What real use are escape pods?

[Condottiere]

Again, circumstantial.

Starwarship, hull catastrophic structural collapse, trained and alert crew, plausible.

Large passenger liner, emergency drills, probable.

Spacestation, emergency drills, likely.

After that, depends on spacetime regulations, if enforced.

Free traders, likely the smallcraft, or a really powerful transmitter and the ship's larder.

 

[Reisender]

I'm pretty sure that the crew and passengers of the Aurora in the PC game "Subnautica" were glad to have escape pods/capsules.

 

[WHULorigan]

Boiling the issue down to the bare bones:

An escape pod/craft is only meaningful or useful in a situation in which staying with the ship (and its associated life support system and carried cargo/supplies) puts the crew in imminent danger, whereas abandoning the ship can alleviate that danger without subjecting them to alternate dangers of equivalent or greater magnitude. ​

How many situations actually fall into that category, and how likely are each of them to occur? That will also determine whether or not it is cost effective and practical to include escape pods in a ship-design.

In most cases, if you have access to life support (either from the ship's systems or from an independent source (such as a vacc-suit or other emergency system)), it is generally beneficial to stay close to the ship and its supplies and surviving systems, as well as its communications and sensor arrays (if they are intact in any manner), as well as its emergency beacon, etc. Leaving all of that behind to go "elsewhere" for no particular reason is generally foolish.

 

[MarcusIII]

Escape pods are probably nonsense, but consider lifeboats.

Yes, lifeboats have all kinds of use. As a life boat it that unlikely event. An auxiliary craft, etc. My 10,000 freighter I designed has a 20 ton boat that can serve as a life boat if transiting for a interplanetary trip.

 

[MarcusIII]

I'm pretty sure that the crew and passengers of the Aurora in the PC game "Subnautica" were glad to have escape pods/capsules.

so?

 

[swordtart]

Escape Pods are pointless.

That's a pretty big statement

For escape pods to be worthwhile;
The incident has to be caused from not lack of maintenance. If it is, then the escape pods would be under maintained too.

Lack of maintenance does not affect all systems the same way (either in game or in real life). Some systems are designed to be low maintenance and most maintenance cycles are based on usage. Normally lifesaving equipment is designed to sit for years benignly without any maintenance other than a check that it is present. Based on RAW skipped maintenance rules tell us the only things that can suffer damage from lack of maintenance are drives, powerplant fuel systems and weapons.

The incident has to be fast enough that you cant fix it.

An incident doesn't have to be fast to prevent you from fixing it. If you don't have the parts then it doesn't matter how long you have. Even if you fix a fuel leak you don't get any fuel that you lost due to that leak back.

But slow enough to let folks travel to escape pods.

Getting to an escape pod might take minutes or seconds, especially if the ship has protocols in place to cover periods when the ship is most stressed e.g. pre-jump, pre-emergence, landing and take-off. A repair to a power plant might take hours.

It has to be a really polite disaster.

If there opposing forces that required you to leave. You're still dead. Or at best captured.

To capture you or kill you they need to find you and hunting down 100 life pods is more work than killing 1 ship.

Most planets arent inhabitable. So even if escape pod can make it to a planet. The planet will you too.

There only has to be a single marginal planet in a system to make landing worthwhile. Other than corrosive or insidious atmospheres any atmosphere is better than vacuum. If there is no marginal planet in system then you can still remain in the pod. It doesn't have to land. The adventures indicate that life-pods contain some equipment and Stranded is posited that you arrive in a life pod. So rules as intended are that they are useful.

If you're in an uninhabited system. You're still dead. As most planets will kill you. If what you were up was legal. You'd have to be declared over due. Then probably declared mission. So that at least 2 weeks. On top of how long you have live to reach that point. Then after you're declared missing you have to wait for travel time to get to you. Even optimiscally thats a month, month and half.

