I am genuinely surprised that a drop pod is actually feasible. It would be a hell of a thing for thrillseekers with a hundred million in the bank.

I imagine it would take a certain type of crazy for one to willingly use one of these in real life.

My uncle used to work at an AFB as a civilian contractor. He has a broken space shuttle tile on his mantle. It's his prize possession. He's very proud.

If nothing else then having escape pods on the next space station that can re-enter the atmosphere and land would be of tremendous use.

My fiancé and I were having this discussion yesterday. We both love Halo, and the idea of Drop Pods has been a great talking point. I can't wait to watch this with her; I know she'll be grinning ear to ear

Has anyone noticed masterchief only uses a drop pod once in the entire game series? My head Canon is that putting spartans in drop pods is frowned upon because they're inherently risky. In halo 2 the only reason chief uses one is for a very critical assassination mission. Cortana also sounds anxious af when she says "mind the bump".

Tiny correction: Crew Dragon has seats for four people, not three (technically it even has space for seven). Also, it has the SuperDraco thrusters on it's sides which in theory would be sufficient to land the capsule. That was the original plan, but NASA took issue with this and now the use parachutes.

There is one thing you missed. When they enter the drop pod, they in a stand up position. When they land, they are in a semi sitting position. So, the chair acts as a extra level of slowing down instant deceleration. Think of it like the air ride seats in a Semi-truck.

We already have a drop pod just look at the Dragon capsule all you have to do is scale it down for one person. Starship gets up and running I have no doubt the military will probably want a military version of it, and before long you are actually going to get Halo style drop pods

Regarding military applications, the US looked into stuff like this back when Starship Troopers was in the limelight (for those who dont know, they have a similar entry method) but I think it was deemed too expensive at the time.

I’ve always wanted an ODST game, ala MOH airborne where you drop in every level and complete sandbox objectives in any order. Set during Covenant war there would also be flashback missions vs Insurrectionists.

As a former Paratrooper and Jumpmaster.. hell yeah, Army Orbital Airborne needs to be a real thing xD (Wheels up in 18 hours? More like boots on the ground anywhere in less than 8!)

Outside that one H2 cutscene, do we ever see drop pods actually fire these retrorockets? In H2A, they are conspicuously absent. I don't think they're really there and the pod just hits the ground hard.

My mom isn't a space or moon landing believer and rants about how fake it is when I try to say anything about it, this video makes me so happy

Constructing the pod that could land as fast and hard as in the games would be the biggest obstacle. Even with crumple zones, the games show the pods hitting the ground at what looks like at least highway speeds.

I would absolutely volunteer to test this! As long as my family gets compensation for my untimely demise.

The lack of odst focused content (games, books etc) is criminal. Easily my favourite part of the entire halo universe

2 things I can add. A. Most drops we have seen in Halo so far in Halo usually have the launching vessel hold exact position above ground instead of orbiting the planet, which eliminates the huge differences in orbital and sub-sonic velocities that are one of the main causes for reentry heating. Basically, every ODST drop so far has been more akin to a Felix Baumgartner jump than an Apollo/Artemis return. B. Space X recently announced that they sent NASA plans on how to convert the 4-man Dragon capusle into a 5-man emergancy rescue vehicle, so your idea wasnt that far off. ^^

Yeah, even without considering the space paratrooper angle, a form of escape pod for future manned ships and stations in planetary orbits indeed is something that should be given more development as we continue to build up infrastructure in space. It could also be done for entertainment purposes if/when it becomes common/safe enough. Another question is how reusable could they be?

Hate to correct you 00, but there's absolutely an evacuation vehicle for the ISS. Crew capsules stay attached to the station at all times with enough seating for all occupants. there's absolutely an emergency jettisoning procedure that takes far less time than the normal separation.

Wouldn't the shock of the landing disorient the soldier's movement for long enough to make him vulnerable on exit?

here's to hoping the Space Force actually becomes something of note and develops ODST pods capable of dropping anywhere on the globe within a matter of a few hours

This is terribly fascinating. Thankyou

god its cool thinking tech like this could be made right now, great video as usual

In the Space station currently that is why they keep vehicles attached, to give the crew an evac vehicle. Going forward as space travel increases tempo I could totally see dragon just dropping off crew and landing on Earth/and or rotating to the next crew coming down in it. So a stay behind evacuation vehicle makes sense! Militarily at the moment I doubt we could make it affordable enough to justify compared to other options currently employed. But I imagine that could all change soon.

