Hi Deb, this question confused me too when I started way back.
The “consolidation errata” to 4.2.5 was added to stop the marine player from using a single transport to fly in, dismounting troops to assault a target, consolidating the troops back onto the transport and disengaging to repeat the same thing again the following turn.
So Consolidating is deemed to take place during the disengagement phase, preventing
any transport from disengaging.
The way round this is to use two transports as Dave says
- #1 flies in carrying troops and carries out the assault
- #2 then flies in, landing next to the troops and embarks them before carrying out its action (usually shooting).
- Both transports remain on the ground until the end of the turn when they can both disengage as neither has had troops ‘consolidate’ into them. However they are both bullet magnets and relatively easy to destroy on the ground, so this assault and pickup is usually the last activations made in a turn.
Planetfall works slightly differently in that it is the spaceship that activates to land various formations onto the table, each formation usually being ‘scattered’ before carrying out their actions later in the turn (any consolation on to a transport preventing the transport from disengaging).
However, the marines could be deployed by Drop pod, perform an assault as their own action and later in the turn, an empty transport could fly in and pick them up to carry out an air assault the following turn.
Note, when a transport planetfalls it lands and becomes a ground transport (with zero movement), so it may not then ‘fly’ somewhere to pick up troops later in the turn.