Speaking of rescue missions that succeed or fail by a hair, would it be worth having at least a day or two of possible uncertainty in when escape pods die? On the one hand you have the Cold Equations experience several people have written up of the Admiral looking at when they will expire, knowing there isn't a fast enough ship to reach them by then, and turning back through the jump point in futility. But that means you never have the pod that lasted a little longer because not every one assigned to it made it off the ship (... perhaps suspiciously so? Did a coward abandon potential survivors to maximise their own chances?) and the supplies therefore stretched far enough, or there was heroic sacrifice so some of them could see home again, or... For that matter, there's no overcrowded pod with people dying just hours before rescue when there was still days left in the according-to-specifications survival window, sabotage or poor maintenance killing those that had just started to process that they have barely escaped with their lives, ...