For the segment on life/escape pods, I don't think single person sized ones will be very common. It'd be easier and cheaper to make a multi-person sized vehicle, just like actual life boats. Definitely much cooler as a single occupant though.

The US military has been looking into the possibility of drop pods for the ability to put boots on the ground anywhere on Earth in under a day. Don't know if they still are though.

I actually love ODST’s more than Spartans. Here me out. Spartans are better, in every way, no doubt about it. However….. Spartans are genetically enhanced and utilise incredibly expensive super high tech armour not to mention the training (especially the 3’s) ODST’s are just good old fashion bad ass humans. They’re completely legit regular humans that just have what it takes to do the toughest jobs no one else can (Spartans aside)

The majority of the safety devices and stuff make a lot of sense. The drag shoot, crash, cage, and retro rockets, of course. But another thing that I think would be a good idea would be to have the single occupants seat on like essentially hydraulic shock absorbers. Kind of like how the Seats on a lot of helicopters are designed. They’re not necessarily designed with hydraulics in mind because will hydraulics heavy. But most helicopters have a design in their seat, where if the helicopter slams into the ground, they have a ability to do at least a degree of downward travel to lessen the impact on the occupant. Especially since often times what actually kills a person in a helicopter crash is not the crash itself but the injuries that their bodies of stains from the sudden deceleration. I would think that, adding something like that to the seat, mechanism would definitely be beneficial. Obviously, I’m not saying remove any of the other things. With equipment like this redundancy is your friend. I mean you want redundancies of redundancies. Going back to my original thought here with the shock absorbers of sorts. Let’s say the pod impacts something that is unexpectedly harder than what they initially thought like for instance maybe it’s slamming into a structure or a vehicle. If the crash cage doesn’t work completely on its own along with the retro rockets, you also have that third back up. Another thing that I think would be a good idea is that on those four little points on the upper portion of the pod for military uses I think it would be a good idea for those to be equipped with devices similar to Claymore mines. This way if they land in or amongst enemy forces , before the occupant exits, these little area, denial type weapons would fire and obviously the shrapnel could potentially kill or at the very least incapacitate the enemy forces. Obviously they wouldn’t go off automatically I would assume the best thing that they would do is the operator would hit a button or something that way if they land in an area where there are no enemies, it doesn’t go off and they don’t run the risk of injuring either fellow forces that are on the ground, or possibly even civilians that I’ve come to investigate.

This content is top notch. Very informative with cool visuals. I always wondered how the drop pods worked.

Carbon Carbon Carbon, Carbon Carbon. Carbon Carbon, Carbon Carbon. Carbon.

For years I thought that drop pods just hit the ground with such velocity that it made a crater,

I've always wondered about this! Great video, very informative

The ISS has, and has always had an emergency descent capsule in case of an emergency, but it is not purpose built. There is always one, and in most cases two Soyuz capsules docked to the ISS, with this contingency in mind. These are the same capsules that crew arrive in, and the capsule remains docked until the crew returns. That way, there is always enough seats available for an emergency evacuation. Dedicated emergency evacuation capsules has been researched, with several being flown as test vehicles (google Crew Return Vehicle), but I guess it was «good enough» to have the crew capsules available. Kind of ironic since one of them are currently having a malfunction and is leaking.

I will always have the same respect for the ODST as i have for Spartans

i remember the big inverted umbrella escape pods that were suggested by nasa, the tech existed in the 50's, these days the profile could be smaller by far with newer shielding tiles. a tipped mast on bottom like the sr-71 has would work with no tiles, gotta be fired pretty fast to get em up to speed for it to work though.

Absolutely fantastic video

That last edit reminded me how cool Chief is. Thanks for that

Space Force needs to start an ODST program!

Its undoubtedly the case that from a materials-science perspective, a drop pod is entirely feasible. And even from a last minute deceleration point of view using thrusters (which as you say with space-x is easily possible). However the main limiting factor of this case is the maximum deceleration experienced during re-entry. One of the main parameters used to determine the maximum deceleration acheived is the lift to drag ratio, represented as L/D. for the fastest possible re-entry case (a purely ballistic one) L/D = 0. However, for a standard human space capsule such as the ones on the apollo missions, a ratio of L/D = 0 would lead to a peak deceleration during the re-entry curve WAY above the limits for humans. We're talking 20+ g's. The obvious solution to this is to introduce some lift into the capule, i.e use a small L/D ratio (usually 0.25 - 1 depending on the vehicle type). But in doing so we greatly increase the decent time. This poses an issue not only for the drop pods being shot down, but also the length of time that they are thermally loaded for in the atmosphere. If we wish for drop pods to be as they are in game, taking the shortest possible time to re-enter, they are simply not possible as the inhabitants would be turned to pulp during the middle of the re-entry when peak deceleration occurs. As i say this can be easily circumvented but it brings with it its own drawbacks that would render the drop pod mostly useless. Why not simple use a high L/D ratio decent vehicle such as the space shuttle? , which offers greater attitude and yaw control verses a capsule type design. From an in-game persective it would make far more sense to use a pelican to re-enter as opposed to a drop pod in my opinion.

