Hammond.
That stupidly massive rat/hamster thing.
In-game, he isn’t too much of a problem to deal with, and in the story, he’s… alright.
HOWEVER, I cannot stand the origins of that stupid rat. It makes no sense. I hate it. It’s disgusting, it’s abhorrent, it’s unrealistic, even for fiction, and it makes my blood boil. I want to disintegrate the rat. I want to smash the rat into a concrete slab repeatedly. I will have none of this.
For the past hour, I have been getting more and more unreasonably angry trying to understand Hammond’s origins. So, according to his origin story, it says Hammond got ahold of, or made some pod, and attached it to Winston’s pod, and simply hitched a ride back to Earth. Right? WRONG.
That shouldn’t be possible. Hammond and Winston should be floating in space right now, slowly asphyxiating as their air supplies drain in perpetual high Earth orbit. Why? I’ll explain why. Sit down, grab a beverage of your choice, and have a read through my tale of anguish and suffering.
Here goes.
From the origin story, we know that Hammond attached his own pod to Winston’s capsule, and Winston flew them both back to Earth, as to which Hammond jettisoned himself and ended up landing in Australia. Physically, this could work, only up to a certain point. With the design of the Overwatch capsules, they don’t have an entire detachable service module that carries engines like today’s spacecraft, instead choosing to use three engines in a triangular formation instead, on the capsule itself. This leaves room for a hook to attach itself in the center of the capsule, letting Hammond bring himself home, right? No. No matter what the circumstance is, someone is losing. With today’s spacecraft, the engines are pointing directly backwards, away from the front end of the ship to maximize efficiency, and to burn for the most delta-V for their fuel amounts. You might suggest, “just tilt the engines, idiot! It won’t burn the ball!” While this might work for a while, the engine efficiency is reduced, needing more fuel for the same delta-V, as there is now horizontal velocity as well, but is being cancelled out by all engines firing toward one another, even by a little bit. This shouldn’t seem like an issue, but given that Winston returned home from the capsule alone, fuel is very limited.
A return capsule with its own engines likely only has enough fuel to bring itself home, given the lowered gravity away from Earth. Even with some hypothetical extra fuel, the weight of Hammond’s stupid ball would create a few issues. How, you may ask? Extra weight, and lots of it. Hammond couldn’t sit in a metal ball and wait a week; he had to have packed some sort of life support and food with him for his journey, or else he would have died before we could even discuss the fun parts. It takes about a week to actually travel to and from the moon, assuming you’ve already waited for and performed your transfer burns. Winston of course had to do this from the moon, so Hammond needed to last about 10-14 days on his own, completely self sufficient in a metal ball. Food for a hamster might not sound like a lot, but in a microgravity environment with a singular and weak form of propulsion, every pound counts.
During flight, even more issues arise. With a loose cable towing a massive metal ball behind Winston’s capsule, inertia would quickly become a problem. Even if Winston completes his burn(s) and deactivates his engines, Hammond would still go along a bit faster, and take Winston with him. This could be corrected with minor burns, but every burn does cost fuel. Whether corrections are done with inline reaction wheels or reaction control thrusters, Hammond is still making life that much more difficult for Winston, having to constantly manage his own capsule and its orientation. And what if Winston needs to do an emergency burn? What if he fell asleep before a burn window and quickly needs to turn retrograde? There’s always the chance Hammond’s cable could tangle up Winston’s craft, offsetting the ball’s weight to one side, making further burns incredibly difficult.
Somehow assuming Hammond is able to not run Winston out of fuel and stay out of his way, we get to the reentry phase. In the origins story, Hammond is depicted just releasing himself from the monkey man and plummeting about 60 miles back to Earth, unscathed. Realistically, this simply would not be the case. In order for that stunt to work in the first place, Winston needs to be flying the craft already in the atmosphere, low enough as to which gravity can pull the ball down. At this point, Hammond would burn to a crisp in the atmosphere. Heat shielding is required on any spacecraft planning to return to Earth, assuming they want to survive. Please tell me where on Hammond’s stupid metal ball is ANY sort of heat shielding. Even if you want to assume it’s built into the ball itself, that returns to an earlier point. Heat shielding is very heavy, given what it’s used for. That large increment of weight would even more severely affect Winston’s ability to fly, raising the chances to run out of fuel mid-course, trapping the two in orbit, or on a collision course with something.
Let’s just say somehow Hammond survives the reentry. He’s dead anyways. Where are his parachutes? Without any sort of parachutes, he’d just smash into the ground and become a big ol’ pancake. Yum.
Let’s review now, shall we?
In order to get home, he’d have to survive getting off of the moon, somehow surviving for almost two weeks, not running his monkey man out of fuel, surviving atmospheric reentry, surviving landing, and then surviving under Earth’s new conditions not experienced on the moon.
See? He can’t. He’s a stupid incapable hamster. There is no way he should have made it to Earth, even in fiction. This is why I want to bludgeon that stupid rodent so badly with a sledgehammer. He shouldn’t have made it.
And with that, I rest my case. Stupid rat.