How Important is Kerbal Safety to You?

[TheHockeyPlayer]

I did a poll on this a while back, but now that KSP has entered it's beta stage, I wanted to find out again.

Personally, I care about my Kerbals a lot. I do whatever is within my power to keep them from dying.

[Mr_Brain]

I care greatly about the well-being of my kerbals. That's why, as soon as I have the tech, I mostly send probes.

[Captain Sierra]

Kerbals are too valuable not to risk. That sounds counterintuitive, but EVA reports! Ergo I tend to take some precautionary measures. Kerbal Experience being implemented in the (warning: brazen opinion incoming) p--- poor role-locked implementation it is actually does make some kerbals very valuable so I tend to take a bit more precautions than I used to, but I'm not going to spend an hour designing a safety system that I almost never need to use (my lifters are pretty proven).

[bwarren109]

This sounds bad.

I try to keep the original three alive, but the rest I don't care about as much. I try to keep them alive as best I can, but everyone makes mistakes.

[SkyRender]

I'm probably not nearly careful enough with my Kerbals, honestly. So confident am I in the safety potential for my various craft that I don't even bother with abort systems on them. Granted, I think the last time I had a rocket actually suffer explosive and spontaneous unplanned disassembly on the way to orbit was some time around 0.18, but still. My Kerbals must think their engineers are insane.

[astropapi1]

Testing mission abort systems, doing unmanned test runs, designing my missions with multiple configurations so that things can be changed en-route... Yeah, I'll take the first option.

Seriously though, I haven't landed Kerbals anywhere other than Duna, Mun, and Minmus because of that, I think I should just let go and stop giving damns about this stuff. After playing 6.4x Kerbin for a while I kinda burned out. The sheer ammount of planning I was putting into stuff was way too much for me to handle, I think it's time for a mission to Jool on a freaking chair.

[UmbralRaptor]

Career: choice 2. While safety measures exist, it's a fundamentally dangerous job.

Sandbox: choice 3. They are fully expendable.

[Johno]

I have to confess that I care so much for their safety that I'll revert to VAB if there's even a whiff of a catastrophic failure. I justify it by saying "It's a simulation".

[King Arthur]

Choice #1 for everything.

Except when I'm "simulating" stuff, then it's revert-ahoy.

[Captain Vlad]

I keep my boys alive if at all possible, to the point of having an orbital rescue craft that doubles as an escape pod on my space station. That said, I don't believe that the crazy-brave astronauts in my space program would be satisfied with a probe-based effort; they're there to explore, damnit, not to sit around and let robots do their job for them.

I do USE probes, just mostly as precursors to manned missions or for repeated contract fulfillment.

[Doomedspeed]

My heart breaks a little everytime Jeb dies, I don't know how i can put myself through it so often.. Just don't want him to go..

[RainDreamer]

Not very much, because I have the godly power of time control through save/load.

Launch escape system? Psh, my launch will always be perfect.

[MGCJerry]

They assume the risks when they board the rockets. They are guaranteed an explosion controlled or not. If the design permits an abort procedure, ill add one. If not, bye-bye whoever Kerman.

[Janos1986]

I use Mission Controller 2, so I get fined 20k every time a kerbal dies.

Yeah, I'm very concerned about their safety.

[CalculusWarrior]

I mean well by installing Launch Escape Systems on my rockets, but spaceplanes tend to murder my kerbals by the dozen.

[Bacterius]

I mean well by installing Launch Escape Systems on my rockets, but spaceplanes tend to murder my kerbals by the dozen.

"Okay, we're going to start tests on the new SSTO prototype. We need 18 brave kerbals to report to the spaceplane hangar immediately."

[DMSP]

It does not break my heart when a Kerbal dies, but I try everything I can to save them/not kill them.

[Heimdall5008]

Kerbal saftey is really important to me. In all my carrer/science games I lost only 1 Kerbal till now (not counted any Kerbals that were devoured by the Kraken...).

[Jouni]

The last time a kerbal died was in 0.22. Then I discovered the quicksave/quickload functionality in the game.

[pandaman]

I try my best to keep them safe - Rescue missions, and specially designed rescue vessels etc. And I feel guilty if any perish due to my own carelessness etc.

[Troubletcat]

Only a soulless monster could let their Kerbals die. But I play with no saving/loading and I rarely include a better escape plan than "stage off everything that can be staged off and deploy the parachutes" so sometimes accidents happen (especially with spaceplanes)... plus the stranded Kerbals I've lost when they've run out of life support before I could get a rescue ship to them... i cri ever tiem

[diego999]

Jeb, Bob and Bill can't die. If something goes wrong, I just reload.

The others... not so much.

[Bill Phil]

I forgot chutes once, and I gave the poor guy a monument on the Mun. When he died I had to leave the game for a while.

[Red Dwarf]

I like all my kerbals to stay alive, but outside of that, their actual safety isn't so important. One time I had to get 12 kerbals off the surface of Gilly. I could have easily gone EVA to get them to the mothership, but who has time for that? I stuck em all in command seats around the outside of an ion craft. Hang on tight guys, you're in for a looong ride!

[livefree75]

In Career mode, I try my hardest to keep my Kerbals safe. In Sandbox, I still express a moderate level of consideration. But if I'm just testing stuff (strapping a bunch of SRBs to a command pod to see how high it goes ) I don't bother to put a parachute.