The Nightstar Zoo

Yeah, I suppose both ends having to be TAD-free is a problem. You'd think the UNS would have some sort of emergency teraport location programmed into their everything. Somewhere far enough from anywhere that no one really cares what teraports there, just somewhere to hit if you have to get out immediately.

It's possible that they have some limits on that because they don't want someone commandeering a piece of their equipment and porting into high security areas. Because a terapod equipped to bypass TAD would be perfect for an infiltrator or rogue to use for that purpose. Or it could be a feature that hadn't or hasn't been implemented yet.

They would probably have to do it in two hops. First hop is to a random location to get out of jamming range. That way you can get your ultimate destination to authorize your inbound terraport through their TAD. Any such site will have one so an enemy can't just port there ahead of you and scrag the survivors.

If Paris can get a TAD exclusion painted for them, why not have the interstellar spacecraft association keep an exclusion zone somewhere? Authenticate with your membership number, and you can port straight into the garage.

The same thing could apply for the lifeboats.
However, with an entire battleplate worth of terapods going off all at once, I expect the facilities could be overloaded for a bit.

I'm thinking a better way to handle it would be similiar to how merchant traffic works.

There a presumably 6-8 major locations just outside earth's teraport exclusion zone where most merchant traffic arrives, with traffic control drones nearby to keep an eye on them.

And another 3-4 areas outside the exclusion zone for military traffic that doesn't just authenticate a jump straight in.

Just add one more area outside the exclusion zone as a lifeboat area, and seed the perimeter with drones.

If lifeboats show up that you want to rescue, send your own drones in, attach as limpets, and do a teraport with the drone's hardware to a more precise area inside the exclusion zone. Or start teraporting warships out to meet and rescue the lifeboats.

Remember that the terapods had been a recently-refitted afterthought, therefore not being thorougly tested or explored, and that, given these were battleplates, there wasn't very much if any expectation of the things ever being actually used. After all, everyone knows that a battleplate is indestructable...

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Forum weapon: das Überbug. Don't cross the timestreams.
"I've never yet seen a semicolon that could be trusted" - Patrick F. McManus

I'm just having a warm feeling inside at the inclusion in a popular work of lifepods with FTL drives. It's so simple. so brilliant, you'd think other sci-fi works would've thought of it. Maybe they have, but it's probably in books I haven't read; you never see that in movies or space-opera TV shows.

It's such a simple thing, a short-range, one-or-two-use FTL drive just to get the survivors of a spaceborne disaster within reasonable range of rescue. You aren't always going to be lucky enough to be close to a habitable planet when you have to evacuate, and if you're in or close to enemy territory, emergency hyperspace beacons are just an invitation to be captured, and in that case you'd better hope your captors are inclined to be kind (assuming they don't just use your pods for target practice). If you're not in enemy territory, but in deep interstellar space, those beacons had better have the range to reach help. If not, enjoy your slow death from starvation/dehydration/asphyxiation as your pod's emergency supplies and life support runs out.

Look how well it worked ow for Kathyrn and her fellow survivors. Yes rescue took longer than she would have liked because of the ever-present TADs, and she was stuck with a bullet wound in the back and hygiene-challenged crewmates for awhile. But without a teraport on that pod, well, she most likely wouldn't have made it out of the area of space where the Tunguska blew up. Even if the Pa'anuri left her pod's annie-plant alone she still faced that slow death I mentioned before.

And never mind rescue by the Toughs, they were too busy trying to keep their own ship and hides intact at the time.

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The MacNut
Artist and writer of The Vanguard, a space opera superhero comic.

This, plus the fact that there's a military bureaucracy with the population of modern India attempting to manage the new technology on a dozen or more facilities the size of Lower Manhattan (but only the population of Idaho Falls. But that's in each one...)

