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Description

The craft that carried the Martians between the worlds to wage war, Cylinders are on the whole comparatively simple devices. While they contain a lot of sophisticated equipment they are ballistic projectiles fired by great cannons to cross the gulf of space. They do have some capacity to change their course during their flight, though most of their ability to effect their own course has been made with deceleration in mind. In their front is a set of retro rockets which burn in the last legs of their voyage to bleed off speed before and during reentry so that they can touch down safely, which produces the distinctive green falling star effect. Less well known is a nose section designed to crumple up on impact and a set of side mounted deployable panels which act as a parachute before breaking off during it's dissent through the atmosphere. Only one of said panels was recovered during the first invasion when it touched down in wales and most of them are believed to have ended up in the Irish Sea, though more were found after the Second Martian Invasion. While the general shape for cylinders has remained standardized, some variation of their internal configuration has been noted. In the Second Invasion, several variants were brought along alongside the generalized models of the first invasion which included rapid deployment craft which had several fighting machines ready for combat and dedicated cargo and passenger units.

Some scientists and engineers such as Tsiolkovsky and Goddard have wondered about the use of Ballistic Projectiles as spacecraft by the Martians, viewing that it is a rather cumbersome method of sending travelers from planet to planet compared to rocketry. The most commonly accepted reason for this is that the Martians concluded that building a few large scale cannons to fire projectiles was a more cost effective way for interplanetary transportation in the long run than building a fleet of rocket ships.

Description

The craft that carried the Martians between the worlds to wage war, Cylinders are on the whole comparatively simple devices. While they contain a lot of sophisticated equipment they are ballistic projectiles fired by great cannons to cross the gulf of space. They do have some capacity to change their course during their flight, though most of their ability to effect their own course has been made with deceleration in mind. In their front is a set of retro rockets which burn in the last legs of their voyage to bleed off speed before and during reentry so that they can touch down safely, which produces the distinctive green falling star effect. Less well known is a nose section designed to crumple up on impact and a set of side mounted deployable panels which act as a parachute before breaking off during it's dissent through the atmosphere. Only one of said panels was recovered during the first invasion when it touched down in wales and most of them are believed to have ended up in the Irish Sea, though more were found after the Second Martian Invasion. While the general shape for cylinders has remained standardized, some variation of their internal configuration has been noted. In the Second Invasion, several variants were brought along alongside the generalized models of the first invasion which included rapid deployment craft which had several fighting machines ready for combat and dedicated cargo and passenger units.

Some scientists and engineers such as Tsiolkovsky and Goddard have wondered about the use of Ballistic Projectiles as spacecraft by the Martians, viewing that it is a rather cumbersome method of sending travelers from planet to planet compared to rocketry. The most commonly accepted reason for this is that the Martians concluded that building a few large scale cannons to fire projectiles was a more cost effective way for interplanetary transportation in the long run than building a fleet of rocket ships.