The pod took willpower and self control. 

Windowless, stripped down and jury rigged, it held two beings and their gear, in the form of weapons, munitions and other supplies. One strapped into a yoked seat with all sorts of reinforcement on top of repulsor-assisted gravity cushioning and environmental systems designed for on thing (theoretically); deliver payload alive, intact. Some would probably get hit. Others might malfunction. Knight Revan was clearly no humanitarian, the plan had all sorts of risks, not the least of which was of people sacrificing themselves. The risk was not careless, but it was a risk nonetheless. He could respect the Jedi's elan.

Besk had no illusions; battlefield expedient tech never was designed to work well, just to work. Before climbing in and strapping in, he attached the hose from his oxygen supplies to his helmet. He tied everything down and then he taped it too, because loose items would bounce around and cause a harm all of their own as they sped down into the amosphere, the forces of gravity pressing against them despite the attenuation of repulsorlifts. These pods were faster than any starship, smaller and designed not to be easily tracked on targeting systems. That was the whole point of the operation, but it wasn't reassuring to be trying these things out operationally for the first time. No one ever said if the engineers that put them together tested them personally. IRSOGs had turned into shock assault units, boarding forces and the like, but they were also designed to raid, to hit and fade. On the other hand, the Jedi were here and it was perhaps thought that they would add some teeth.

Then, trying to avoid thinking about this potential death trap, because he was Mando, not insane, he focused on strapping himself down in the one of the two heavily padded harnesses in the compartments. Basilisk drops, the inspiration here, were different. You rode the metal beast, you steered it, you watched the planet grow larger. This was more gestational and deprived, leaving a being sealed in with their doubts for company, at the mercy of the tech more profoundly than when he'd done it on a droid's back. It wasn't easy to conceal the impatience; he was eager to get this ride over with and feet on the ground, into the actual fight at hand. The waiting was interminable, the action was muscle memory. 

It didn't show, as he was, of course, sealed behind a helmet. He checked the status of the systems on the armor to make sure it was sealed properly. If they lost atmosphere in this thing, he'd be alright. He'd advised his partner in this to seal up in a suit and go in with a mask; they were going into a place of blaster fire and debris, all of which could puncture the skin of their pods. 

He tried not to notice the activity out the entry hatch; that was at the top of the pod, whereas the part that would face atmopshere was much more armored and didn't have any airlock or entry-way. A typical pod would have a heavily reinforced bottom with ablatives . It was, inevitably, the heavy part that would plow into the ground upon landing, still hefty even after the ablative coating was taken out in atmospheric entry. Here, it was reinforced with shields as well, intended to give it some armor against blaster fire and debris hitting at a faster-than-intended velocity.

The hatch closed with a clang. There was more rattling as the pod was put into place; the Incisor had been refitted to launch the pod at a faster velocity than before, with longer tubes that jutted out of the ship's hull. The details of the system were never communicated in the briefing because it was a briefing already brimming with schematics and other data, but it suddenly occurred to Besk that he would have felt better having some sense of how they were going to launch the escape pod. Magnetism? Repulsors? Rockets? Ion-engines? No idea.

Most escape pods would have windows of some sort, to allow a person in the pod to see out and perhaps signal to ships or assess the atmospheric conditions outside, but in a combat vehicle, windows were a structural weakness and were done away with. The interior was pitch black except for a couple of operating lights that allowed the riders to see around them, but there wasn't much to see. Then, there was a roar and shuddering as the pod was hurled into space at an extreme velocity. Even with the repulsor-lift attenuation and heat shielding, the gravity and the heat could be felt as they burned down. It was perhaps better to be unable to see any of it coming, the ground fire and whatever else was there, or to see the sphere of Javku grow alarmingly large as they plunged into the planetary gravity so rapidly. He occupied himself with numbers -- the number of detonators he brought, cataloguing the weaponry. They had to get out of the landing area fast, they had to keep it moving.

He shook in that harness, glad for the layers of beskar'gam and padding beneath that that he wore, glad that he had the means to survive a breach of the thin skin of the pod. As it turned out, though, none of that redundancy was really needed. The landing came with the rumbling of thrusters as the pod expended what little it had in the way of power to brake itself before it landed; it came down surprisingly soft and the seats disengaged as soon as it was down; the cabin, what little of it there was, was bathed in red light and announced, "15 seconds to hatch opening." That wasn't a lot of time to get to feet and ready a weapon, or to glance over to see if his partner was disoriented or not from the fall. Outside, he could hear the other pods hitting the ground. Some of them were loaded with weaponry; their thrusters roared and then they hit the ground with a bone-shaking force.

Then, suddenly, the pod split open with small, controlled blasts as the skins fell away, and he was already putting an armored boot on the ground, disruptor rifle shouldered as he moved forward. The fears of the moment were gone as soon as there was action to react to. He operated on the muscle memory, the immersion in the moment. He found a target and squeezed the trigger, feeling the recoil of the weapon even as he watched a blue-armored figure crumple. He was already looking for the next target as his drones floated around, picking the targets and relaying the telemetry to his rifle and his helmet. All around him, it felt as if the world were suddenly erupting as the auto-turrets opened up, using sophisticated republic programming algorithms to identify friend versus foe. 

A sidelong glance caught the pods that didn't quite make it, or the trails of the ones that took damage and plummeted, potentially killing some. There was no place for sentimentality here, there was only the way forward, out of this killing ground. Once he found a place to hold up for a moment, he did, keeping up a volume of fire with his disruptor weapon while he calculated the next movement. They had to get out, but they couldn't just sprint across a field, not if they could help it...