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Samson Helicopter / AMP Suit / Dragon Ship / Venture / RDA Bulldozer / Valkyrie

The Aerospatiale SA-2 Samson is a Human light ducted-fan craft. The Samson is armed with door guns and detachable rocket pods, and is the work-horses of RDA operations on Pandora. It is used to transport cargo and personnel to and from isolated sites. A hook point for sling load operations allows the Samson to carry extra or oversized cargo.

The Samson has been in use on Earth for decades. Its various trial runs in Antarctica, the Himalayas, and Honduras proved the aircraft could fly well in thin or thick atmospheres or in extreme temperatures with minimal maintenance. So when the RDA needed a reliable and sturdy aerial workhorse, they naturally chose the field-tested Samson and hardened its electrical systems to prepare it for the rigors of Pandora.

The rear cargo doors are normally left open for flight operations on Pandora, resulting in the need for exopacks for any occupants in the cargo area. The cockpit is separately pressurized and the flight crew can operate without them even with the rest of the aircraft depressurized.

As a utility craft, the Samson's primary defense is its speed and maneuverability. The armaments usually seen on the SA-2 are a pair of door-mounted GAU-19/As or M60 machine guns and missile pods on pylons immediately aft of the cockpit. The craft is not heavily armored - rounds from an RDA sidearm are able to penetrate the hull and canopy.The Samson uses a pair of ducted fans with coaxial propellers, increasing the lift efficiency while granting excellent maneuverability. Both fans are capable of rotating independently backwards and forwards. Left and right movement is possible by changing the speed of either one of the fans, and the Samson moves forward by rotating its fans horizontaly.

The Mitsubishi MK-6 Amplified Mobility Platform (or "AMP" Suit) is a distant descendant of the first military exoskeletons used on Earth in the mid 21st century. It was improved during military service in a myriad of combat theaters– from arctic to jungle to desert– over the decades. Sealed and pressurized models for toxic environments were developed as well. The suit is used extensively on the Moon and Mars colonies (where they are powered by fuel cells and/or monopropellant ceramic turbines). Its well-tested capabilities have proved invaluable in the deadly environment of Pandora. Its full name is the Mitsubishi MK-6 Amplified Mobility Platform, whereas the Na'vi name for it roughly translates as "shield that walks" or "not-demon walking".

The human-operated walking machine magnifies the strength and mobility of a soldier or civilian worker while providing protection from military and environmental threats. Unlike fanciful designs in which weapons were integrated into limbs, the AMP suit is a multi-purpose machine, able to duplicate all functions of the infantry soldier. Since soldiers spend much of their time loading and unloading, and performing other tasks besides operating weapons, it was determined that the AMP suit needed the same functionality as a human: two legs, two arms, and highly dexterous hands. This allows not only a wide range of functions, but allows the suit to operate a variety of weapons systems.

Arms operate in a directly scaled relationship to the operator’s arms, which allows better spatial positioning of the hands. The fingers and thumb are in direct 1:1 ratio. The servo armature has force feedback, and resists the movement of the operator’s arms when the suit's limbs meet an obstacle. The operator can "feel" what the suit is doing. It is said that the suit can be operated in full darkness, by a skilled driver, by "feel" alone.

The legs are actuated by foot-pedals which amplify on an even larger ratio. In fact the leg sensors work slightly differently than the arms. Due to the confining spatial envelope around the feet and legs of the operator, the pedals cannot move in long strides, even on a scaled relationship. Instead, they sense the force and direction of the input and the on board computer triggers a corresponding programmed movement of the legs. So the operator creates pressure and direction "cues" which trigger leg movements. The suit executes the "intention" of the pilot, calculating terrain factors and momentum to perform balanced movement. An average Marine can learn to manipulate the AMP suit in combat conditions, it takes months longer to master the transition from supine to an upright position. However, though the use of gyroscopes and stability chips, AMP suits rarely topple. Auto stability programming maintains center of balance. If the operator happens to be injured or killed, the AMP suit has an automated "walk back" feature. This was developed to protect the AMP suit, as it is a significant investment to the RDA.

