Emergency Medical Services on Kerbin

[Goddess Bhavani]

EMERGENCY!

EMERGENCY!

Considering our usual Kerbal casualty rates, do you provide Kerbal medical services? I was pretty curious thanks to a recent RL career change, so decided to play EMS in sandbox to see how it felt. And oh a friend of mine, who did the narration for the below parody video, suggested I make some references to the old Emergency! TV show!

To explore this topic in the name of fun and giggles, I constructed an air ambulance out of an existing Minmus surface base module and used a new building added in recently released Kerbin-Side Kampus as a hospital.

I was in for quite the surprise. It was very fun - Time constraints, having only 30 seconds of reserve fuel, lives in danger, impossible landing on a mountainside, all in a day's work! Except Jeb did not think it was so fun. He was meant to have 'simulated' having spinal injuries but in the course of production actually ended up losing all motor function!

In the scenario, Jeb and his girlfriend embarked on a road trip to the "Central African" mountains and managed to spontaneously overturn his 1989 Ford F-150 replica. An AL-5 air ambulance on standby at the Kampus Hospital helipad was sent to retrieve them while Jeb threatened to post about his 'faulty' truck all over the Kerbal equivalent of Jalopnik.

After no small effort to maneuver what is indeed a space station module with tiny wings and huge engines onto rather treacherous sloping ground (required creative use of nacelle angles), one of Valentina's many sisters attempted to stabilize the casualty; Jeb having suffered spinal injuries during the crash.

In his zombified state was not able to climb up the short ladder into the ambulance's side door so was unceremonially shoved inside and off she goes!

Full disclosure: The cripple could either stay there and get roasted by the afterburners, or use the 'dishonorable' revert function, so revert it was to simulate being shoved into the ambulance anyway!

The air ambulance raced back to KSC at transonic speeds to generate cool visual effects, landing on the hospital roof with barely 5% of fuel remaining; it might have just been a 50km rescue but turboramjets are not exactly the most economical of engines and I couldn't use basic jets as they don't generate enough thrust to be useful in this application. Thanks however, to one Joss Whedon, visionary of Earth, whose iconic Firefly-class cargo ship served as the engineering basis for converting a Minmus base into an air ambulance / mobile lab!

So, I thought to share my Kerbal EMS story and ask - what do you do to keep your Kerbals alive (if any )?

[Sharkman Briton]

So cool! Pandora, you are the KSP player we all want to be like.

[Yukon0009]

Now you have to build us a hospital to go with it

[Rath]

I have a pair of nuclear quick-rescue rescue craft at my station.

[Hotaru]

Very cool ship and video. Nice backwards takeoff!

I've never done this myself, have given some thought though to following a rule of always rescuing Kerbals who land more than a few kilometers from KSC instead of using the magic "recover" button to get them back from halfway round the planet. Basically it would give a little more incentive (beyond just funds recovery) to try to land at KSC rather than just any old place on Kerbin.

The main thing that's put me off doing it is the lack of plane parts in early career mode, which would potentially mean permanently stranded Kerbals from suborbital flights until I have enough parts unlocked to build a rescue plane--not to mention the difficulty of retrieving spacecraft and splashed-down Kerbals. Those seem like solvable problems though.

[Fiddlestyx]

That is so awesome, when do we get to take it for a test drive?

[lordlundar]

Very cool but impractical. After all, a better option is having a permanent fixture parked right between the launch platform and the runway. If you're lucky they won't even need to be transported there.

[Goddess Bhavani]

That is so awesome, when do we get to take it for a test drive?

My apologies, I was on mobile data most of this month and it just had to run out last weekend.

The craft discussion thread is here

And here's the KerbalX craft download page.

Looks great on SketchFab too!

Edited September 28, 2015 by pandoras kitten

[Specialist290]

I have to say that I'm constantly pleasantly surprised at how much effort different players will put into making their experiences meaningful and enjoyable for others. Excellent work on all fronts, pandoras kitten!

[peadar1987]

Hmm... My Kerbals don't seem to ever need medical treatment. They have exactly two states: grand, and exploded.