Small correction, if the shuttle were to bounce off the atmosphere it would not bounce off "into deep space" it would just go back into space at a lower orbital height than the original orbit because it would dump some of its energy into the atmosphere. It would eventually come down, it would just take longer.

@10:33 you wonder why this hasn't got much real world interest, but it did actually get some development in the 60's. GE's Project Moose ("Man Out Of Space Easiest") was a one man deorbit process that was in a lot of ways similar to the ODST drop pod, though it was for emergencies not combat. You'd exit the ISS in your space suit, place yourself in a shaped bag with an ablative heatshield, fill the bag with foam, locking you in position, use a rocket pack to deorbit, and drop to earth. The shield and foam would protect you from re-entry, your suit provided the life support, a parachute would remove most if your velocity, and the foam would crumple and deform to protect you from the final landing. The foam would also float if you landed in water. Unfortunately it never got beyond Earth based testing in practice, but the numbers are sound. Hopefully someone in the same vein of Alan Eustace or Felix Baumgartner decide to give it real test and we can integrate it into our emergency planning.

As it stands the crew vehicles that deliver astronauts and cosmonauts to the ISS remain docked at all times and in the event of an evacuation the crews would enter their respective vehicles, undock, and return to earth within the next few hours. Reentry windows are much wider than launch windows and as long as you are landing in the ocean for crew dragon or on reasonably flat land for Soyuz it doesn't really matter where you land. During the cold war both NASA and Roscosmos had contingencies for landing in each other's territory and emergency procedures were established for such an eventuality.

In terms of your comments regarding the usage of spacecraft for emergency evacuation of the ISS, there was a dedicated escape re-entry pod planned for it but it was cancelled due to budgetary reasons

Blunt re-entry vehicles are the most similar things we have, but they're still always going at quite a shallow angle. Though the most dubious thing for me is the impact with the ground; yes, they've got crumple zones and all that but cars have crumple zones and people still die regularly in car accidents. I'd guess if anything at all goes wrong, the guy inside turns into jam on the floor, and even if everything goes right, there's a reasonable chance the guy inside is injured. As for getting people off the ISS in an emergency, they'd get off in the same way they'd get off on a normal day - there are a couple of capsules docked around the ISS which can re-enter the atmosphere with crew. Once you're detached, anything going wrong with the ISS is no longer your problem since you've got your own fuel and life support on board, so you don't need to rush. Also if we estimate the acceleration of the drop pod, v^2 = 2as, v is around 10^4 m/s (orbital velocity), s is around 10^4 m (scale height of the atmosphere) so 2a = 10^4 m/s/s, or around 1000g. That is not at all survivable. Even normal reentry is tough - it can get to 4 or 5g.

In my mind, the Dragon capsule with the brake rockets is the perfect reentry vehicle for an ODST drop for a long time.

Can you take a looksie at the drop pods from the Starship Troopers book. It seems like the way we would actually do it and as a bonus it's the book where the whole idea of power armor came from.

I'm really surprised that nobody else commented this already, but the ISS DOES actually have emergency escape systems. There are always 1-2 soyuz capsules docked to the ISS for emergency re-entry.

The way they evacuate the International Space Station is that everyone rushes to their space capsule/ship and, depending on the emergency, fire their thrusters pointing at the ISS at max thrust to get away as fast as possible. It is currently, as far as I know, possible to evacuate the ISS within 5 minutes, as that is probably the time frame you have to make it out if a fire starts on board or a hole is punctured in the ISS. A Soyuz can be separated from the ISS within three minutes, which is probably also about the same time it takes for all the other spacecraft that are docked at the ISS to undock in an emergency.

