Wed Nov 18, 2020 10:45 am by Comstar
In the simplest terms, the outer engines weren't 'engines' necessarily, but vent nozzles for the main reactor. The four main drive engines were located below the drop pod, but the ship also had four landing legs, and each one has a smaller 'engine' inside it, to allow the ship to stabilize as it landed. Each of these was a series of control valves and containment fields which funneled the energy of the Fusion reactor into thrust, and for it to fail catastrophically would require multiple systems to break at the same time, or some sort of outside event.
Normally, a failure of containment on a reactor of the size of the dropship would result in a total shutdown, or a majority of the ship and reactor vaporizing as the reaction ended violently, but in this case, the vented plasma had been cut off quickly without disengaging the entire reactor core - which was also anomalous.
There seemed to be two anomalies here - the first being the explosion itself, which from a scientific point of view, wasn't the likely fail point at all. The explosion had torn away the top half of the vent shaft and drive funnel, but the failure points, structurally, were the joins where the engine shaft had to flex before locking into place during landing. The outer pylon itself was quite sturdy, which made that failure point unusual.
The second anomaly was that the ship survived without a shutdown... either it should have blown completely or shut down and hard landed as soon as the failure occurred, so something about the Calico was either extremely lucky or un-like modern Union dropships.
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