BetterThanLife
SOC-14 1K
That's a function of slope (which GT handles), and is irrelevant to the volume of a passenger compartment. In any case, the 'volume' of an object refers to internal volume, not the stowage space required to put it on board a ship.</font>[/QUOTE]That is a strictly GT interpretation then.
Assault helicopters have bench seats. In general, anything that can make a grav APC crash is a heavy weapon that will also gut the vehicle, killing everyone inside, so crash-worthiness is really an incidental objective. It's possible that APCs have something like roller coaster bars to hold people in place, but that doesn't add all that much volume, and it forces a rather small base seat.</font>[/QUOTE]OK First an assault helo does use bench seats. But those aren't for the crew. The crew uses real seats, the equivalent to acceleration couches and aircrews generally survive the impact with the ground caused by combat damage. Which if there is no passengers in the bench seats generally is considered a hard landing not a crash. (Before 1994, no Apache Helicopter ever crashed. Though there were quite a few hard landings.) You rarely hear about hard landings which happen more often than crashes. The difference between a hard landing and a crash is that in a hard landing nobody dies.
First, not all planets that require lifesupport don't have an atmosphere. Second, just because a system has no atmosphere, it does not mean that a landing and assault isn't required. After all it would depend on your objective.
Now one other point. A Bradley, at between 5 and 7 dtons, and a Marder at around 4 dtons has less than a full squad of passengers. In general you are looking at half a squad in them as a transport. The original M2 did not have a bench seat. That wasn't implemented until the later A2 and the A3 models. Even then they are limited to 6 dismounts.
Further a Soldier doesn't ride into combat in t-shirt and shorts. They wear lots more equipment. A unit equipped in Combat armor or a combat environment suit or even current BDU with LBE/LBV or whatever the current terminology is plus body armor is quite a bit bulkier than a normal human. Add the rest of their gear, to include rifle, shelter, demolition kits, communications equipment, sensors, crew served weapons, anti-armor weapons, grenades, additional ammo, life support (which includes air and FOOD), and your passenger compartment is exceptionally crowded. Now put a full squad in there, instead of a single fireteam and you definitely need more space.
In CT, MT and T20 this volume does include space around the vehicle for entering, leaving and maintenance and allows a vehicle to be carried in a drive off condition.
Further just because the passenger compartment, in your opinion, is the wrong size, the conversation is about carrying a Mercenary unit on a custom built starship. So the external dimensions and the required space for maintenance, boarding and exiting the vehicle and moving it about within the starship is definitely an important consideration.
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