Using the suit, a driver is able to punch through a tree trunk, lift a half ton cargo crate, or rapidly build prefab units without a construction crew. Its cannon obliterates anything in its targeting sights with a rain of armor-piercing rounds, at a 250 round per minute cyclic rate of fire.

Some military analysts point to the Avatar Program as an alternative to mechanically-assisted exploration of hostile environments.

The C-21 Dragon Assault Ship is a four-rotor VTOL, heavy transport craft and heavy gunship used by the RDA for full-scale military operations against the Na'vi, or as support during small incursions into otherwise hostile territory teeming with vicious megafauna and flora. It is the RDA's most powerful non-nuclear weapon on Pandora. The RDA only had one operational Dragon at the time of the film. There was actually a second Dragon airframe on Pandora, but most of the main components hadn't arrived from Earth. Quaritch led RDA forces with one of these in the Avatar film.

The Dragon is much larger, slower, and less maneuverable than an Aerospatiale SA-2 Samson. However, with its myriad arsenal of heavy machine guns, dozens upon dozens of rocket and missile pods, and possible complement of door-gunners, it can function as an excellent lead gunship when mainline Scorpion Gunships are not around. To prevent potentially catastrophic friendly-fire incidents resulting from careless use of such firepower, all but the door-guns are constrained by friendly fire IFF (Identification Friend-or-Foe) avoidance codes for safety. Otherwise, it acts mainly as a military air transport, utilizing its ability to land numerous AMP Suits, infantry, and other military vehicles across Pandora. In essence, the Dragon is the military workhorse of the RDA.

The Dragon is heavily armed with multiple weapons systems included grenades, rockets, missiles and point-defense gattling cannons.

Ability to deploy many infantry units and AMP suits at once, variety of medium automatic guns, ATG and ATA missiles, door-guns, incendiary rockets, grenade launchers, plus dual and quad gatling gun systems. All gun and missile systems are constrained by friendly fire avoidance codes (IFF Lockout).

The ISV Venture Star is a Capital Star class ship, there was at least one predecessor to the Capital Star class ships. This predecessor was 4 times as big because of its need to have cold super conductors (since no unobtanium was available when building it) which required much bigger radiators. In total there are 12 ships transporting cargo and crew back and forward between Pandora and Earth. 9 of them are Capital Star class ships (the same as ISV Venture Star).

Capabilities

The ISV Venture Star can travel from Earth to Alpha Centauri A (a distance of 4.37 light years) in the time of 6.75 years it starts with a 5 and a half month long initial acceleration at 1.5 G to reach 0.7 times the speed of light. Then it continues at the same speed for 5.83 years before the engines/photon sail (depending on which way the ships are traveling) are used to slow the ship down. During the ships decceleration it yet again gets 1.5G for 5 and a half month.

Also note that due to time dilation effects experienced at velocities higher speeds, an Earth-time voyage of 6.75 years seems significantly shorter at 0.7 times the speed of light.

Propulsion

Two matter-antimatter engines. One photon sail. One fusion PME (Planetary Maneuvering Engine).

Beamed photon power from Earth for the outward acceleration phase is what the photon sail uses. The ship’s matter-antimatter engines are used for deceleration phase on approach to Pandora. Sequence reversed for return to Earth.

Matter-Antimatter engines

Two matter-antimatter engines, arranged symmetrically in a tractor configuration(that pulls the ship behind them). They are angled outward a few degrees off the ship’s longitudinal axis so their exhaust plumes bypass the ship’s structure. This results in a slight loss in thrust efficiency since the engines push a bit towards each other, but even after this the body of the ship must still be shielded from the plume’s thermal radiation, they thought of putting the engines at the back instead but the mass-savings advantage of a tensile structure outweigh the disadvantages of shielding.Since a very long truss is needed to separate the habitable section of the ship from the engines which produce large amounts of radiation, such a structure would be prohibitively massive if it were a conventional space-frame truss designed for compressive loading. But the carbon-nanotube composite tensile-truss creates the necessary stand-off distance at one tenth the mass. Essentially it is a hard solid tow cable, engines in front and the "trailer" in the rear.


