On 1/28/2018 9:57 PM, Caleuche wrote:
> 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.

Would this be tolerated within a supposed "enlightened society"?  It is
one thing to condemn a prisoner to death when sentenced, but this seems
to me to be something that would quickly be abandoned when someone
breaks the Red Zone to find a loved one (or political prisoner) and
reports on the mortality rate just getting to the surface.

--
Kurt Feltenberger
xxxxxx@thepaw.org/xxxxxx@yahoo.com
“Before today, I was scared to live, after today, I'm scared I'm not living enough." - Me