Of if all the star systems of interest have space stations, you just need to get close enough to one of those to call out a rescue ship, you don't need to land on the planet.

That's a bit of a stretch, but if we're going to allow any of a number of SF conceits (including FTL) then why not some kind of super-tech to allow extreme suspended animation life support.Īlso, if 'rescue ships' might be a thing, then a lifeboat that can't land on a planet can work. Depending on the game's suspended animation technology, that can also reduce the life support needs, and at least in some games, allows for 'drift in space to be picked up 100s or 1000s of years later' lifeboats. (again reference the Soyuz capsules and the ISS, granting that the ISS is not intended to 'go anywhere'). It COULD even have better acceleration performance than the main ship. So a space ship life boat could be considerably smaller than the ship itself. A space ship probably caries at least some of the following that don't need to be carried by a life boat: extra crew space for comfort, extra mass for crew comforts, FTL drive and fuel, fuel for longer endurance than may be necessary for a life boat cargo, weaponry, defensive shields (a life boat can have a single use re-entry shield that must be oriented the right way), scientific instrumentation. But that doesn't make it not worth carrying. Stay with the wreck.Ĭlick to expand.Sure, a space ship life boat needs to be a fully functioning ship to be most useful. Lifeboats aren't really practical and are very seldom useful. The big problem in either case is that space is so huge and hostile, and orbital mechanics so demanding, that you need a lot of life support, consumables, shielding, and delta-vee to do anything about it. One problem in the first case is that ship explosions, like that of HMS Hood and USS Maine, for instances, tend to be sudden and allow no time to abandon ship. The exceptions are when the wreck is about to explode and for some reason you can't jettison the volatile fuel or ordnance, and when the wreck is on a trajectory for disaster. A spacesuit is not an analogue for a life-jacket or parachute because in space there is no way to sink or to fall. In space it is almost always best to stay with the wreck. Aircraft sometimes have parachutes and escape hatches because aircraft can stall spaceships can't. Ocean-ships have lifeboats because they can sink spaceships can't. In more-or-less realistic spaceships (1) is okay, but (2) has the problem that you can't build escape pods with enough life-support endurance, delta-vee, or re-entry and soft-landing capacity that are any smaller than the ship, (3) is the same as (1), and (5) is simply death. Some of those depend on spaceships being watercraft or aircraft in disguise - which, to be fair, they often are by genre convention.

Jettison the pod ftl