Playing
Rescue Missions
You put a ship somewhere it cannot come back from, with kerbals aboard. Then you pay somebody else to go and get them. The wreck genuinely leaves your save and appears in theirs, on the orbit you abandoned it at.
What makes this different
Every other contract hands over a file at the end. A rescue hands over a situation at the start. The ship is snapshotted and removed from the issuer’s save when the contract is created, which is why the creation form puts it behind an explicit switch that says out loud that this is permanent.
If the contract never completes, the wreck is restored to the issuer. It is not thrown away, but it is genuinely gone from your save while the mission is live, and that is the point: you are not asking for a favour, you are out a ship until someone earns the fee.
Sending destroys the vessel in your save
Vessel removal in KSP kills whoever is aboard, so the removal also has to decide what happens to the crew. On the issuer’s side the stranded crew leave with the craft, because they are the contract, and they come home later as an import. On the rescuer’s side, giving the recovered craft up returns their own pilots to the astronaut complex and hands over only the borrowed ship and the borrowed kerbals.
Creating one
- 1
Be flying the ship you want rescued
The contract is written from the game, because it needs the actual vessel: its orbit, its crew, its parts and its life support state are all read off the live ship rather than typed in.
- 2
Choose what counts as success
Crew only, meaning the rescuer may strip or abandon the hulk as long as the kerbals get home. Or crew plus the vessel, a salvage where the ship has to be towed or flown home too, which is worth pricing higher.
- 3
Set the target and the margins
The body is picked from a searchable list, and the orbit the rescuer has to reach can carry margins on apoapsis, periapsis and inclination, so “get to roughly here” is expressible rather than being an exact match nobody could hit.
- 4
Confirm the permanence
The switch that acknowledges the vessel is leaving your save is separate from the send button on purpose.
The part restriction is not a choice on a rescue. The rescuer needs whatever the wreck is made of in order for it to load at all, so it is set automatically.
On the rescuer's side
Accepting a rescue does not spawn the wreck immediately. It sits as an action on the active contract in the sidebar, so you spawn it when you are ready to fly the mission rather than finding a derelict in your tracking station.
When it does spawn, it arrives on the orbit it was abandoned at, with the epoch frozen so the intervening real time has not silently moved it. The kerbals aboard are tagged with the owner’s name while they are in your save, which is reversible and stripped when they go home, and which makes an untagged roster name the test for whether a kerbal is yours.
How the crew survive the wait
This is the part that makes a rescue work between two players who do not run the same life support mod, or where one runs none at all. Three things hold it together.
Out of the simulationwhile stranded | The stranded crew are lifted out of the vessel entirely. Nothing consumes a kerbal who is not aboard a ship, which is the only approach that also works under Kerbalism's background simulation. |
A clean slate on thawnot a stored clock | USI-LS, TAC-LS and Snacks all reconstruct hunger from a stored last-fed timestamp. Handing a kerbal back with that timestamp intact after two hundred days would kill them the instant they woke up, so the thaw resets it. |
A ration kitthe rescuer's resources | A few days of supplies in whatever the rescuer's own save understands are stowed aboard, because a wreck provisioned for TAC carries nothing a USI save recognises. The default is three days, and it is configurable. |
Crew thaw on their own once you are within ten kilometres, which is outside physics load range so the wreck is still unloaded and KSP seats them as it loads. There is also a button, and pressing it twice is harmless.
Which mods are handled
USI-LS, TAC-LS, Snacks, Kerbalism and DeepFreeze. All of it is done by reflection, so the add-on references none of them and does nothing at all if you have none installed. See Life Support.
Credit for it
Completed rescues are counted per player and have their own leaderboard, separate from the XP ranking. Going and getting somebody is the one job in the system that is worth being known for on its own.