[SOM] Re-entry timeframe

[Ravien999]

So curious question - I'm not sure if I'm missing something but I'm reading the rules for drop pods in SOM, and they mention that dropping without a pod does a certain amount of damage per round, as well as the falling damage at the end. But unless I'm missing something, I'm not seeing anywhere it recommends how long re-entry should take?

Slightly entertaining to me that if you can find some way to slow your momentum, say through a parachute or something, it would cause a thin atmosphere to do no damage, as there's no minimum.

[C4M3R0N]

Yeah this is an excellent question and it seems unanswered from my read through as well.
It definitely would be helpful to know how long it takes to be able to calculate atmospheric damage per round and the time it takes for reinforcements to drop in.

[Samantha DeWinter]

If we're talking realism, a steep re-entry like these pods would have to use, on an Earth-similar planetary atmosphere, should be around five minutes in the blackout "hot" zone. Total drop time probably double that. That would put un-shielded fire damage at around 60d6. Plus 20d6 from the sudden stop at the end.

Edit: No more than 12 damage per round though, which makes soaking it with fire resist gear completely possible.

[C4M3R0N]

So hypothetical scenario... a firefight is going on with the PCs and another army or waves of enemies, something like that. They want to drop their mech in to handle the situation but they'd have to hold them off for 10 minutes.
That's probably not really doable haha, but definitely good to know.

[Samantha DeWinter]

If you're going round-by-round, yeah, it's not gonna be particularly workable. You'd need a "holdout" situation where you're abstracting the combat.

[Pantshandshake]

Hmm. You could do it, but you'd need either a giant map, or a way to represent larger amounts of units on a much smaller scale, with an associated scaling down of map squares (like 1 square is a 50 ft square instead of 5.)

You'd basically just need to make the encounter area big enough, somehow, that a large amount of enemies would take many minutes to move across it.

*edit*
Actually, right after I posted this, I decided the biggest issue wouldn't be time, but the scale of combat. You'd probably be talking about something like the old Pathfinder Army rules to really make this look correct.

[kaid]

Ravien999 wrote:

So curious question - I'm not sure if I'm missing something but I'm reading the rules for drop pods in SOM, and they mention that dropping without a pod does a certain amount of damage per round, as well as the falling damage at the end. But unless I'm missing something, I'm not seeing anywhere it recommends how long re-entry should take?

Slightly entertaining to me that if you can find some way to slow your momentum, say through a parachute or something, it would cause a thin atmosphere to do no damage, as there's no minimum.

The issue is that reentry time would vary with almost every planet. It all depends on the size of the world and the thickness and size of its atmosphere. In a thin atmosphere it would go very fast because there is not much to slow you down and your period of heating is short. In a thick atmosphere the period of reentry is going to take longer as there is just more air to punch through which slows you down.

[Hanomir]

C4M3R0N wrote:

So hypothetical scenario... a firefight is going on with the PCs and another army or waves of enemies, something like that. They want to drop their mech in to handle the situation but they'd have to hold them off for 10 minutes.

That's probably not really doable haha, but definitely good to know.

If it's a mech you're dropping it might not be depending on gravity alone for acceleration toward the surface. Given that you'd want an orbital drop to be over as fast as possible (so the baddies have less time to shoot you on the way down) you'd probably use thrusters to get down quicker than freefalling would, braking at the very last point where your technology can handle the impact of the landing without also knocking the crew unconscious or killing them from the gees they're pulling. In straight scifi you might have "inertial dampeners" or something to justify things, but in Starfinder you'd just need some technomage gadget that kills your thrusters (so you're "falling" not "flying") and "casts" a mecha-scale version of Level 1 Flight (aka Feather Fall) the instant you get to 60' above the ground, at which point you just touch down harmlessly no matter how fast you were going.

TL;DR If you're the GM, this is totally doable as a scenario and you can even justify it without a sweat. Just be ready when your players want to use the same trick themselves sometime. :)