Kerbal Audience

[Bilfr3d]

What about having an audience of kerbals beside the launch pad that watch the spacecraft take off, and if your space ship crashes into the kerbals in a bad launch, lots of bad things happen.

[bgraves]

I have no idea why the public would ever want to see any launches from my space program. After all, there are more astronaut casualties under our belt than there are billions wasted on rockets filled with soon-to-be-casualties.

In all seriousness, They probably wouldn't be right up next to the launch pad. Radioactive exhaust, right? And what if I wanted to launch a super-secret-spy-satellite? I wouldn't want crowds there for that. How much of a crowd even shows up for your average, run of the mill satellite launching?

[Bilfr3d]

I have no idea why the public would ever want to see any launches from my space program. After all, there are more astronaut casualties under our belt than there are billions wasted on rockets filled with soon-to-be-casualties.

In all seriousness, They probably wouldn't be right up next to the launch pad. Radioactive exhaust, right? And what if I wanted to launch a super-secret-spy-satellite? I wouldn't want crowds there for that. How much of a crowd even shows up for your average, run of the mill satellite launching?

Well, they probably will be a fair bit back from the rocket to be away from fumes, but really, they would only be there to add some visual authenticity and (if you crash) some extra fun (because they would probably start running and rioting around). Maybe after a while, some (eventually all) of the kerbals will walk off. I dunno, it is a discussion.

[rdfox]

As Charlie Bolden puts it in the intro spiel to the Shuttle Launch Experience 4D ride at Kennedy Space Center, "If you're within about 400 yards of a Shuttle launch, the heat and blast will kill you. If you're within 800 yards, the sound pressure levels will kill you. And if you're within about a mile or so, the alligators will kill you--all those low-frequency vibrations really rile them up." So if viewing stands are ever added to KSC, they should definitely be at least as far away from the pad as the VAB is, just for safety reasons.

That said, a set of VIP viewing stands by the VAB would be really cool to have--and the glory of it is that you might not actually have to populate it with actual Kerbals. A number of NASCAR race tracks, wanting to disguise less-than-sellout attendance, have taken to simply applying random colors to each individual seat in the grandstands, so that when you see them from a distance or panning quickly past them on television, you see a sea of colors that looks like the stands are full even when they're empty. The devs could use a similar trick to make the VIP viewing stands look full from a distance without actually bothering to even make a detailed texture map of Kerbals sitting in the stands to put on a flat surface, much less go to the trouble (and processor load) of modeling each individual Kerbal in the stands.

That said, after the experience of attending the STS-135 launch (and getting stuck in traffic for three hours getting out of Titusville--yes, it took me less time to drive from Port Canaveral to my final destination of Fort Lauderdale than it did to drive from Titusville to Port Canaveral!), it appears that the bulk of people who go to see any space launch--manned or unmanned, special or "routine"--tend to watch from public vantage points outside the space center's boundaries, partly due to the relatively low number of tickets available to see the launch from inside the fence (IIRC, STS-135 had about 1000 passes for viewing the launch from the Apollo-Saturn Center and 10,000 for viewing from the further-away Visitors Center, with over a million people on hand to see it), and partly because it's significantly less expensive to pay five bucks for parking and watch from a public park that's ten miles away than to pay twenty bucks per person for admission to the KSC Visitor's Center to watch it from seven miles away. (The STS-135 passes were, and I'm not joking here, literally $75 per person and there was a lottery draw to see who'd get them, but that was increased above the normal price due to the anticipated demand.) So while you might have a fairly small group of Kerbals in viewing stands and a grassy viewing area relatively near the pad, once some form of infrastructure is depicted on Kerbin, it'd be really fun to see the roads near the center lined with cars parked so that people could view the launch--again, this could probably be depicted with simple color splotches on the texture map instead of fully modeling most of them (maybe some near the launch site and near the landing approach path can be fully modeled to explain what they are), thus avoiding any real hit to framerates due to the new additions.