-------- Original Message --------
 On January 28, 2018 6:33 PM, Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

>>
>
> That sounds like an personal re-entry kit, rather than a life pod. Used
> for meteoric re-entry by extreme sportspersons and cut-rate marines.

As we all remember from Starship Troopers (the book, not the movies), insertion was done from orbit in individual ablative pods, and some of the advantage of that is that the defender on the ground has many more objects to track rather than a single landing ship, and the mobile infantry described there were the opposite of being cut-rate.

Supplies can probably be more routinely dropped from orbit or even from a hyperbolic flyby.

The best use yet is prisoner delivery. No chance of ever escaping from a planet that no ship ever lands on. Huge prisoner transports can make repeated back and forth trips from nearby stars, loading up on condemned prisoners packaged in a just-long-enough-to-get-down vacc suit and ablative foam reentry shielding with a low-tech kicker motor to deorbit the package. Hundreds or thousands of prisoners could be delivered each trip with very little in the way of ground logistics. Distributed more or less randomly (though that could be computed) around the world, a good percentage of them will land at sea and probably die of thirst while drifting out of range of shore, and some of them won't survive reentry. Most would never encounter any other prisoner, though they might watch for the tell-tale meteor trails of new prisoners being delivered.

It'd be a solo survival adventure, probably.