Have you left kerbals to rot somewere

[Curveball Anders]

I might leave some to stew from some years due to planning and schedules, but I never leave anyone permanently behind.

[Secuas]

I once send Jeb on a 3 year vacation to Laythe

[ARS]

I never let any of my kerbals rot anywhere not in Kerbin. The farthest is probably Duna during a botched landing sequence that destroyed the entire ship (though the rover inside survived), so I let jeb, bob, bill and val take a road trip there forever. Since then I always do my mission with "No one gets left behind" principle

[Urses]

The near left behind was a combination of my naivity and absolutely dumbness to use EVA.... Minmus landing predicted to be a lithobreak test and in my wisdom to use EVA Fuel before hands... short Kerbal was stuck on a nearly perfect circular orbit with PE + 1m above highest Mountains and AE at +5m. And as my skills where realy below anything possible to get a Craft with a cargobay in range and catch him up.... he wizzled around 1 year there... i am not realy sure if his Courage was at max and dumbness does concurence with sand before... but the experience clearly is a explanation for it... so many ice so snacky... and you don't get any... poor Kerbal 

[adsii1970]

Nope. There's two options... RESCUE MISSION or go *poof* in some sort of fiery death.

[Eldrad_Ulthran]

More proof that dres is worthless: nobody has left a kerbal to rot there. LEOELELELELELELELELELELEL

[Overfloater]

On a Sun escape trajectory, sometimes.

You know how it can be, a transfer to Jool takes a long time, so you may want to do other missions in the meantime. That gets you sidetracked, the Jool mission is forgotten, and the insertion burn doesn't happen.

You think about loading a save, but so much progress was made during the Jool transfer, that it would be too much to compromise. 

[vitekc45c]

In my sandbox save I have Jeb and few others in LKO along with some ground base equipment. Originaly I intended to send them to Laythe, but I didnt and I never bothered to send them back.

[Kerbal pancake]

I have a group of kerbals stranded on tal (I’m using OPM) jeb is coming to save them but he took a trip around Sarnus first.

[Geschosskopf]

Did you know that a nose-down Mk 1 pod is a perfect fit for the bottom of the Mohole?  With no way to open the hatch?

[[insert_name_here]]

1 hour ago, Geschosskopf said:

Did you know that a nose-down Mk 1 pod is a perfect fit for the bottom of the Mohole?  With no way to open the hatch?

Now I'd like to see you engineer a craft with a claw on the bottom that descends into the Mohole, grabs the pod and comes back out. That would be awesome.

[invision]

true story......

landed on eve for first time, had no idea gravity was so high, i get out of my rocket and jump, and i slam into the ground and die............

/cry

[Geschosskopf]

22 hours ago, [insert_name_here] said:

Now I'd like to see you engineer a craft with a claw on the bottom that descends into the Mohole, grabs the pod and comes back out. That would be awesome.

Well, this happened long before the Klaw existed.  I gave some thought to using a KAS winch, which did exist in early form back then.,  However, I ultimately decided, as I usually still do, that this Kerbal's rescue cost exceeded his replacement cost.  Which was zero, because this was a sandbox game, which was all we had back then anyway.  So I left him to rot, as the OP asked about.

However, I admit to being a bit bothered about this.  The trapped Kerbal's pitiful whining on the radio (back then, pods never ran out of EC and didn't need antennae at all, let alone networks, so there was no shutting him up) was affecting the morale of the others.  Something had to be done.  So I buried him under a deep enough layer of Whack-a-Kerbal projectiles to block his signal  

This wasn't intentional, at least to start with.  I originally intended euthanasia.  It's just that I fired the 1st projectile without checking its size, which was where I'd left it last time, at a rather wider diameter than the Mk 1 pod.  As such, the projectile wedged in the Mohole a bit above the target and utterly blocked anything else from getting down there.  So then I scaled the size way down (to eliminate as much void space between them as possible) and basically poured a couple of cement trucks worth of them down on top of the 1st big one.  Problem solved  

 

Edited November 3, 2017 by Geschosskopf

[Archgeek]

On 11/1/2017 at 2:36 AM, Overfloater said:

On a Sun escape trajectory, sometimes.

You know how it can be, a transfer to Jool takes a long time, so you may want to do other missions in the meantime. That gets you sidetracked, the Jool mission is forgotten, and the insertion burn doesn't happen.

You think about loading a save, but so much progress was made during the Jool transfer, that it would be too much to compromise. 

You see, were it me, I'd design some sort of monster of an ion-powered rescue boat and go intercept them and force that escape trajectory back down to something Jool-crossing, aiming for a gravity assist with Jool and hopefully Tylo, then abuse the excess delta-v in the rescue boat to make the final return trajectory a bit non-hohman to get 'em home faster.

[James Kerman]

I like victims engineers to man my ISRU rigs.  I lure them into a capsule with snacks and send them off-world forever.

[Twitchi]

Purposely send Jeb to rot on eeloo .. he needs to let other kerbals drive!!

Edited November 8, 2017 by Twitchi

[Bill Phil]

I once sent a poor guy to Laythe, and never had a plan to rescue him... That was way back in the 0.2x versions, though.