Not really. Far too much energy involved. Rough guesses for back-of-the-envelope calculations is that our Liu Xing is dropping in at ludicrous (maybe even plaid) speeds in proper orbital insertion manner. Supersonic until about 1km above the ground, and then a massive burn to stop without breaking the LX on impact. Dude inside probably weighs 100kg, and has at least that much more armor and whatnot. Let's call it 250kg, to include retro-rocket fuel. Kinetic Energy equals one-half the Mass times Velocity squared, and let's assume 500 m/s (~Mach 1.47) for round numbers. That's (0.5*250*500^2=) 31,250,000 joules that your retro-rockets need to burn. That's the energy of nearly 9kg of TNT, or about the impact force of the Navy's railgun. Yes, it's probably hot, but it's not likely to light anything on fire. Except maybe the LX's butt! Anything light enough to be easily ignited would be blown away before it got hot enough to light. Also, you can do wicked things with how you shape a rocket nozzle to extract every single bit of heat (ie, force) out of the thrust plume, which basically turns the rocket into a hurricane-force cold-gas thruster. Actually, here's a better comparison point: It's also about 4.5kg of C4 demolition bricks. half a satchel charge. You don't get too many flames after that kind of force. Hadn't read that yet. That would be different.
those AD pose make no sense, the guy can't hack before landing and can't jump up after landing so what the hell is he doing ? :p
Quick question: how does the velocity of the incoming LX (or any other jump troop for that matter) change as they’re coming in so that the troop doesn’t get knocked unconscious or go splat on the ground? Or having some other really bad thing happen; how does all that affect the human body? I imagine that it wouldn’t be comfortable.
A properly equipped and trained human can briefly survive 16 or so gees of acceleration, say the last two-three seconds before landing (plus the gees should be greatly reducing that last second, because you will break something hitting that hard). Then you need to spend a moment to reboot the brain (fancy term is called G-LOC, gee-induced loss of consciousness), but the human won't even recognize that they've been out. But no, it's NOT comfortable in the slightest. Imagine your worst plane flight ever, that one with so much turbulence you wanted to kiss the ground in thanks when you landed (yes, I've had one of those, I very nearly puked after I got out of the plane, thunderbumpers throwing the plane up and down several thousand feet at a time for the entire hour-long flight! ugh.). Then add people shooting at you, so you're jinking even harder than the turbulence was shaking. And all this time you're watching the ground get closer and closer, because you're in the usual 'skydiving' pose. About 5 seconds before you land, your airbrakes pop so that you swing feet-down. Then the retro-rockets fire and all the blood leaves your brain, rushing to your feet. Hopefully you strapped yourself in correctly, because when the straps cut into your crotch you do NOT want Little Scribbler underneath the strap (yes, that happened to a friend of mine, he went into the emergency parachute air dump and hit about 5x harder than normal. But it was better than another 20 seconds of having his nuts bearing his entire equipped weight! SLAM! Oh, hello, ground! And your brain will almost certainly slosh in your skull. Now you have that Concussion Headache (for those that haven't had the privilege, remember your worst hangover headache. Without the fun of the previous night's drinking!) Ok, you're down, now where is that rude person shooting at you before you landed?
Not bad but Liu Xing is spoiling the whole box for me. He has the typical hacker "In nomine Patris..." pose but this time the mini is floating in the air and blessing everyone on the battlefield. I find this extremely awkward. Also the female Zuyongs got their armour shrank in a strange way. I can't shake the feeling that's a totally different unit.
I would never see that in this pose but now - just great: "So I bless you all my beloved enemies" - kabooom! I like the IA Starter very much. The Daoying look so good that I can forgive her not to be the Hacker ;-) Mr. Lui indeed is the the optical downside, but I am okay with him too. I don´t like the open visor and the pose is a bit, hmm, not so perfect. Here I wish a more "impact" pose, he looks to heavy for that light swinging (blessing) pose. Just let me hack that thing befor I hit the ground here ... I notice a new visor on the MSR and a slighty new design here too. So with the Kanren Hacker we got a new combi rifle design ... the 3rd ?! They are changing weapon design more often than people returning clothes to zalando! Like the old shotgun more too. The female Zuyongs are fine (why not belly-free? ... just kidding;-) and the I like the Haidaos pose - hes watching the scene.
Hah, finally found a calculator to do some deceleration number-crunching, and a reference for how fast a typical military parachute falls (~7m/s). Yeah, 500m/s drop velocity at 1km altitude may be too fast to be survivable. Math works out to give a 16.66gee deceleration over 3 seconds. But if you stretch that out to 4 seconds, you're down to 12.5 gees (and landing at less than 7m/s). And that's much more survivable, at least from a gee-force perspective. I think. NASA's emergency gee limits are expressed strangely, I think we should be looking at the "Eyeballs Up" (relative to the heart) table, which works out to a limit of 4 gees over 4 seconds (reading logarithmic graphs is annoying). 'Eyeballs in' (which I think translates to 'prone relative to the gee forces') gives a limit of 11 gees over 4 seconds. I'm not sure I'd want to spend 4 seconds within 1km of the ground when people are shooting at me and I'm trying to hit my landing point! At least not without a lot of computer support for my jinking (aka 'drunkwalking'). This is why the Eldraeverse setting has the drop shuttles literally crash-landing, at the ragged edge of 'survivable by transhumans with massive preparation and padding'. In one combat drop (that I can't find right now, but know it's in the collected set called The Core War), two out of three troopers in the drop pod didn't survive landing. (Three-man fireteams, but each trooper has ~6 drones slaved to him, so total deployed strength is ~24 per pod landing)
Which dates to about 1980, so it's still a 200-year-old design by the time you get to Infinity's current working era. There are good reasons why you'd want a bullpup weapon (and several decent bullpup shotguns are currently in production!), the biggest one is overall length. When you're fighting in a city or other built-up area (factory, space station, etc), having a compact weapon is really useful. Though it does make magazine changes annoying, since it's much more natural to have your hands up like a boxer than putting one hand halfway up your forearm. Especially with the YJ drum mag on the shotgun, I think it's honestly a revolver type with detachable cylinders! Nah, he's got Limited AI autotargeting support. But that probably is why the Yuan-yuan are BS9. edited for grammar
I was very slightly disappointed with the IA starter, but it's grown on me. the Haidao is actually my favourite model in there, despite not being a huge fan of the concept art.
I knew I wasn't the only one. I really like the Hai Dao and I think the Liu Xing has one of the best of those AD poses. I do not like the Daoying sniper and I'm so tired of the ludicrous male/female HI size difference. Those female Zuyong are the size of Zhanshi and might be half the volume of the male Zuyong.
