rescueing kerbans

[Stilgar2300]

So right now I'm very mun focused right now since it has multiple biomes. After two accidents stranding two crews of 3 on the moon and the hastle of launching two rescue missions I've decided on putting an unmanned station into low münar orbit with twelve small craft who's sole purpose is to land and take the kerbans home. Does anyone else take such steps to ensure the safety of the little green men or am I just weird

[Kialar]

No. We are 2 weirdos.

No mission with plan B to rescue the crew.

[MalfunctionM1Ke]

Wrong! We are three

[Kialar]

victoRRy issss ouRRRRsssss, becausssss many we aRRRRe.

[Spatzimaus]

Once you've played for a while, this issue won't really come up for three reasons:

1> You'll be less likely to have the sort of accidents that strand the kerbonauts in the first place. I haven't had a single stranded Kerbonaut since I restarted my campaign in 0.22, because I tend to overbuild both in fuel capacity and landing leg strength.

2> Unmanned vessels are handy for a lot of stuff, like mining vessels or gigantic boosters. The control nodes are lighter than a manned capsule, and the electricity cost is negligible once you get solar panels. The fact that no kerbonauts are risked in the process is just an added bonus. All of my stations, mining landers, rovers, and so on all use unmanned nodes; if they have any crew capacity, it's not necessary to function.

but most importantly:

3> When you're making hundred-ton vessels, adding a bit of extra crew capacity (a small hitchhiker module, or using a 2- or 3-man capsule when you only need 1) to a vessel doesn't hurt much. I've got several designs that, if need be, could fly to Mun to pick up any stranded kerbonauts. Heck, my standard Mun rover uses a 2-man capsule but is typically unmanned, so I could just send one of those to them, and each has enough rocket power built in to bring them back to a Kerbin space station if need be. (Or just drive them to a moon base.)

Now, there's no reason not to put that station around Mun anyway. It'll come in handy refueling vessels, and if you give it a small utility lander with a hitchhiker you'll be able to pick up all those stranded guys for easy transfer to a shuttle. But in the long term you just won't need that sort of thing as much, so you'll want to design that utility vessel to do other useful stuff as well.

[larsmaehlum]

I've landed multiple Hitchiker Storage Containers on the Mun(and a few other places) to rescue bigger crews. I love those missions.

I ended up making a standard craft for those missions, as they tended to happen quite frequently for a while.

[magnemoe]

it makes some sense, however you should also have rovers. as it can be hard to land near enough to the target.

Three is probably overkill, you will get better at landing, had on standing accidents while doing carrier twice.

[el_coyoto]

Same here : playing KSP and treating Kerbals as an expensive capsule furniture does not really suit my gameplay style.

I take great steps in ensuring that my Kerbals are flying a safe rocket, including Kerbal rating of said rockets with unmanned flights. I also avoid sending 3 Kerbals in a tiny capsule to Eeloo and enjoy taking habitability into account : so an interplanetary transfer module of mine will have several Hitchhiker pods, whereas a lander designed for a "land-flag-photo-return" mission will probably not include one, depending on how much time the Kerbals will have to spend in their tin can.

In fact, most of the fun I derive from the game comes the very high value I attach to Kerbal lives and the design compromises I have to face when designing ships.

I even designed a SAR spacecraft with a lot of delta V and a few Hichhiker pods, but fortunately I haven't needed it yet...

[MalfunctionM1Ke]

Here is my Dres Rescue Mission

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[Liowen]

I made a single pod rescue ship, with a probe attached to it so it can be used unmanned (just have to remember to take the crew out before launch) when I did my first Mun try. This was my backup in the event that I did something very wrong. Basically it was my lander I already had with a small probe body slapped into it, nothing fancy but I figured it would work...though to be honest I never actually used it....

Maybe now I should redo it and see if the concept is valid, since it was deleted after my Minmus landing was done.