Siege-class Single Trooper Entry Vehicle

Long Rang Stealth Orbital Drop Pod "Strapping yourself into one of those things takes a special kind of crazy."

- Anonymous GA infantryman

The Long Range Stealth Orbital Drop Pod was a advanced, unarmed, single occupant, combat troop-delivery pod used by the Third Imperium to deploy a single soldier from a warship, or other sufficiently equipped craft, in high orbit to a planet's surface. Although any standard sized humanoid could use the pod, Spartans were the only soldiers ever to utilize them in actual combat. Although Alpha, Gamma, and Delta Spartans were all fully qualified in their use, the pods were most commonly used by the Gammas, who saw the order to report to the pod bay for deployment as a chance to ride the ultimate ride.

Usage, purpose and construction
Orbital Drop Pods allowed for the rapid deployment of a large number of ground troops near or right onto a objective target. The pods smaller profiles made them more difficult to destroy by anti-air defensive fire than dropships, landers, or shuttles. When deployed under standard combat operations, Imperium warships would commonly exit hyperspace within range of a world's planetary defense weapons and "spray" a wave of the pods in a wide arc from their belly hatches, than immediately jump once again, leaving their ground forces to disable or destroy the planetary shields and defenses, allowing the fleet to move in and land the main attack force. The large number of pods dropped at a time also increased the probability of a sizeable portion of the assalt force surviving to ground. Each pod bore the serial number of the Spartan inside;aside from other uses, this identification could be used to identify the occupant of a destroyed pod, allowing the soldier to be recorded as dead and put to rest, something that was discouraged by Azazel as he saw anything other than a quick, simple show of respect for a fallen comrade to be a waste of time, effort, and resorces which could be used for other purposes.

Spartan doctrine requried the command pod of a Orbital Drop Pod-facilitated assault to land first to minimize the period of disorder that might occur as pods landed and Spartans deployed. Command-pods were equipped with additional features, including high-powered field computer gear and a Imperium Artifical Intelligence unit requried to operate it.

The pods construction consisted of a simple durasteel shell covered in a layer of heat-resistant material to protect the occupant during reentry and a overlayer of Stealth Ablative Coating, which made them invisible to sensors and impossible to track except by visual means. However this coating had to maintained perfectly and replaced after each use, since the extreme heat and friction genearated by entering a planets atmosphere would burn it completely off by the time the pod had landed.

Cargo
In addition to the soldier, Drop Pods necessarily carried other supplies, such as weapons, ammunition, rations, and a small prefab-memory plastic cubicle for shelter. This allowed a Spartan to fight from their pod with out need for resupply for upto fourteen days.