I hadn't until these last two books. I did go over there at lunch and they did get one miniature in, but were expecting the rest tomorrow. Since then I did get an email from them saying my order was ready, so they might have come in after I stopped by at lunch.
(Semi)-Disposable drop pods are a thing, one of the Paradiso missions has you evacuating from the space station into drop pods, and a small, 4-man drop pod has been a part of the game since the beginning.
Still waiting on my book semi-patiently... Maybe I should have ordered it and the Beyond box separately.
I completely forgot about those folding paper drop pods. Alright, so reinforcements/counter-invasion by disposable drop pod should be a possible thing. But it's still probably more expensive than transporting a bunch of troops to the planet and having them take the elevator down. I mean, stations have that sort of emergency evacuation pod as a mandatory safety feature, and the station management probably complains about the cost the whole time the station is in operation. :) I did the same thing. :( Of course, I ordered from an online-store/distributor, which is probably adding another delay on top of that.
The difference is that the elevator is about a week's trip down, while taking a shuttle down is about 30 minutes-or-less (depending on relative orbital position). Why is the elevator so 'slow'? Well, first realize that it's 36,000km from the Geostationary Station on the elevator to the surface. Yes, about 6x Earth's radius. Then, even carbon nanotubes get into resonant failure modes if the train climbing the beanstalk exceeds about 300kph, which makes max speed up or down the elevator. So it's 120 hours from surface to GEO Station, and the same going back down. If your mission can spend a week dropping down (hey, more mission prep time is never a bad thing), cool. If not, though, you're taking the Aliens combat drop to work. And the station managers that do complain about them get thrown out the airlock when the lifeboats are actually needed. Hey, now, Titanic had all 16 lifeboats required by international law. The law had not been written when it was even conceivable that a passenger liner would sink that quickly, nor carry that many passengers. Now, of course, I think each side of a passenger liner is required to have enough lifeboats (rigid and inflatable combined) to handle 120% of passengers and crew. Personally, I hate being a passenger on a ship anymore. Was riding the ferry to Seattle once and caught myself looking for and mentally mapping the firefighting equipment...
Yep, the dreaded Titanic disaster comes to everyone's mind. That is a little part of history that most people never heard of. I too agree that the lifeboats should be able to cover more than the max amount of passengers that a large ship can handle. Plus splitting the placement on each side sounds logical to me. I'd be of the same mind to mentally map out what escape routes or equipment are in any given situation.
No, WHISPER - Mecha Miniatures, alone and with Wave 2, are the names. 45-60 mm sized, for use with 10 mm infantry, but also nice TAGs/robots in other scales.