Here the lack of any information about the pods gives us issues. It clearly has some life support but we don't know how much. Presumably enough to last to get you to a planet surface, but without knowing the acceleration of the pod we don't know how long that might be. We could say hours but days is probably more likely. However it only takes a tiny amount of fuel to provide life support for months. If you aren't using the fuel to power the drive then you can use it to power life support instead for even longer. Add in Fast Drug and you could extend that to years.

If your in an inhabited system, then declare SoS, and wait the few hours for someone to get to you.

Depends where you are some 100D limits are days out at 1G (planets sitting within the 100D of the star for example). If you are relying on the main world to rescue you (because there isn't much traffic) you might not have that long just sitting in a rescue bubble (though again fast could extend this). With a re-entry pod you could always meet them half way. Just because a system is inhabited it doesn't mean it even has a space search and rescue capability. It is unlikely a planet with Class X or E star port has anything that might be able to help you, but can provide a four course mean and a hot bath if you can make your own way there.

Escape pods provide nothing.

No escape pods provide less than nothing.

If you want escape pods to work they are entirely credible. If you don't you can make credible arguments why, but neither stance is absolute or undeniably true.

 

[swordtart]

Boiling the issue down to the bare bones:

An escape pod/craft is only meaningful or useful in a situation in which staying with the ship (and its associated life support system and carried cargo/supplies) puts the crew in imminent danger, whereas abandoning the ship can alleviate that danger without subjecting them to alternate dangers of equivalent or greater magnitude. ​

How many situations actually fall into that category, and how likely are each of them to occur? That will also determine whether or not it is cost effective and practical to include escape pods in a ship-design.

In most cases, if you have access to life support (either from the ship's systems or from an independent source (such as a vacc-suit or other emergency system), it is generally beneficial to stay close to the ship and its supplies and surviving systems, as well as its communications and sensor arrays (if they are intact in any manner), as well as its emergency beacon, etc. Leaving all of that behind to go "elsewhere" for no particular reason is generally foolish.

The majority of case will end to support staying with the ship. However there are plenty of edge conditions where an alternative would be useful as a back up and Vacc-suit or bubble might not cut it.

The issue of course is that in a properly run ship no disaster will occur. If you decide to not invest and one of those circumstances arises then you won't live to regret it, so no harm done

 

[Sigtrygg]

So how big are these escape pods? What are you going to sacrifice for them? How many do you have to have installed?

Let me guess, they are free and magically are accounted for in some other ship system. How about 0.25t of a stateroom is the escape pod allocation, every low berth and emergency low berth can double as an escape pod.

Why don't you just have an emergent transported that beams the crew and passengers to safety? Or how about the ship computer rapidly scans the memory/personality of every crew member along with their genome sequence. This data packet is encoded to multiple redundant systems and is broadcast so anyone can pick it up by just jumping ahead if the information wave and detecting the transmission. The crew and passengers can then be resurrected.

Note that this latter system is perfectly doable with current MgT game mechanics...

 

[MarcusIII]

So how big are these escape pods? What are you going to sacrifice for them? How many do you have to have installed?

0.5 tons and cost MCr0.1 per person. And since they are in no way interplanetary in range one would just get a small craft useful for other things instead.

 

[phavoc]

The lifeboat discussion (current and historical ones) usually devolves into two broad camps - the ones who say its' pointless and the ones who say it isn't.

The game has a perverse idea that spaceships only travel in jump space and emerge 100D from the single world in a star system that has THE starport on it. Beyond that the idea that a star has a SYSTEM attached to it is ignored or extremely vague. Most adventures are based upon leaving one system and traveling to one or more destinations.

Is it cost effective to make every cabin it's own 'lifepod'? Probably not. And if you aren't providing a spacesuit for every person on board, getting them out of that lifeboat may be difficult. It's not very practical to say you'll set up a temporary airlock at every cabin to evacuate the people inside, and if the ship has structural damage you may not be able to re-pressurize sections. One could say - "oh, every cabin has a rescue ball in it for the occupants!". A possibility, though practically it has some big potential problems - but it's a reasonable alternative. Just like having universal/disposable vac suits for temporary use. The game really doesn't get into this aspect, nor should it necessarily. It's much more on the outer edges of gaming and describing such things is better suited for a supplement or journal article - which, of course, begets the rage war on whether or not it's a rule if it ain't in the main books.