The antimatter(the fuel) (in this case anti-hydrogen) is contained by a magnetic field in a near-perfect vacuum in which it circulates as a high density cloud of atoms cooled to near-absolute-zero temperature. When antimatter and matter (normal hydrogen) are brought together, they mutually annihilate and produce an enormous amount of energy, which must be directed by an ultra-powerful magnetic field to form the exhaust plume. These photons of energy, although massless, possess momentum, and their ejection provides the thrust to accelerate the ship. Additional thrust is obtained by injecting hydrogen atoms into the plasma before it leaves the engines. The exhaust flare is an incandescent plasma a million times brighter than a welding arc, and over thirty kilometers long. The plume is considered to be one of the most spectacular man-made sights in history.

Structure

The ship's primary structure (which could only exist in zero gravity) consists of the two side-by-side engines attached to a tensile-truss of carbon-nanotube composite. This connects the propulsion section to the payload section, which includes habitation modules for crew, the cryovaults for passengers, amnio tanks for the avatars, and the cargo section. Starting from the forward end:

1. Engines, propellant tanks, and radiators. The propellant tanks are spheres insulated for zero boil-off of the cryogenic hydrogen propellant. The radiators dissipate the heat of the engine section. After a deccel or accel burn phase, the radiators will glow red hot for 2 weeks.


2. The tensile-truss that transfers the thrust of the two engines to the rest of the ship. Although thin, it is rigid enough to prevent the payload section from fishtailing caused by buildup of resonant frequency vibrations during acceleration and deceleration. The section of the truss adjacent to the antimatter engine nozzles is protected by a thermal shield of nearly perfect reflecting materials, to guard against the intense heat radiated from the exhaust plumes.

3. Cargo containers, arranged in four ranks of four modules each. The 16 modules are in turn composed of 6 cargo pods. Depending on the cargo bay configuration of the shuttle, it can hold the contents of two pods and 100 passengers in jump seats, or up to the contents of six pods and no passengers. A mobile transporter running on tracks can position a large robotic arm for transfer of the cargo modules to and from the trans-atmospheric shuttles.

4. Two Valkyrie TAV’s (trans-atmospheric vehicles) docked to access tunnels. The tunnels connect to a pressurized tunnel that runs through the truss, and connects to the habitation section.

5. The habitation section consists of three large modules containing the cryovaults and amnio tanks. Inside each module is an open frame structure of advanced composites, with non-load bearing walls made of foam composite. There is almost no metal used in the structure. This is to prevent galactic cosmic radiation from striking metal and producing secondary radiation particles. There are a number of airlocks for the crew, and portals for repair bots that look like high-tech mechanical crabs.

6. Immediately behind these three modules are the two on-duty crew modules, located at the opposite ends of a transverse truss. A pressurized tunnel runs through the truss, connecting the two units. During cruise mode, these modules can be rotated to create an artificial gravity for the on-duty crew. During accel and deccel phases, the modules fold along the longitudinal axis of the ship. In this configuration, the gravity is created by the acceleration of the ship (so all floors and walls are still correctly oriented to the gravity vector). The modules also provide centrifugal artificial gravity during the ISV’s one year loiter on orbit at Pandora.

7. At the far end of the structure is the mirror shield, which protects the ship from the intense light of the beamed-power laser from Earth. This mirror is only a few molecules thick, but reflects light efficiently enough to prevent incineration of the habitable section of the starship.

