Do you prefer efficiency or safety?

[mythbusters844]

Do you prefer efficiency at the cost of safety or safety at the cost of efficiency? For example, this:

is a very efficient way of landing (due to the Oberth effect and other factors), but is obviously dangerous (I missed a mountain by 1 craft length ).

Other examples of this are cutting deltaV to the bare minimum required, not using escape systems, etc.

A few examples of cutting efficiency for safety are adding multiple parachutes, using escape systems, overbuilding launchers, and (in the case of life support mods) adding more than enough life support for the mission.

Edited January 22, 2015 by mythbusters844

[Toastedbuns]

I like to think at one point or the other I have been on both ends of the spectrum. Quite recently my command craft for a Munar landing mission had 10000 DV just so I could get my lander into position, break off, and go home. On the other hand, the lander had JUST enough delta V to destabilize the orbit, slow down to avoid crashing, and land with a little less than forty fuel remaining.

I'd say it depends on the situation to me.

[Pecan]

Safety first, so it works.

Efficiency second, third, fourth and fifth so it works better.

MJ sixth, because it's boring now.

[Greenfire32]

I show my Kerbals tender love and care.

To hell with the blasphemous "efficiency."

I build my crafts as efficiently as possible, but I fly them as safely as possible at the same time. As such, I feel I do not experience increased benefit of one over the sacrifice of the other.

[Liowen]

Fun first....everything else beyond that is secondary.

[Toastedbuns]

I too love committing mass genocide on Kerbal-kind and wasting millions in favour of fun! Do me one and crash into the Mun whydontcha!

[Captain Sierra]

I tend to overbuild my stuff and fly to avoid mission failure. Kerbals be damned I just don't want to screw up and explode. If the command pod was detachable and I could pilot the rest home with a probe core, I could care less if I kill them, just as long as I finish the mission.

[Superfluous J]

I like cutting it to the bone. If I finish the mission with more than 100dV I feel like I wasted fuel. More than 200 and I'm wondering why I brought parachutes.

[Empiro]

There's way too many choices in this poll, and it's missing a "I never let Kerbals out of the house!" option.

I try to err toward safety. This means not sending Kerbals when not necessary, and having a working abort in case something goes wrong (I play with FAR and don't revert, and I've definitely had launch failures). I do love Kerbal Construction Time's simulate feature though.

This does cost me a lot extra, because it can be unwieldy and difficult to put abort modes on a giant space station module, so I usually launch those unmanned, and launch the crew up in a safer, more tested rocket. This is pretty similar to real-life.

[SkyRender]

Safety and efficiency are not as mortal of enemies as you may have been led to believe when it comes to space travel. That said, I do tend to favor more efficient methods over particularly plodding safety measures. Since arbitrary failure is not a "thing" in stock KSP, for example, an escape tower is pretty well unnecessary as long as your upper stage can safely land on Kerbin. And from a reasonable height, the low-pass method of landing on an airless body is not really dangerous while still losing relatively little dV to gravity.

[zekes]

I do it zie german way - overcomplex, heavy, and breaks down a lot. But it is awe-inspiring when it goes off.

[prophet_01]

Safety is the priority for me. I'm playing with DRE and TAC ls so thete are couple of thungs I have to keep in mind. I do have a few safety rulesthat I learned the hard way. They might be a little overprotective but my 0.90 hard career has zero losses so far I design my vessels with significantly more fuel than I need (at least 10%, depending on the mission) and I keep the twr high in order to be able to perform emergency maneuvers. I don't recover much more than the pod (I even decouple the science equipment after extracting the data), because I'm afraid the pod might spin during the reentry due to FAR and burn up. All that extra mass and equipment left behind is quite expensive as you might expect

In order to get cash I do a lot of satelite contracts with crap-sats (yep thats how I name them) straped ontop of the cheapest srb stage I've come up with so far. Agressive negotiation is my best friend

And munar orbits/fly by/last minutebrakings at altitudes lower than 5000m are absolutely out of question

[Janos1986]

Let's say 70/30 in favor of efficiency.

[RainDreamer]

I build things until they look good. Efficiency and safety be dammed.

[Duxwing]

Safety first! I love my Kerbals and would be heartbroken should they die. Among my measures are:

-Rounding all dV costs up to the nearest hundred

-Launching in proven, reusable vehicles with escape systems

-Orbiting and ascending prograde to planetary rotation

-Quicksaving and quickloading

-Listening to or humming only soothing music during tense maneuvers

-Deactivating probe core battery until emergency use

-Omnidirectional solar panel coverage

-Large emergency budgets for rescue craft

-Duxwing

[_Aramchek_]

I prefer brute force and being awesome.