In reality lifeboats became a thing after people died. Nearly all safety concepts are foisted upon manufacturers after there are deaths because, well, the public tends to get up in arms over stuff like that and when they are exposed to things they want to know the system are there to keep them alive. Actually paying ATTENTION to the safety briefings...meh! Who cares? After all these planes don't crash, and ships don't sink! What a waste all this stuff is!.... at least until the next accident where people die and at least some of their deaths could have been prevented had their been safety equipment present.

Most of this concept is going to be biased towards civilian liners that are much larger than the single one in the books. A good example is the Fhloston Paradise ship from The Fifth Element. In that case it blew up - so staying onboard or evacuating in rescue balls wasn't a possibility. Granted having megalomaniac's / shape-changing mercenaries putting bombs on ships is probably not a regular event. However it does illustrate the need to be able to abandon ship in a hurry. Cramming people onboard a lifepod and giving them fast drugs would make it quite possible to store a lot of people in a small space while the awake crew pilots the lifeboat away.

Anyways, it's mostly a theoretical discussion, so always interesting to hear about different methods and applicability. One never knows when an adventure seed will be started based upon something that some feel is superflous to a game. I know my players have siezed on ideas > I < didn't think of when planning an adventure. It's always good to be prepared, or to at least have an understanding.

 

[phavoc]

So how big are these escape pods? What are you going to sacrifice for them? How many do you have to have installed?

Let me guess, they are free and magically are accounted for in some other ship system. How about 0.25t of a stateroom is the escape pod allocation, every low berth and emergency low berth can double as an escape pod.

Why don't you just have an emergent transported that beams the crew and passengers to safety? Or how about the ship computer rapidly scans the memory/personality of every crew member along with their genome sequence. This data packet is encoded to multiple redundant systems and is broadcast so anyone can pick it up by just jumping ahead if the information wave and detecting the transmission. The crew and passengers can then be resurrected.

Note that this latter system is perfectly doable with current MgT game mechanics...

Size of them would be variable, depending upon need and people carried. And also how they work (rack-em and stack-em and turn the lights off while they wait, or provide them actual seats and food/water/fresher facilities while they are awake the whole time). As they are escape craft making them cryogenic low berths isn't practical - a shot of fast drug is much cheaper and more flexible.

Like anything else you have to pay the credits and space for them. That's how ship designs work. Most players do min/max designs, so some certainly struggle with these kinds of ideas as "inconceivable!" (insert image of a semi-bald Sicilian here). In reality naval and and aircraf designers make these sorts of tradeoffs all the time. Most ships and aircraft tend to NOT be equivalents as designed by players.

I never bothered with the Singularity campaign as I thought its premise was too far out there - at least for my Traveller tastes. Kind of like the premise behind the Cymbeline lifeforms for TNE - conceptually I was ok with fall of the Imperium and even AI-crazed bots and starships... just not some of the other aspects of these things. In TNE's instance I picked up the supplements that I liked or were interesting and tossed aside some of the other ideas and went from there.

 

[swordtart]

I just looked at real life escape pods and the B58 fully enclosed ejection seat is an eye opener. Taking up no more space than needed for the normal seat it is pressurised allowing ejection at high altitude and contains survival gear and supplies (sufficient for 3 days on the arctic ocean completely unsupported). From that it looks like a 0.5 DTon escape capsule should be able to have similar performance (the air requirement is higher but life support in Traveller is quite low impact). We can be more efficient than 1960's tech.

Setting aside an additional DTon per stateroom is not beyond credibility. The cost is also negligible amortized over the life on the mortgage. The biggest hit would be the opportunity cost of the loss of 1Dton of cargo. There would be no ongoing life support costs as the pod will only need replenishing if it is used (and then it will likely need complete replacement anyway).