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Creator and Cartoonist, Schlock Mercenary

I remember this in the remade Battlestar Galactica ... sort of. When the Battlestar Pegasus was destroyed, they evacuated in FTL-equipped ships. But they weren't lifepods, exactly ... they were the Raptors, which were kind of like small transports/gunships/utility craft or whatever they needed them to be. In this case, FTL-equipped lifepods.

in most universes the FTL drive tend to be big, power hungry, or both. in others it requires an exclusion area around the jumping ship. all of these tend to limit them being put into pods.

This. The terraport is pretty much unique in that it's man-portable. In most situations any non-FTL lifeboats are pointless since you can install much more effective backup life systems on your main ship.

This. And I think it's most done that way because essentially unlimited FTL has far-reaching consequences for world-building, especially battle tactics. Many authors don't want to deal with it, preferring to confine FTL to a role of "move people from one local area to another, with all action happening in a confined space / time zone". Howard's unusual in having the guts to tackle the issues head-on.

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After 3 long, weaponless years, I became the wielder of the Doobie/Dobie gun!

I'm wondering what the optimal system would be, assuming the UNS fleet was able to efficiently implement it.

On one hand, we have the two-hop random location thing; on the other a direct negotiated teraport into the protected destination. When the hypernodes aren't jammed, the latter is probably better: A truly random location has a certain risk, and the enemy could follow before the terapod ports the second time (unless it's near instantaneous).

When the hypernodes are jammed, of course, the two hops are essential to get clear for contacting the destination's TAD.

You guys are thinking about this all wrong again.

If you're on The One Battleplate That Got Sunk, where's the safest place to be? Somewhere with a similar scale of emergency evacuation gear? Somewhere safe, controlled, impenetrable? Somewhere you can continue contributing to UNS objectives? Somewhere TAD can't ruin your day, from either end?

Step 1) Run/walljump like hell into Tunguska's emergency evac stations
Step 2) Emerge aboard the Popigai.

Terapods are for people who haven't invented the art of caging out. (Which to be fair, no-one had, back in the Zoojack days)

I guess with modern fabber technology, and the ease-of-installation for a terapod, I assumed that ALL UNS lifeboats were now terapods, and the Battleplate just had lifeboats installed for the first time after everyone else got some, because terapods would actually work in something that size, as opposed to previous lifeboat designs.

And if the order came down to install teraports on all current lifeboats in frigates, cruisers, and carriers throughout the fleet, that the order would also specify what destination the teraports should be pre-programmed for.... presumably an unused military exercise zone in the outer Sol system, outside the teraport denial zone. That would be the best place to dump a frigate's worth of survivors in a hurry if you needed to, there wouldn't be any TAD zones to argue with, and the rescuers or combat patrols would be right there anyway.

Naturally, if battleplate pods had the same design, they'd have the same destination set.

Of course, it's entirely possible that no-one ever seriously planned for an entire battleplate's worth of survivors to arrive simultanously. If they picked a different solar system, away from the jovian shipyards, first responders could easily have been overwhelmed.

Especially if doctrine called for first responders to be qualified as psychologists and incident report interviewers.... On a small scale disaster, that would allow for all survivors to be quickly comforted, placed in a stable enviroment, and solicited for useful information on what wrong and what the UNS needs to be worrying about right now.

and the UNS probably has the resources to make that work, for small scale disasters. I could easily see some bureaucratic idiot blocking assistance from armor squadrons, assault shuttles, and AI-managed terapedos, on the grounds that they weren't 'qualified' to help, and every battelplate survivor must wait to be rescued by a 'properly trained' rescue interview team.

The genius was making terraport interdiction possible otherwise the Schlockverse would have destroyed itself in a week. The fact that apparently you can track at least one jump helps a bit too.
Terraport cages have limits. Something big enough to take on a battleplate will likely have the juice to keep more than a dozen people from caging out.

Teraport interdiction had to be possible for the universe to continue: Receiverless, go-anywhere teleport makes for some very short and messy wars, and this was shown in the comic.

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