Sherdas Kerman, RIP

[Starchaser]

So I had a few hours between times on my alarm clock, and I looked into my mission ribbons from FinalFrontier. 

I had a red tag by one of my pilots.

Turns out, I had sent this pilot alone to the mun, to plant a flag for a misson, and had a probe piggy back on his rocket, carrying an orbital scanner. 

Apparently, I burned out of mun orbit, and burned down for a re-entry trajectory, then forgot to set the time on my alarm clock. Since his periapsis was around 25km he died when I failed to pay attention to him.

 

I am bummed about this error. 

What would you do? continue on, or page through the savegames and find him still alive?

[Geschosskopf]

Well, fist thing, I'd got into KAC's settings and make sure to turn on SOI-change alarms (which are off by default).

Second, I'd go on about my business as if this never happened.  Kerbals are available in "seemingly unlimited supply" as the official description says.  They are born/hatched/cloned/whatever simply to be menial labor for the few things probes can't do by themselves, such as fixing flat rover wheels.  They're totally expendable.  Treat them as such.

[Zeiss Ikon]

It all depends on the way you're playing this game.  Some folks like to play without respawns or resets -- "if they die, they die."  Others like to "edit out" the bad parts, and would obviously go back to a save before the omission -- and then grumble their way through redoing all the other burns and maneuvers they had done before the fatal moment.

Still others would delete the save in disgust.

There's no wrong way to play KSP, as long as you're having fun.

[Starchaser]

I should complete this by saying what I did.

I decided I'd see how much I'd lose, if I went back and tried to correct the mistake. I saved at that point, and loaded my savegame from when I sat down after coming home from work It turned out at that point, he was still alive.

So all I had to redo was complete a docking mission (I'd already docked, just needed to transfer a kerbal) undock those ships, and set their SOI shift from Minmus to Kerbin, Skip checking on my synchonous orbit of Minmus because I already knew the sector wasn't under me yet, and it's set to pop a new alarm for the next periapsis, go through re-entry with Sherdas, and then re-land Jeb and his lander with 6 tourists on the Mun.  Not bad at all.