SECOND! I like the idea of mission failure having consequences, and mission success has rewards. Like the more missions a Kerbal has flown the more experience he has so the better he pilots the ship. But if he crashes and dies you loose all the training and experience that he had. I agree that this would make rescue missions of trapped skilled crew members much more stressful/demanding, but if successful a very rewarding endeavour. Also would be cool if the Kerbals could get injured not just killed in a crash, then they would have to spend time in the KSMC (Kerbal Space Medical Center) recovering for a time before you could use them again. The worse the crash the worse the injures (up to and including death) and the longer they have to recover. However not sure this would be that viable if people could just speed up time until the injured Kerbals got out of the hospital. Would still be a cool RP element though. A second thought about Kerbals getting exp/skills. Having a really skilled/experienced crew could not only make them able to keep the ship more stable like the SAS & ASAS, make the ship better and easier for you to control, and also make your ship more fuel efficient. Added to this could be the need to have a crew with good enough skills to even get to some of the other planets. Then maybe if they come back from a successful mission some of their experience they learned can be added to the training program for new Kerbolnauts still in the KSA (Kerbal Space Academy), that way if you do happen to crash and all of your most skilled crew dies you don't necessarily have to start over from scratch. There could maybe even be a way to add training for failed mission as a "well that didn't work, lets not do that again" type thing. Because you can learn from mistakes as well as success, (especially in the beginning) But you can choose how much training to give a kerbal you recruit, the more they are trained the longer it takes before they are ready. I also think that a freshly trained Kerbal no matter how much training he did is not equal to another kerbal with actual experience. But what you can do is make it so they are ready to attempt more dangerous missions without having to do all the small stuff first. Now for a third thought. From the looks of it there will be a budget/resource system in the game at some point. I have a few Ideas about that too. First off training takes time, time costs money, so the higher you train your Kerbal in the Academy the more it will cost. Then once you have all these well trained and experienced Kerbals, you actually have to pay them to go on missions, the more training/exp the higher their salary. Also if they get hurt it will take money to heal them, the worse they are hurt the longer they stay at the med center and the more you have to pay to keep em alive until they are full healed. (Sorry for rambling, I just keep getting Ideas. Might be the sleeping pills I took just before reading the forums as I am getting into bed.)