There was a skydiver who free fell without. Parachute into a net

I agree with the final statement. We'll need a vehicle similar to this sooner or later. Maybe an escape vehicle could do with less crashing into the ground and more unfolding some type of airglider-wing to turn downward momentum into sideways momentum. But the concept isn't just sound and viable, but it might actually be preferable to dying in space...

At all times there are two soyuz capsules attached to the ISS as lifeboats, in case of evacuation/disaster.

Next lore and theory about whether or not we could possibly make any more noise

Literally a space capsule, dork. We've had these since the 60s.

The US Marines were looking into this in the early 2000s they wanted a rapid insertion vehicle that could deploy a fireteam anywhere in the world in a hour or less via orbital deployment. They couldnt get it funded though...

One of the biggest issues I see with this as an emergency evacuation method is the landing. With the majority of the planet being water and a lot of our land being occupied the pods would need to have an accurate enough landing so that they don't land in the middle of the ocean and just drown the occupant or in a populated area and risk killing someone else in the landing. It would have to be capable of enough controlled movement to avoid both of these things when the pod is not directly above unoccupied land.

spartans are awesome but ive always loved ODSTs since i saw them

Nice video

I’m not engineer nor scientist but I dabbled in a drop pod concept in high school 4-5 years ago, nearly got suspended for it

The Breaking The Covenant song in the outro is timed so well and goes extremely hard

Right after I got my rookie ODST drop pod set from Jazwares!😎

I feel like you're not touching enough on the speed of impact. Just how much would be necessary with no parachute but instead drag chutes and counter thrusters? Remember that the occupant needs to be combat ready, but still go fast enough to avoid being shot out of the sky...

Only issue I see is that realistically, it would be loud as hell upon insertion, which defeats the point of intended use for getting troopers behind enemy lines unnoticed

Depending on the speed you approach the earth at, the more straight on you can reenter the atmosphere. There is a reason why the space shuttle has the angle of reentry it has as it is rated to reenter at about 8.89 km/s which is about the typical speed you have when entering from an earth orbit after coming back from the moon. Also, they wanted the space shuttle to be able to glide back to the airport, therefore necessitating that they keep as much altitude and speed as possible. Now if you look at how SpaceX's boosters reenter the earth's atmosphere, you will find that they have a very steep angle as they are not actually entering the atmosphere that fast, and they use retrograde thrust as a heat shield and to slow down faster while at the most critical stage of reentry. I think generally they have a speed below 8 km/s when coming back from space. Though to be fair they are also reentering from like 80-100 km altitude, unlike the 400-500 km altitude that is the low earth orbit where the ISS is flying around.

Well, that is about five hundred years in the future. Titanium B and who knows what else. In our modern-day Transparent Aluminum has been achieved (Star Trek apparently got it right) and who knows what else may be possible. The biggest limitation for such a vehicle today is the weight. Weight is everything. Power and thrusters as well.

I can't believe that I didn't though bout this up until now

Space force better get on it!!

We have in the US, H.A.L.O. jumpers. Not the same thing, but concept wise it's close.

You know, I'm not sure if you've done this before but a thought on more lore videos you can do in the inevitable lore starvation we're going to be in for a time. Battles in the Covenant War. Kind of a recap like thing with strong detail to really paint a picture of what it was like. Or a "perspective" idea. What it might've been like to be a human living in a colony with the threat of The Covenant destroying you, or refugee overcrowding and food camps. Or life on Reach, technically untouched by war but likely the cost of living would've gone up as UNSC assets and agrian planets were destroyed. Right up until the strike comes and now Reach is in danger. You could do it like a whole story series on from just the layman's perspective

