IDEA! Avatar 2: Ava-Tarrer

[PeZook]

I have an awesome idea.

They could have towed the diggers across interstellar space.

That's probably NOT what they did, but think about it: the huge moon-laser that pushes the solar sail is powerful enough to fling a four kilometre long starship on its way to Alpha Centauri. Yet the Capital Star class ships built with unobtainium are said to be vastly smaller (and thus lighter), which means there's a huge power reserve in their primary power source.

So...they could have strapped those gigantic diggers on a massive cable and towed them across four light years, and then dropped them from orbit using gargantuan ablative heat shields and strap-on retropacks built with Saturn-V sized rockets.

I don't know about you, but the images this brings are nothing short of "whoa, awesome!". A hundred thousand tonne vehicle landing in the jungle on massive pillars of flame, like a beast straight out of Hell. Kills everything within ten miles of the landing site by just firing the retropacks.

[Ford Prefect]

Maybe they used different, and much larger, shuttle craft and/or mother spaceships during the initial resource and cargo-intensive phases of setting up the Pandora bases, and when the high-complexity megamachineries that can't be replicated on-site were already set up along with the on-site fabrication machines, the following space journeys involved much smaller shuttle crafts and mother spaceships.

Like how a giant facility might require initial shipments of craps by a SPRUCE MOOSE antonovski giant aeroplane, but after all the essentials are there, the successive and less-huge shipments are done by C-130s or something.

While the first interstellar vessels were bigger, they were more massive because they needed much larger radiators to handle the heat. Subsequent ISVs use Unobtanium in various nebulously defined way to reduce the need for excessively huge radiators. They aren't likely to have had significantly greater cargo capacity.

[Stark]

Y'know NASA is apparently contracting dudes to develop ballutes, as the mass of the ballute system scales well with the mass of the payload. Maybe 'parachute' is wiki-speak for 'complex multi-stage drop with parachutes at the end'.

[Simon_Jester]

The premise is that even very small masses of unobtainium have huge value for some industrial purpose- something that cannot be obtained in Sol system.

That doesn't mean it's vital to Earth's survival, I'm not even diving into that cesspit, but the reason for Pandora becoming a mining colony is logical if you accept the basic premise that there's this really cool antigravity metal there.

[PeZook]

While the first interstellar vessels were bigger, they were more massive because they needed much larger radiators to handle the heat. Subsequent ISVs use Unobtanium in various nebulously defined way to reduce the need for excessively huge radiators. They aren't likely to have had significantly greater cargo capacity.

I think that's the part that makes the least sense, actually. If you could cut three kilometres off the radiators, then the modern ISVs would have a vastly greater cargo capacity due to the mass saved. Unless the materials they use for radiators are ridiculously light, but that...makes even less sense than building smaller ships to haul your absurdly valuable cargo around...

[Shroom Man 777]

Maybe those giganter ships weren't the RDA's own vessels. And maybe right now, those giganter ships are under contract for someone else so they're currently busy shipping mountain-sized atmospheric processors to planets like LV-numbers for another obscenely wealthy amoral acronym company.