On Sun, Jan 19, 2014 at 8:36 AM, Mike Adams <[email protected]> wrote: > Once into the lower atmosphere, then its drop until your close to ground and > then either ballon or like, seen the Mars probes and how some landed, via a > giant ball?
The airbag landing on Mars are a special case. Mars' atmosphere is too thin for a reasonable-size parachute to give you a plausible landing speed, but too thick to just be ignored. It's really rather awkward. The airbag landings were at high speed - 100km/hr or more, but not much more than that. In an earthlike atmosphere, you can land much slower than that with a reasonable parachute. You could use a smaller parachute (in proportion to your weight) to land faster and use airbags to cope with that. But doing that to humans is risky. Even if they're thoroughly padded and restrained so they can't suffer whiplash injuries, high-g shocks can cause traumatic brain injuries. John _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
