From the Legends of the Eight Worlds...

About the Eight Worlds

Sometimes things went wrong. Sometime, in spite of the best damage control a ship went down. When this happened, the crew had to resort to the ejection pods. On the face of it, this was a trivial proposition. All they had to do was claw themselves free of their acceleration couches, fight their way to an airlock battling g-forces and spin as the ship broke up around them, strap themselves into a complicated and unfamiliar piece of equipment, pull the release, and hope that the system functioned. Properly.

In practice, this was rarely a satisfying experience. Indeed, we cannot recall that there was ever a successful ejection in the Eight Worlds -- though one crewman of the Golden Horde, M4G-272 New Carina, did survive to reach the polar sea of an uncharted world, where he subsequently perished due to his injuries, exposure, falling from an ice floe, drowning, and being eaten by large aquatic predators. This lead some cynics to hypothesize that the ejection pods were never intended to be actually used and were only provided to give starcrew a false sense of security in the event of an emergency.