I'm trying to find this and am having difficulty, it is probable that I have an out-of-date version of the Errata. Could you please provide a link if it is online? I would like to view this lifeboat concept to get some ideas for MTU.
CT errata and some other interesting tidbits are here:
http://dmckinne.winterwar.org/trav.html
I have sometimes included lifeboats in my HG/TCS designs, taking the view that lifeboat nay-sayers were about when the Titantic was designed and "staying with the ship" was one of the drivers behind Biggles not getting a parachute in WWI. Even today lifeboats are not part of most (all?) submarines, but not because it is safer to stay with the ship in a hostile environment.
The opinions here though are all decidedly against lifeboats in space, which I find curious. What have you guys read that I haven't?
Can you provide a link? Anyone else got any links?
A bit of exploration on lifeboats, and a critique of same, can be found at Atomic Rockets:
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/advdesign.php
To summarize the arguments against lifeboats:
Your ship is designed to protect you from the hazards of space, most significantly vacuum and solar radiation. If all power fails and the hull is holed, it will
still do a good job of protecting you from solar radiation. In any case where the ship itself does not face imminent destruction and rescue is available - which is the case at any A-C starport and might even be the case at some D ports - any emergency measures that would give you life support, while rescue comes for you, can just as easily be used on the ship itself as on some pod ejected into space. Unless the ship itself faces imminent calamity, you are better off sealing holes and making a refuge in the dead ship.
With only the resources available to us moderns, you can survive on a ship days or even weeks - we today have such resources to help miners trapped in mines and mariners trapped in submarines to stay alive until rescue reaches them. And in a game that offers 6G ship's boats, getting rescue from the starport to the ship doesn't tend to take long.
The imminent destruction scenarios boil down to situations where disaster is unfolding too quickly for even a 6G boat to get to the ship in time. Probably the most popular - and least likely - is the sci fi trope of abandoning the ship before it blows up. Think that one through: if the ship is about to blow up, then there is something on the ship which is known to have a risk of blowing up. If you know it's there, and it fails in a way that gives you time to abandon ship, then it is also giving you time to jettison it safely away from the ship, assuming only that the ship is designed to do that. Better to design the ship with a way to eject the ticking time-bomb than to require that passengers flee their best shelter. Conversely, if there isn't time to eject it, there isn't time to reach the lifeboats.
The other popular one is crashing: falling from orbit, or finding yourself on a collision course with some world or other significant mass and with no ability to change course. That's a popular trope in space fiction, but when you think about the scale of space, it's less likely than a passenger plane being hit by a large meteor. If you are navigating with some intelligence, you're making very sure that your course doesn't intersect known masses ahead, just in case those drives fail. If you are flying with half a brain and your drives fail while coming in from deep space trying to achieve orbit around some world, the result is you will overshoot your orbit and fly on out into space (most likely to be rescued by a tug), or perhaps end up in some wide parabolic orbit. Traffic control is NOT going to give you an approach that might result in a ground impact if you screw it up, and no sane pilot would chart such a course. If your drives fail and you spot a mass in your sensors, sensor ranges are long enough that you attitude jets alone are more than adequate to ensure a miss. (This by the way is an excellent reason not to rely on gyros alone.)
The only time you're actually at risk for falling from orbit is when you're in orbit (assuming some calamity takes out your drive while giving you a push that sends you falling), trying to achieve orbit, or descending from orbit to make a landing. In orbit isn't an issue at most worlds: you're headed for the starport or docking at the highport, not lingering in orbit.
If it happens while you are descending, then one assumes you're in a streamlined ship. Your problem then isn't the descent - Trav ships are built pretty solid, and it's a good bet your controls, inertial dampers and attitude jets have access to emergency power and backup control lines. Your problem is the sudden stop at the end. Escape pods might be useful, but whether you'd have enough time to organize an evacuation of untrained passengers between the moment you realize the problem and the moment you go thud could probably feed an entire thread full of debate. Your best bet is something like an ejection seat with a chute, and plan to eject in lower atmosphere after you've decelerated to an acceptable speed. One can (arbitrarily) decide that any small craft couch meets that requirement; there ought to be
some reason that this glorified easy chair comes in at half a dTon and costs 25 thousand credits. Better in most cases would be to aim for a large, deep body of water.
If it happens while you are launching from the surface trying to reach space - well, it's about the same problem as descent.
All of that sums up to saying: for the vast majority of ships on the vast majority of flights, lifeboats are unneeded because there's a starport handy to give you a tow or send out a rescue boat, and events too quick for a rescue are also too quick to make anything but an ejection seat practical. Exceptions would be ships visiting systems that did not have available rescue or whose population was hostile to ship and crew. In other words: warships, explorers, and merchants who planned to frequent worlds with little or no ground support. You might note that both the subsidized merchant and subsidized liner come with a boat.
As regards submarines, to the best of my knowledge it is in fact usually "safer to stay with the ship in a hostile environment." There've been efforts to make ways for men to get off a submarine without external assistance, but the challenges in getting a human body safely up from the depths are daunting enough that the preferred option has become getting a rescue craft attached to the ship and pulling people off in that. There is at least one sub that carries its own escape craft, and it's not a bad idea, but space is not the ocean depths: there's not a giant fist of death outside waiting to crush your ship like a grape or to rush in like a juggernaut smashing everyone and everything in its path. There is only the great cosmic vacuum cleaner.
