I've seen and experienced Orbital Drops in Starhawk and it led to a lot of camping. The drop gave away positions like no-one's business and the Starhawk mech would swoop in and either bomb the mess out of you or wait for you to emerge. Take this in Ambush and you will see the opposing side knowing exactly where to camp if there is a limited area, or watch as the map descends into utter chaos as people are dropping everywhere. It really isn't a great idea. Also, it detracts from DROPSHIPS with mCRUs, which are meant for people to spawn on and to drop from. Anyways, just my 2 cents and experience on this subject.

Reposting basically what I've said in my Sky SpawningGäó thread.

CRU spawns, since you're spawning in a Clone Reanimation unit, should work as they do now. Drop Uplinks, as a variant of wormhole tech, should work as they do now. MCC spawns involve a clone from the MCC being activated.

Ambush "random" spawns, and Skirmish objective spawns, and the Skirmish "default" spawn that's currently on the ground should all be changed to use an air-drop.

In addition to this spawn mechanic, the falling mechanics in the game need adjusting.

While a player is in free-fall - not just a normal fall from jumping, but when you've fallen far enough to take the free-fall position and trigger the prompt for your Inertia Dampener - you should have (limited) ability to adjust the direction of your fall. On activating your Inertia Dampener, you fall faster, but you light up and you lose the ability to control your descent. This makes you a harder target, but makes you more visible.

This will encourage players - while not under fire - to hold off on triggering their Inertia Dampener until the last second to avoid their blue glow giving them away. It will also encourage players who have been spotted and are actively being fired on to use the Dampener to speed up their descent and evade the incoming fire.

With Ambush spawns - adjusted as many people have requested so that enemy presence is more heavily weighted than friendlies - this would mean you're usually dropping into a less dangerous part of the map, and you have the ability to fine-tune your landing position based on the location of nearby enemies, who you'll see as you're falling. With Skirmish, you're dropping into an area your team already controls, so you SHOULD have someone handy to keep enemies off you, OR you should have reinforcements landing around the same time as you.

It's a low-orbit drop from the Warbarge, directed towards a designated "safe zone" within the battle area. Designated in Skirmish by your team controlling the location, and in Ambush by the balance of your team's presence in the area vs. the presence of enemies.

Good enough lore-based reason for you? If not, I'm sure CCP can make a better one than I did.

As I said in every post I've made so far about it, you'd only be able to drop into areas deemed "safe" - that meaning there's no enemy presence, or there's a secure position in your team's hands.

In Skirmish, you can drop on the NULL Cannons (or, as some have suggested, build CRUs into them to explain spawning on objectives), and in Ambush, when the spawn system is working properly, you'll be able to spawn in a relatively secure position on the battlefield - away from enemies, and preferentially near your teammates.

When they introduce player control to the Warbarge, this could possibly include the ability to actually direct where the orbital drop will be aimed, allowing a team's commander to reposition their spawn area as they see fit. At that point, a Corp with a commander on the Warbarge will have the option of spawning anywhere on the map, but it comes with the risk of the commander setting their team up to be spawn-camped and dropping them into hotzones without a fair chance. It will also require effective communication and team-level coordination for this to be a better option than leaving it in the hands of the AI.

And if you don't like things being out of the players' hands, are you against allowing us to use the same Warbarge to call in a Precision Strike? When working with EVE players in a Corp Battle, you can request a ship in space to fire, and you're relying on player interaction across games for their supporting fire to actually arrive. If you use the Precision Strike, the Warbarge just drops it immediately. When we have commanders on board the Warbarges, they'll be responsible for directing this fire, but until then it's NPC-controlled even thought it's player-directed. Just like the spawn system would be under my proposal.

Effectively, the current system - or any variant of it - has LESS player involvement. You're dropped into a fixed predetermined-by-code location, with no control over even the slightest details of where you're going to land. What I'm asking for is a system that gives players MORE freedom than we currently have.