Sorry I'm just replying to this now. Apparently nothing alerts me when a post is made so I didn't notice :(. And probably you won't notice this reply either. Oh well.
A penalty for pod death is an interesting thought. On the one hand, I sort of want the pod's survival to be its own end-goal. As soon as there's a concrete consequence, people will think "well, it's actually not worth it to save this pod; much better to just take the penalty." But on the other hand, if there's no in-game consequence, it can be hard to make it feel like a real failure.
Yeah I've thought about using rockets for something. I've actually added a separate way to get rid of pods recently, using "life pod stabilization modules." I agree rockets should do something, but I don't know what. If you can launch any pod into orbit with a rocket, then the end game will just become "can you launch rockets as fast as new pods land?" which is sort of silly.
