True enough, but that's kind of how Risk Assessment works. You can't plan around what will happen, barring prophetic foresight or a Stable Time Loop, you can only plan around what will probably happen. And that assumes you have all the correct information and assumptions (i.e.: Will this other equipment be installed correctly?) to do your analysis to begin with.
rollin' on dubs
There were ejection seats, the first crews used SR-71 pressure suits and ejection seats. Those were removed because most of the crew is middeck, surrounded by structure. An escape capsule was never fitted. Putting one in was studied, but it would have been too expensive.
Yes, the B-58, F-111 and B-1A used crew capsules. But for the shuttle, explosive bolts were too risky and a capsule added weight. The external fuel tank took thousands of gallons of paint and added too much weight, so the rest of the tanks were unpainted.
For more reading, Space Shuttle abort modes
via The Other Wiki.
edited 13th Jul '14 5:41:23 PM by TairaMai
I tried to walk like an Egyptian and now I need to see a Cairo practor....edited 13th Jul '14 7:10:24 PM by MattII
And how many times have Risk Assessment types been found wanting or otherwise very short sighted? Way too many to trust them.
A good risk plan has those little contingencies even if the intention is they'll likely never be used. Better to have and not need and all. Because after all, your risk assessment plan will look extremely stupid if shit goes sideways in the very way you said it wouldn't or was too unlikely to occur.
The escape pod wouldn't have helped either Columbia or Challenger. It is very unlikely any of them would have been saved. You have to know you need to escape before you can do it. The folks on Challenger had no clue they were about to blow up. The Columbia had a under two minutes from that thermal tile falling off to total loss of control and break up of the shuttle.
Who watches the watchmen?A giant parachute would be very useful in the event that an airplane suffers an engine failure. An extra set of backup engines probably even more useful. After a certain point, excessive contingency measures become far more of a hindrance than any practical benefit they serve. Following the engines example: Note that most modern airliners have gone from four engines (more redundancy) to two engines (less complexity and thus fewer parts to break, not to mention lower costs).
Risk Assessment balances the risk of doing something with the benefit of pulling it off and the cost of making that activity safe (or skipping it entirely). Most of the time it works just fine because by definition you never hear about something succeeding thanks to proper risk assessment. It's like how nobody talks about how engineers did a brilliant job properly laying a foundation and building an apartment complex, that's just the assumed norm, versus a failure if it collapses under its own weight.
edited 13th Jul '14 9:54:03 PM by AFP
Compressed hydrogen tanks will inflate the skin of the airplane to enact an Emergency Transformation into a Zeppelin. Remember, this is a no smoking flight.
What do you guys think of the "landing brick" basically a hardened descent vehicle with limited deceleration. They basically scream in through atmo and via limited deceleration and/or impact/shock mitigating tech smack into the ground and then open up to deploy units.
You see it various sci-fi. Something comes down there is a blast and then something comes out of a container and crawls out of the craterthen begins raising hell. Even some of the Dune books have examples of it.
edited 16th Jul '14 4:13:54 PM by TuefelHundenIV
Who watches the watchmen?I could see it being useful for landing heavy mechanized forces such as tanks, mecha and whatnot. Infantry on the other hand, that brick better be able to go back up for it to be worth it.
Unless that infantry "brick" is one-manned.
edited 16th Jul '14 4:11:13 PM by MajorTom
If you've got the inertial dampening to handle hundreds-of-gs maneuvers in space combat (as many sci-fi ships seem to have), I figure the forces involved in a terrain-assisted deceleration should be easy enough. Plus, it can make for a spectacular entrance, always great for those morale effects.
And why go for the cliche perpendicular impact? I say come in at a low AOA and skip across the landscape like a skipping stone of mayhem and destruction.
So what you're saying is that the landing is gonna get pretty interesting.
Ideally you'd want even more. 3:1 or better is the preferred ratio for head on attacks.
However you can do with even a paltry 1:1 ratio provided you have no intention of lining your guys up against theirs Revolutionary War style. Localized outnumbering can prove a lot more practical than digging up millions of more troopers to hit everywhere on the planet all at once.

Didn't they remove that feature fairly early in the Shuttle's career? They did a risk assessment and determined it was more likely that the explosive bolts it used would cause an accident, vs the possibility of a situation where the crew would need to punch out.