Ethics of Space Travel

[NASI Director]

First off, I'm not talking about real life, hence why this isn't in Science Labs or The Space Lounge. Now for the main entry...

Whenever I do manned space travel, there are certain things I just cannot do. I cannot do anything longer than maybe a 7 day orbit around Kerbin without sending to people (Kerbals?) along. So if I were to send a manned flyby to the moon, I wouldn't be able to only send one Kerbal. It just doesn't see right to me.

I cannot build a manned rocket without an escape tower. However my escape towers are not able to save a Kerbal from impending doom, they're just meant to make the Kerbal feel safe and to not flip the f*** out.

I also cannot do any sort of space station without some sort of means of return back to Kerbin.

So now I ask, what are your limits on manned space travel? Or lack thereof? Are you willing to risk the mental instability of a Kerbal who has been alone for too long? Do you torment your Kerbals with no means of escape from a failed Whackjovian rocket? Will you summon a Kerbal to a one-way mission to a space station without any means of return than his small EVA jetpack?

[TwoHedWlf]

My kerbals all live to die in a horrible fiery death in deep space. It's their only desire in life, who am I to keep them from that?

[FlamedSteak]

I never deliberately strand a Kerbal, but I still seem to do it an awful lot. I rarely do solo missions that are longer than a few days.

[The Destroyer]

The kerbals die for science! And for fun, but don't tell them that.

[panzerknoef]

I do quite a lot of one-way missions, but i still have ethics though! All of my stranded kerbals recieve supplies on a regular base. I don't like the fact of kerbals being alone in their command module, every stranded ship will always have a hitchiker container coming up for the kerbals to live in.

[Dizzle]

Same as OP, I never send them out of the Kerbin system alone.

[Spatzimaus]

Same as OP, I never send them out of the Kerbin system alone.

I'm the opposite. I almost never use multi-Kerbonaut vessels, because the chance of failure is high enough that I don't want to risk more than one Kerman. (The fact that Jeb just WILL NOT DIE means it's nearly always him by himself on long missions.) The exceptions are my manned space stations, which generally have 2-3 Kerbonauts on board at any one time; those stations come with four dedicated 1-man escape capsules, and my main one will usually also have a larger hitchhiker vessel docked for resupply.

That doesn't mean you can't take precautions. My Mun/Duna rockets had an escape core, a low-weight module with the absolute essentials (capsule, RCS tank, etc.), capable of safely returning to Kerbin from anywhere within Kerbin's SOI if it ditched the rest of the stages in one shot. (Outside Kerbin's SOI, that core would be enough to get into a recoverable orbit.) Originally I did something similar for my spaceplanes, but honestly, once a plane gets past takeoff the risk of catastrophe is very low (since there's no staging) so it wasn't worth the cost.

[maltesh]

First off, I'm not talking about real life, hence why this isn't in Science Labs or The Space Lounge. Now for the main entry...

Whenever I do manned space travel, there are certain things I just cannot do. I cannot do anything longer than maybe a 7 day orbit around Kerbin without sending to people (Kerbals?) along. So if I were to send a manned flyby to the moon, I wouldn't be able to only send one Kerbal. It just doesn't see right to me.

Um, a manned flyby of the Mun doesn't have to take seven days. A Hohmann transfer to the Mun gets there in about seven hours, and can easily land and return to the surface of Kerbin in less than 20 hours. Even a round trip to Minmus using Hohmann transfers takes only five days or so.

For me, the primary rule is: "As few one-shot spacecraft as is possible." Almost everything gets designed to be refueled and reused, and landers tend to be single-stage affairs. Why bring another lander to the Mun/Duna/Eeloo/Etc when the previous expedition left a perfectly usable one in orbit the last time it was there? Just add fuel. I haven't sent Kerbals to any surface that required a multi-stage lander since 0.18.

Things designed to return to Kerbin are the obvious exception, An object that descends to Kerbin's surface is either going to stay where it lands, or be recovered, so I don't bother designing full-reusability into Kerbin lifters, or Kerbin Landers.

I do not design escape systems for launchers, though. There are no failures in my space program, and any claims to the contrary are SUBVERSIVE LIES, spread by VILE TRAITORS AND SPIES about things that DID NOT HAPPEN.

