Long space voyages requiring larger crew compartments

[Ember12]

One large hurdle to sending humans to Mars is that, if you coop up a few people in a van-sized compartment for nine months, they will go insane.  However, in KSP you can send a Kerbal to Eeloo in a MK1 pod, and I think that could use a change.

My thought is, each ship has an internal-volume/crew-count ratio, and the higher it is, the longer you can go without your Kerbals starting to lose effectiveness.  So you can go to the Mun in a packed-full command pod and that's fine, but if you go to Minmus in that capsule you'll start to lose Kerbal effectiveness on the way back.  If you're going to Duna or Eve, you need some empty crew compartments.

Centrifuge modules could provide a disproportionately high benefit for their mass, and if you reach a very high ratio of volume/crew then you don't have any time restriction at all.

 

[Catto]

yeah, i agree

[intelliCom]

Having a larger ship wouldn't necessarily stop a crew from going more insane. There'd need to be recreational facilities or hibernation to truly stop such a situation. The former solution would only be temporary anyways.

[Ember12]

From what I've gathered, hibernation is unlikely to be in the game because no one knows how to do it.  About the space requirement, I very much agree about the necessity of recreational facilities, but I don't think that it has to be temporary.  If you have a ship with thousands of cubic meters per Kerbal, that's comparable to the density of a suburb, which should be fine indefinitely.

[darthvader15001]

as long as its toggleable in difficulty settings