Pod Tender

Confederacy Standard "Pod Tender"

   Every class of freighter or transport ship which carries pods also carries one or more Pod Tenders as part of the ship's standard equipment.  While there are as many designs for pod tenders as there are shipyards building them, they all have similar characteristics:

• They are small 'tugboats' that are optimized for moving the Confederacy's standard cargo pods, usually in their smallest (10m D by 25m L) size.
• They are capable of descending from orbit down through any atmosphere and gently emplacing a pod within millimeters of their planned position.  If necessary, they can pick it up again and move it wherever needed.
• They can pick up a fully-loaded pod and lift it through the atmosphere to meet an orbital freighter.  Since an empty Mk1 pod masses 54 metric tonnes and we can't predict how much the cargo will mass or even what any random planet's gravity will be, we assume that a typical pod tender is capable of lifting 100 tonnes through a 1-G field.  Therefore, a pod tender can also deliver a Rommel heavy tank to any planet we would be willing to fight over.  It should be noted that the typical pod tender is NOT armored and should not enter a 'hot' drop zone.  A tender could probably be talked into adding armor around its critical systems, but that would tend to add mass and thus reduce its carrying capacity.
• They are automated, as riding either in a pod or in the tender down to a nonsecure planet is more dangerous than the typical Confederacy citizen is willing to do.  It is assumed that any pod tender must therefore have an AI at least as powerful as the ones in the pods themselves, as they must perform all navigation and control functions without need for crew.
• It is not known if all pod tenders can handle all possible sizes and configurations of pods, but just as the pods themselves manage reconfiguration, it can safely be assumed that the pod tenders can also reconfigure themselves as needed to securely 'mount' any form of pod.
  
• A round trip from transport to surface and returning to the ship is generally allotted three hours.
  
• On board the Nurse class transports, some have been modified to be large ambulance craft. (Shouldn't this read "some pods have been modified to be large ambulance craft"? Why would anyone modify an uncrewed drone as an ambulance? This has nothing to do with pod tenders. -ZM)
  

Host Ship Classes

   It is known that the following ship classes carry, as part of their standard equipment, at least one pod tender:

• Aurora Class - Hangar space for two pod tenders
• Trader Class - One pod tender?
• Peter Minuit Class - One pod tender?
• Kilo Class - 24 pod tenders carried as standard equipment

(Someday this will be a navigation template.  It will provide a bar across the bottom of each article with useful navigation links.  Until then, this is just a placeholder to get rid of all the red "broken link" indicators. -ZM User (talk) 10:00, 3 May 2024 (PDT))