[SpaceSphereOfDeath]

I never deliberately strand a Kerbal, but I still seem to do it an awful lot. I rarely do solo missions that are longer than a few days.

This is me, except I like making things harder for my self, so on interplanetary missions I like to give each pair of kerbals a hitchhiker (if there's 3 I just let them share)

[Sirrobert]

My kerbals like living, but I informed them that they are willing to die for science, so there's that.

I haven't had any deaths yet though

[vexx32]

Ethics? What ethics? My little green minions don't mind; they're helping me take over the universe, and they love​ that!

[Landwalker]

I never perform crewed landings on other celestial bodies without at least two kerbals in the landing capsule.

The intent is less "ethics," though, and more "I once got an EVA kerbal killed because he jumped on Minmus while running down-hill and built up too much speed by the time he hit the ground, so I want to make sure that if I ever do something like that again, I have a backup pilot to get the lander home."

That said, I do endeavor to never strand or kill any kerbals. As a result:

1) Abort procedures on all crewed craft.

2) Kerbals

are not allowed

on any of my plane designs.

3) Uncrewed probes precede crewed capsules to all intended locations in order to find out whether or not I can get them back to Kerbin safely.

[Barefoot Friar]

I'm playing one game where I will not be doing quicksave reverts or launch reverts and where I must avoid killing Kerbals as much as possible. It has meant putting probe cores on experimental ships (although I did copy over a lot of craft files from another game that won't require any testing) and building escape proceedures, but that's not difficult.

[celem]

Yeah I have an aversion to killing them off. But I generally disregard their sanity and have no problems sending 1 kerbal in a lander can to eeloo and back. I do have a thing where they have to wait for their return transfer window on the surface in their suit rather than in the can. Everytime I switch back to that ship it feels like he's just been for a walk. My argument is that Kerbals are all somewhat insane as a base-level of existence. The solitude is unlikely to damage their weird little psyches.

The station thing really doesn't bother me, I regularly have far more crew aboard than return capsules currently docked. I can generally dock straight off my launch these days so sending those capsules up feels trivial and there are ports dedicated to those alone always sitting available.

I must admit spaceplanes are my major diversion from this set of ethics. Almost all my space stuff is done with the orange suits. White suits are my spaceplane testpilots and they do die from time to time. I dont build aborts into rockets, on the very rare occasion it goes that badly wrong i can usually manually save the pilots. Spaceplanes all get fully fledged abort routines since the situation comes up a frightening amount of the time, yet the difficulties involved in ssto spaceplanes and hypersonic sub-orbitals means even abort routines dont save them all. Feels right to leave them as dead, as a ex-roguelike player I dont scum/simulate and they are heroes on the 'Lost' wall at the barracks.

[Rainbow-Dashie]

On rockets, i have all the usual safety features, and ejection crap...

On planes, they're lucky if they get a parachute! To much extra mass, to hard to fly!

[Britpoint]

I just have the one rule: "Everybody comes home alive".

I have no qualms about sending them on missions lasting years into the great beyond or on space station expeditions, but they always come home eventually. Anybody stranded must be rescued. All my rockets have an abort sequence or some sort; my favourite way of doing it is to have the Service Module engine fire and decouple everything below that. It's a good way to escape from bottom-up explosions on the launch pad or boosters coming loose and going haywire. Failure is still a lot of fun of course! Sometimes things go wrong on the ascent or you stage the wrong thing and it takes some creative piloting to get them down safely. And there are always going to be a few heart in mouth moments where everything just goes up in a huge fireball and you just have to hope the tough old capsule survives the inferno.

[sporkafife]

I've only had one Kerbal death on my career mode so far, and the first Duna landing site was named in his memory.

I was trying to build an SSTO space place with a full eject system (decoupler, sepatrons and a parachute on the capsule) just in case. However, after a few prototype missions were successful, I decided it wasn't necessary. In the first mission with the new spacecraft, it became aerodynamically unstable because the lack of an escape system shifted the CoM too far back :'(

Ironically, the eject system that would have saved the Kerbals life would have probably moved CoM far enough forward to cause it not to flip out, negating the need to include it in the first place. My Spaceplane program is on hold pending a full review of the incident

[Saberus]

My abort stages have just switched to something universal and simple, 4 sepratrons with their exhaust aimed at the cockpit/capsule/probe core. Something goes wrong, pop the abort and carry on. (IE revert the flight and try again.)

