I have been thinking about this escape pod thing for a while now, it's been bothering me... The way I see it, escapes pods (at least the GC style ones) were relitively piontless to the average player, the reason being that theres no motivation to get in one when your ship explodes, as its way faster to simply either die in the blast or commit suicide so the player can spawn again. But, being the really, really bored person I am, I think I've come up with a way to make escape pods not only practical but useful. So here goes:
I think that it's relitively probable that most space maps will have stationary bases with hangar bays. These should be the destination of all escape pods, which should have sufficient fuel (if u decide to the GC route with the fuel thing) to reach it. I believe though that the crux of the matter would be giving the player a reason to use the pod instead of suiciding just to spawn again sooner. To motivate him to do so I suggest a system of rewarding the player with a sizable sum of pionts when he lands a pod in a hangar. I also thought up a system I think might be able to do that.
In every hangar bay (probally away from 'run ways') there should be a large 'escape pod recovery pad', big enough for about 4 pods to land on. Now these pads are actually a seperate 'object' from the floor. They could be the type of object that the commander asset things are (like the radar dish, an arty). I'll get to the reason why they should be that in a second.
Anyways, the escape pods them selves would have to be special too. Would probally be a hassle to code, if what I propose is even codeable. When they're in they're little launch rack/tubes in the ships they should be closed capsules, just like they where in GC. There shouldn't be any open door to get out of the pod, and the exit piont (I mean the piont the player goes to inside or out of the viechle when he presses the button to get out) should be inside the pod. There is however a door in the pod that will open when the pilot of the pod presses the fire button. This is really hard to explain.
Basically the piont of this is to make the pod shoot an invisible, harmless, projectile straight down at the floor. If this projectile hits the specially made escape pod recovery pad it will act just like a special forces using C4 on a radar dish, giving the guys in the pod a set number of pionts, and a little exclamation that pops up (like the 'recieved pionts for destroying commander's assets' thing in bf2) that says 'recieved pionts for succesfully escaping'. This projectile thing can only be shot once (the pod only holds one shot of 'ammo' and can't be reloaded. The door to the pod must open simeltanesouly with the projectile bieng fired, so it seems natrul to the player. He lands on teh pad, clicks to open the door, and is rewarded with his escape pionts.
I think the best seating arangement for the crew in the pod would one guy who pilots, and then another in charge of opening the door. The door opening guy would have his crosshairs locked pionting straight down, where he can see through a small window in the floor so to know when he's over the pad to fire.
I'm terrible at explaining things, and I'm not sure I've really gotten my image across. The only thing that I think there might be trouble coding is having a pod door open from a firing click.

Futurama: You Can't Prove it Won't Happen