Drop Troopers

Writing prompt: Someone mentioned that a horse that was being taught to skydive had returned to the Lord.

Reminds me of the story about wolves being parachuted into a national park to control the deer/elk/moose populations and then someone made a comic about a wolf with a knife parachuting in on a moose.

The opening up of the Terran Marine’s to the various races in the coalition was greeted with a bit of concern but it was nothing to the opening of the Drop Troopers to anyone who qualified.

We all know that the Drop Troopers were seen as the best of the best and were the ones who were tasked with orbital insertion attacks where they were basically kicked out of perfectly working spacecraft to fall into the atmosphere of a planet and then on to the enemy waiting below in disbelief that anyone sane would do such a crazy thing.

The training for the Drop Troopers was just as hard and tough as most other top line units of the Terran armed forces but with a small addition of strapping on gravity harnesses that allowed limited space flight and then were used to arrest their falling from orbit. That little part was the most important of course and was the hardest part for any sentient to handle.

The Drop Troopers were a unique force in the Coalition in that only the Humans had ever dropped combat troops out of atmosphere craft into combat zones and then when spaceflight was used, dropped combat troops out of orbit onto combat zones.

When they were first mentioned to their allies, they were thought to be joking but upon demonstration a sense of insanity and disbelief was felt by all those watching.

Along with the orbital strikes from the cruisers tasked with dropping off the troopers, most Coalition forces knew the Humans were insane from the start.

The introduction of various allied troops into the Drop Troopers was seen as pushing the envelope at times. Most allied races were close to human sized and only their body configuration required a bit of a change in the gravity harnesses due to center of mass or body weight. Though with the size different of some humans it wasn’t that bad.

Until the Krophett troops qualified and had to be fitted for their harnesses.

As a human private said, “Think of a small elephant with four arms to go with their four legs. Those gravity harnesses will have to be super sized to handle even the smallest Krophett trooper.”

So that’s exactly what they did. They also found that the Krophett were capable of carrying some of the bigger Human weapons and had a child like glee in firing them and it was a match made in Heaven like the Humans say.

So now the Drop Troopers have what they call Heavy Drop Troopers who are armored like a Human tank, capable of moving over terrain to keep up with the other troops, carry some of the biggest Human weapons for their troopers and are just as happy as humans to fire them, and you have a military force that scares the hell out of the enemy when they leap out of their orbiting cruisers.

Some fights have been won with the simple announcement of the Drop Troopers arriving in orbit.