I can not wait for your halo flood Vs mass effect reaper video

As much as I'd like drop pods as lifeboats to be a thing, this video seems to gloss over a lot of the technical details that need to be considered when designing reentry vehicles. Thermal load G-Forces Fuel The manned reentry vehicles we have today are designed to spread thermal energy out over time. Gradually slowing from orbital speeds down to subsonic speeds by stretching reentry out over long distances (Space shuttle entry prep started over the Indian ocean to land in Florida). Some might say that the Falcon 9 boosters are doing precisely this. Yes, but also no. The boosters aren't traveling at orbital velocities, and relative to an orbital trajectory, the boosters are basically making a short hop. They don't experience anywhere near the amount of thermal heating vehicles like the space shuttle, dragon, or soyuz have to deal with when reentering the atmosphere from orbital speeds. Going back to a high angle of attack reentry, vehicles experience very high g-forces upon hitting the atmosphere. The Falcon 9 vehicle experiences ~10G during its reentry burn to slow itself down before it hits the denser parts of the atmosphere. Again, it isn't traveling at orbital velocities, so it has significantly less speed to deal with and is already hitting very high g forces. Humans can survive these forces fairly easily with training and provided the g forces aren't for any extended periods of time (a few seconds at most for higher g forces). Humans can also withstand higher amounts of g forces from different directions, such as when we are lying down on our backs. If we were to be oriented standing up as depicted in the drop pods, our passengers would quickly find themselves blacking out from blood rushing into their brain or pooling in their legs. This significantly changes the size and shape of a drop pod vehicle as it wouldn't be as narrow of a profile. Most significantly, it would definitely present a larger profile towards the direction of travel. This means increased drag and even higher g forces. The last big thing to note about all this is the fuel needed to help make all of this work. Our drop pods are in some carrier or other large spacecraft in orbit. We're trying to insert them as fast as possible to a target on Earth. Due to orbital mechanics, our drop pods will need to cancel out their horizontal speed in order to head in as short of a distance possible to the target. This means each drop pod will need a lot of fuel, which increases their size and mass. This will further change the design of each drop pod as we have no means of storing enough fuel to make such large changes in velocity in a vehicle as tiny as the pods are depicted. We could say each pod is launched out of the ship in a rail gun type of system. Provided it's long enough to keep g forces tolerable, it could negate some of the orbital velocity. The problem here is that we don’t have railgun systems of this caliber to be able to launch large truck sized projectiles, so we're stuck with fuel. In conclusion, we would not be able to create drop pod type vehicles with today's technology. The physics required to allow for a nearly vertical descent into the earth's atmosphere exceeds what our material science can compensate for. We do not have large-scale rail gun tech for launching pods. We don't have propulsion systems small and compact enough to compensate for a lack of rail gun tech. We don't have heat shield systems able to handle the thermal loads of a rapid atmospheric descent. And then, if we could somehow bend the laws of physics enough to enable a vertical descent, our fragile human bodies wouldn’t be able to handle the g forces from the craft punching into the atmosphere. The silver lining to this is that if we relax the requirements of getting to a target as fast as possible, we come back to our present reality. We do have vehicles that can reenter the earth's atmosphere safely. And we have them acting as lifeboats in space right now. They can manage thermal loads by spreading it out over a long shallow trajectory. They experience minimal g forces because of this. And they don't need a lot of fuel because the atmosphere is doing most of the work.

While the idea of using a dragon capsule as a real world alternative to the drop pod is a good idea on paper the rocket motors that are in the dragon are not rated for landing and the heat shield is intended for low earth orbit only. A better alternative would be the Soyuz capsule, some variants were designed to return from the moon were reentry heating is much more extreme than low earth orbit and because the Soyuz is intended to only lands on solid ground compared to all other capsules that only land in water, the Soyuz use retrorockets at the last seconds of decent to slow to a survivable speed. Besides the rate of decent the Soyuz capsules would be an almost identical real world match to the ODST drop pod.

My big question would what the crash cage and inter of such would be made of to give the proper levels of deceleration without causing major shock that'd be jarring and potentially disorientating if not potentially causing blunt force injury to the lower body or spine. Particularly over repeated drops in a military application. That would also allow the pod to dig enough into the ground the stay upright and not skip, bounce or drag on a proper landing. And also have a strong enough outer frame that as displayed in canon, able to blast through something like Scarabs or through and skip off of buildings without the occupant being killed. As stated in the books, most deaths in drops are caused by heat shielding failure just based on the inevitable flaw or simple bad luck. Or a drag shoot not deploying properly, too early, too late or breaking off before the intended altitude/speed. So an otherwise speedy drop has yet to be mentioned as a cause of casualty outside of 'extraordinary' circumstance. As even on Earth many ODST did survive the drop over New Mombasa, those that weren't, were caught closest to the slip space rupture and hit hardest, if not pull through. Then otherwise scattered and squads or even platoons completely scattered across the city before either being killed while stuck inside their pod, or in the continued fighting on the ground.

I think I’m first. Refreshed the page just before and no comments before mine

I would like to mention that the Soyuz space capsules use retro rockets as they don't splashdown and instead land on the ground.

Sacred cow shipyards did a similar thing but it’s nice to see a video go a bit deeper into the material details

The fact that we can have drop pods in IRL is fucking sick and it makes me very happy to know that we could build Halo Drop pods.

