraft. Which is a bit ambitious considering it takes a rocket roughly 8-9 minutes to get into low earth orbit...

beast_gts wrote:

 tauist wrote:
How many pods can you simltaneously lift with a single THT?

I'd guess 2-4, depending on how careful they want to be with them. There's also the larger Lander:

I thought about the larger Lander but nixed it because it requires vehicles to drive into the carrying arms

The_Real_Chris wrote:Epic rulebook lists the Strike Cruiser carrying a company of marines deployable by drop pod, 20 vehicles of various types, 6 thunderhawks of various types and landing craft sufficient to transport any vehicles the 'hawks aren't configured to carry.
Barges were 3 companies, 60 vehicles, 9 thunderhawks and the rest pods and landing craft.
Personally I imagine they have tubes loaded up with stacked pods as well as the more durable troop carrying pods. Those stacked ones are full of consumables for marines to resupply from and would be salted over the battlefield or near key objectives.

Incidentally the rulebook has the marines being planetside 30 seconds after leaving the spacecraft. Which is a bit ambitious considering it takes a rocket roughly 8-9 minutes to get into low earth orbit...

Strike Cruisers don't land ona planet as far as I know so they would have to have something to transport the pods back up to them.

I’d be surprised if a drop pod was recoverable considering the damage from atmospheric entry (bearing in mind there are planets with much more dense atmospheres than earth), the landing jets, impact, battle damage etc

But in old lore space marines didn’t leave combat gear behind so…….

A giant tube, like the things you get for collecting golf balls or tennis balls, descends from on high. Plop!

Well, they have to get their tanks back on the ship. So I imagine they use some sort of super-sized fork lift equivalent deplord via Thundercats or whatever to dig the pods out and haul them onto aircraft. The pods are supposedly landing within a somewhat limited area, so collecting them is probably just a matter of sending one forklift and a few aircraft down and having the forklift dig around.

How much can a marine lift? Thinking there might not be a need for a forklift, as long as stuff can be pulled apart into smaller pieces, two marines might be able to carry each piece into the transport (okay, maybe more than 2 for the largest thruster block..)

Was just looking at the Sokar, could you fit drop pod pieces through the center hatch?

I don't see why they'd need to do either- just land the dropship (Thunderhawk transporter or landing craft) over the drop pod, fix the mag-clamps, and blast off. Out pops the pod.

Sorry but I cannot unsee the divine STC-made modularity of the pod build anymore.. This is how I'll envision their storage from now on

EDIT: Just checked with my Valkyrie, assuming one could carry the longest 5 fins outside the cabin (with cables/ropes perhaps, tied to the fuselage),you could even transport a non-deathstorm drop pod with a valk in an emergency Would take more than one trip but hey.. desperate times..

But yeh, just mag-clamping to a dropped pod and tugging would be fastest, problem would just be, those doors have nothing to hold them up during ascent anymore (IIRC they are only held in place by disposable locking bolts?).. You'd need to tie up the doors against the structure somehow..

I can see the doors being secured with temporary bolts or something for recovery. After all, the tolerances involved in being used, and being recovered, are pretty different?

I would presume that, even with the veneration of ancient equipment, the Marines are still fairly practical and won't hesitate to abandon drop pods if they can't be recovered easily. The battle barge or strike cruiser probably has hundreds of them in storage. Of course it is preferred to get them back, but they're hardly exceedingly valuable.

But I imagine that 99% of the time it is perfectly safe to recover the pods. The planet has just been cleansed by the Marines after all. Gives the serfs something to do.

 tauist wrote:
One way to envision such robustness is to consider that perhaps only the engines & thrusters are considered to be the "pod", maybe the six pieces that constitute the sides of the pod are "disposable" in the sense that new sides can be installed to replace damaged ones, and that each barge has plenty of spare "sides" in their cargo bay

Funny, I imagine it the exact opposite way, doors and frame being pieces of solid metal being the part that is never changed while the engine tends to burn out on entry and it the only part completely refurbished/replaced after each drop (seeing it's also the only part you really don't want to stop working midway).

The_Real_Chris wrote:
Incidentally the rulebook has the marines being planetside 30 seconds after leaving the spacecraft. Which is a bit ambitious considering it takes a rocket roughly 8-9 minutes to get into low earth orbit...

Rockets work against the gravity. Pods are being pulled by it. Same difference as walking with/against treadmill. And Earth's gravity exerts massive force, just see how big the escape velocity is.

mrFickle wrote:
I’d be surprised if a drop pod was recoverable considering the damage from atmospheric entry (bearing in mind there are planets with much more dense atmospheres than earth), the landing jets, impact, battle damage etc

You are aware we have dozens of 'drop pod' like capsules right now that are perfectly reusable, right?

And actually, denser atmosphere would help as A) aerobraking and cooling would be far more efficient, B) falling pod would heat up less due to smaller compression gradient in front of it (which is what actually heats up stuff during reentry, the friction thing is a complete misconception). If anything, I'd bet main thing heating up the pods would be its own rocket engine plume, but that too was solved ages ago with various reentry protection schemes, from coatings/tiles to gas envelopes diverting heat away (which, incidentally, is stuff that protects the sides of rocket engine bells from melting, temperatures there being vastly greater than encountered during any reentry too).

 Grey Templar wrote:
I would presume that, even with the veneration of ancient equipment, the Marines are still fairly practical and won't hesitate to abandon drop pods if they can't be recovered easily. The battle barge or strike cruiser probably has hundreds of them in storage. Of course it is preferred to get them back, but they're hardly exceedingly valuable.

Eh, I can't see it being true. Would take way too much precious space. I'd bet at most 1.5 to 2x the amount of pods they usually use in mass insertion of the whole complement of the craft via pods (which typically isn't true seeing a lot of marines would use planes or teleportariums but is a margin usually done in these cases), so maybe 15 to 20 including dreadnought ones on a strike cruiser as taking more makes little sense, any mission catastrophic enough to have you not recover pods would usually end up with massive SM casualties too so the ship would go back to chapter planet for the company to be completely rebuilt.

Now, stuff like deathstorm drop pods might not be included in this number (being treated more as an expendable munitions than vehicles) but that can't be big number either as a decoys during landing and almost never as an artillery, which kind of makes sense seeing they would be far more expensive than a bombardment cannon shell for much lesser effect but a decoy/drop zone clearing duty would be a pretty useful mission profile ship artillery couldn't normally perform...

I was pretty sure that internal carrying capacity is not really the limiting factor in imperial craft

I wonder if the rhino chassis would be big enough to install some kind of rig for hauling drop pods? The land raider seems to big and valuable to make into a work horse. That would be a cool little conversion to make. Similar to the craneblade in the WIPs forum.

Drop pods are way too big for a rhino to carry around more than 1, even if you disassemble it and had a modified flatbed rhino.

The most recent Loremasters video on WH+ (which is about Thunderhawk gunships) explicitly mentions Astartes using Thunderhawks to get drop pods back on ships.