When acceleration is completed, the ship is rotated 180 degrees so that the mirror shield faces forward. Now the shield performs another role, acting as a multi-layer interstellar debris shield. Although intense magnetic fields are used to deflect stray gas molecules, the occasional dust grain requires a physical barrier. The shield is in multiple layers, spaced one hundred meters apart. Impact of a debris grain (traveling at a relative speed of 0.7C) with the first layer of the shield causes vaporization into a plasma. The spray of plasma particles strikes the second layer, and the impacts cause spalling from the back of the second layer. These particles are stopped by the third layer. A fourth layer acts as a backup in the unlikely event that something gets past the third layer. Once cruise speed is reached, this shield is detached and moved by small thrusters thousands of miles in front of the ship, to improve survivability if a larger particle of debris is encountered.

The largest component of the ship is not located on the primary structure. It is the “sail” which receives the beam of photons and extracts the momentum to accelerate or decelerate the ship. It is a shallow bowl 16 kilometers in diameter and stabilized by rotation. The material of the sail is incredibly thin, being only a few dozen molecules thick in most places. Its basic structure is a fabric woven from carbon nanotube thread, and coated with a refractory ceramic that fills in the interstices.The working side of the sail is further coated with a vacuum-deposited multi-layer diachronic reflector, which is 99.99999% efficient. What little heating of the sail that occurs is dissipated by radiation from its back side. Carbon nanotube cables connect it to the main body of the ship, and these cables also have a diachronic coating which reflects 99.99999% of the beam energy that strikes them, and prevents the cables from instantly vaporizing. When not in use, the sail is folded along molecular hinge lines, and occupies a surprisingly small volume. It is stored in the cargo area when not in use, along with the spools of connecting cables. Rigging and removal of the sail is done autonomously by the service bots, but can be done manually in an emergency by awakening the other two crew teams.

The RDA bulldozers are used for mass forest clearing on Pandora.  They first appear halfway through the movie when the RDA is preparing to open up a new mining operation under the Na'vi Hometree, destroying the Tree of Voices in the process until Jake Sully manages to halt their advance temporarily by smashing one of the dozer's cameras.

In the Avatar game there is a mission if playing for the Na'vi to destroy two bulldozers. Strangely, if playing for the RDA, the bulldozer is rarely seen. It only appears once or twice in three RDA stages, with all bulldozers being inert each time.

The dozer is controlled remotely from the operations center at Hell's Gate. The machine features a camera system mounted to a post that allows the driver to see where it is going. If the cameras are destroyed the vehicle is essentially stuck. The dozer also features a blade mounted to the back of the body allowing it to till the ground behind it.

The Valkyrie TAV (trans-atmospheric vehicle) is a delta-wing space vehicle/aircraft used to transport equipment and personnel between ISV Venture Star and Hell's Gate on Pandora and its chief purpose is to bring Unobtanium to the spacecraft. Valkyries also have an operational range of 2000 kilometers in Pandora's  atmosphere. The Valkyrie's official name is SSTO-TAV-37 B-class shuttlecraft, however the Navi name for it is Shah-tell. The Valkyrie has a payload of up to 60 armed troops, 25 AMP suits, 25 tons of refined unobtanium and/or supplies.

The two Valkyries carried by the ISV are used for transfer of personnel and cargo between the orbiting ISV and the surface of Pandora. These vessels are left at Pandora. The old replaced Valkyries craft have been re-purposed to serve as automated gas harvesters, skimming through Polyphemus’s upper atmosphere to obtain hydrogen and deuterium for refueling the ISV. Each has VTOL capabilities by pivoting the engines for landing on the planet. As seen in the picture (far right), a Valkyrie is landing at Hell's Gate.

A Valkyrie was fitted with machine-gun nests on the wings and cargo ramp, and was going to be used to deliver two Daisy Cutter explosive packages to the Tree of Souls. It was destroyed when Jake, in his Avatar form, threw grenades into the engine intake after the explosives had been armed, causing the Valkyrie to tip forward and the explosives packages to fall back inside the hold.  The explosives then detonated while still inside the Valkyrie, causing the entire ship to disintegrate in a massive fireball. The second Valkyrie was seen being used to ferry the remaining base personnel of Hell's Gate back to orbit.

 

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