The ODST drop pods on my favorite

Chop chop humanity let's get to it

I know the USMC has done a paper study looking into fireteam or squad sized capsules, so basically regular size space capsules, for rapid special forces deployment at least once in the past, though IIRC that was well before commercialization of space kicked off, so the projected costs were outrageous compared to other options. Might need a revisit now, but still probably cost prohibitive. Also, in military applications any such capsule would be highly vulnerable to any anti-ballistic missile weaponry, which seem to be rapidly proliferating.

Excellent use of breaking the covenant from h2a.

What is that song that's played at the end? Love those guitair riffs!!

DARPA be like this guy giving all our plan’s away!

Before watching the video I'm gonna say yes. We already done it. During the Apollo missions it was basically a drop pod that got them back. And are we gonna forget the guy that free fall from low orbit not too long ago?

Man I make such a good videos I wish u could do more of videos about guns, vehicles etc from other games too!

NASA did jointly develop an emergency drop vehicle for the ISS with the ESA and Germany's DLR. It was called the X-38, and was pretty much a miniaturized Space Shuttle. It was never deployed due to the project being killed by budget cuts. Instead they settled for docked Soyuz capsules, which is a large reason why the ISS' crew compliment is as small as it is.

technically we have drop pods, the spacex dragon pods are the closest thing we have to those pods and since we can land rockets from orbit it only takes time to get there on a smaller scale. i think our current problem is that we dont have the fuel capabilities to power thrusters long enough to break any G force and at a slow enough rate as to not kill who ever is inside the pod and materials strong enough to survive a planetary reentry/ground impact, the glass window would be the first thing to go wrong. plus in ww2 the us military tried to rabidly deploy equipment and supplies in any environment without ever landing the cargo plane by using thrusters under platforms and it may have not worked right back then but thats an idea that doesnt just go away when you're a military

The concept of using drop pods to insert shock troops in to planet from space goes back quite a way in Science Fiction. One prominent feature of those older stories was that the soldiers were often in "powered armor." The drop pods themselves weren't necessarily envisioned as actually making it to the ground intact. The pods would only protect the soldier from the heat of re-entry, but at a certain altitude they would peel away and the soldier would land with the jump jets of their powered armor. This way the pods didn't need their own thrusters, and only a very basic guidance system. In that approach, they wouldn't have to be anywhere near as complex or as expensive as the ODST drop pods. Then all you need to do is create the powered armor...lol!

I'll tell you why because Halo is a video game people look at video games and say no it's not possible when they don't realize that some of it may be very possible I am a huge ODST fan myself really enjoyed the video

So Installation00 how much was this a lore video then just stroking SpaceX.

The ISS has several capsules attached to it that can act as life boats at any one time.

One thing to consider is that current space de orbits start from objects traveling at orbital velocities, around 7 km/s which need to shed huge amounts of kinetic energy in a short time using friction with the atmosphere. Halo is different, because ships can already maintain geo synchronous orbits at low altitudes, so a drop pod can start with 0 velocity with respect to the ground and only need to deal with shedding the energy gain from falling from a few hundred kilometers. You could probably do that with a suit

If Drop Pods existed and the ODSTs were US MARSOC units (because it is lore that ODSTs are Marines), I would join the Navy and volunteer to be one of their first Corpsmen. I'd be happy to jump "Feet First into Hell."

Love the outro! Keeping Halo metal

ODSTs are the best

interesting idea you have there; turn ODST drop pods into life boats that carry survivors from emergencies down to the saftey of earth

2 things, 1 it's time to fund 00 to also build a odst drop pod. 2 time to start my odst training lol.

"We're on the express elevator to hell! GOING DOWN!"

"Helljumper helljumper we've you been?"

the Shuttle, (and every other reentry vehicle so far) needed the heat shielding and reentry corridor because they were in orbit, going "sideways" at 17,000 miles per hour. If a UNSC ship could just "hover" in orbit over a planet, they could drop the pods straight down without accelerating them to the speeds necessary for heat to be a huge problem. Terminal velocity of a giant metal box can't be that high, and they won't have time to reach the speeds necessary to heat up the atmosphere before the atmosphere thickens and slows them down through drag. Kind of like how the Red Bull Guy was able to fall from "space" without a vehicle to protect him. I think. granted, if the ship was moving in orbit, or the pods were fired down to the surface (probably necessary to be more efficient than just putting everyone on a Pelican and flying them down) they could run back into those issues. Either way, Elon Musk, let us borrow a spaceship, I wanna try something