[annallia]

Anything within Kerbin's SOI = do whatever so long as they make it home. It just doesn't take long enough to require things like a hitchhiker container to act as living quarters to go to minmus or mun.

Outside of Kerbins SOI however I always send a little care package along with them. Usually a fuel satellite to top them off before they return (maybe even grab a little extra before landing if it looks low). As well as a small base type lander just in case they do get stranded.

[Dean Harper]

I don't like reverting or quick saving. If I send them to their deaths, they stay dead (I'm so, so sorry Jeb ).

With that in mind, I don't like leaving men behind either. If they die they'll probably get a probe with their name on it, but if they are alive and stranded I will do whatever I can to get them back. That's why I've never put boots down on Eve. I know I can get them there safely, but I don't know if I can get them back.

As for multi Kerbal missions, I'll either send a one man mission with a lander capable of returning to Kerbin or I'll have one man go down and one stay aboard the return vehicle. I don't like leaving vital pieces of equipment unsupervised. From what I can tell, they don't mind long periods of isolation (I assume they spend their hours/days/weeks of downtime trying to figure out a rubix cube or something), so I have no issue with sending them out alone.

[Whirligig Girl]

Lunch Escape Prevention System - Prevents loss of lunch during launch.

Launch Safety System - Prevents loss of life during launch

Boilerplate Crew Modules - Empty out all manned vehicles until after two successful launches of a new large-sized vehicle. (sometimes I forget to empty out the crew roster each time I make an edit and they launch anyway. Also don't forget the probe cores!)

Stability Augmentation System/Sickness Avoidance Scheme - Press T before launch!

Spacelab Return Vehicle - The Spacelab 1 station (modeled after Scott Manley's space station from IQ e12) has a command pod and an RCS pack to return home.

Few launches over the distance of Minmus that are 1-man.

[Duxwing]

My Rules:

-What is not reasonable may be corrected at whim

-What is remains

Game Setup: stock KSP lacks a correct aerodynamic model, and I therefore use FAR and DRE. Coping with this model requires fairings, which I acquire from Procedural Fairings. Unity and the above hate large parts that have single nodes, and I therefore use the Joint Enhancment mod from Ferram. Kerbal Engineer Redux provides data that every rocket scientist has, and the clouds and cities mod makes Kerbin beautiful.

Gameplay: I test almost every craft in a sandbox save that I've titled "Simulator" before they launch in my Career save. If a bug or monumentous blunder (e.g., accidentally hitting "Launch") occurs, then I correct it because the end of maintaining overall immersion justifies the means of temporary gamey-ness. I'm considering reverting this rule to account for random part failures, Kerbal error, and political pressure.

Craft Building: My aircraft's cockpits can decouple from their fuselages and parachute to Kerbin at zero altitude and zero airspeed. My Kerballed rockets lack escape towers and instead deactivate and decouple all their stages if a lifter failure occurrs (see "Gameplay").

-Duxwing

[NASI Director]

I recently put a space station up in orbit and have about 3 return modules docked to it. I only plan to have two Kerbals manning it though. However I also have a ton of debris orbiting equatorially so that's a problem.

[AndrewBCrisp]

I take a few basic precautions to keep my Kerbals alive.

I usually code an abort option into a crewed spacecraft in case something goes wrong during launch. Generally this consists of shutting down all active engines, decoupling the CSM from the rest of the launch vehicle, and lighting up the CSM engine - this lets me get the Kerbals clear before deploying the chutes.

My early missions to the Mun and Minmus employ free-return trajectories, again if something goes wrong and the engine isn't able to put the craft in orbit. Of course, with the first Munar and Minmus flybys, free-return was the only option...

Outside of that, I usually have an orbital mission that will simulate the length of time for an exploration mission, to test how well Kerbals will respond to microgravity, confined spaces and relative isolation for that time frame. This lets me make adjustments to space program priorities to make sure my Kerbals return healthy and sane.

[dudester28]

I sent two rescue missions to rescue Kirk Kerman. Because of TAC life support, I had to make the rescue fast or let him die.